Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton Discuss ‘Her Private Hell’

Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton star in NEON’s Her Private Hell, which is now playing in theaters. I spoke with the actors about their character arcs, the value of filming in chronological order, which of their past work they would like to revisit, and more.

When a mysterious mist engulfs a futuristic metropolis, unleashing a deadly and elusive entity, a troubled young woman searches for her father. Her quest collides with an American GI on a harrowing odyssey to rescue his daughter from Hell.

“I think my confidence grew, as it naturally does on a film set. You start very vulnerable. I mean, every single time I enter a film set, I’m like, you forget how to do your job. You’re not sure you can do it, and then you grow, hopefully, with a character. I think because my character starts off so repressed, she’s shutting down all of her emotions and it ends up just turning into this feeling of numbness that I think a lot of the times, like with this job, you can shove a lot of things down just to get through the day and I was feeling that to an extent, and you can’t help but feel that the character is naturally bleeding into your own life.”

Thatcher continued to express, “But I found that as Nicolas was giving me confidence, and I felt more sure of myself as an artist, because Nicolas really did make me feel like an artist, and as the character, because we shot in chronological order, when she has that kind of, she unleashes herself in a very scary way, it felt so gratifying and freeing for me, that I felt like I was growing with the character and removing blocks that I had put up, walls that I put up for myself that played well for the first part of the movie, but I couldn’t have for the other part of the movie. I feel like I’ve played a lot of characters that hold a lot in. There’s always tension or playing against something. To have that kind of openness at the end, it was exactly what I needed at the time as a person.”

“It was the first film that I’ve ever done where the moment we started shooting, I stopped reading the script and I was just completely in the moment with Nicolas from beginning to end,” Melton shared. “I think when you’re shooting in order, so many things become revealed to you because you’re not jumping in different times and shooting the end, then coming back to shooting the middle, and then the beginning. There’s like this amorphous kind of evolution of the character, and what’s happening and what’s changing, and it really lends itself to the art having no limitations, and so many things changed constantly. You’re like a kid on a playground.”

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