jacket. FANCì CLUB
skirt. PALOMA WOOL
earrings. MOULE JEWELRY
Beyond the crazy, there is nuance, and Malia Pyles found that nuance in Apple TV’s ‘Cape Fear,’ playing Nevaeh Valentine. A challenge and a privilege, Pyles tapped into something she didn’t know she had, a ferocity, a feral nature, that she couldn’t wait to sink her teeth right into, once she got past taking that uncomfortable step into the unknown. A far cry from the characters she’s used to playing on screen, Nevaeh is the epitome of an unstoppable force that meets an immovable object. She’s a tornado of carnage for the Bowden family, creating chaos in her wake, then swiftly disappearing without a care for the consequences, while others are left to pick up the pieces. Pyles is having an absolute blast with it.
As we continue our chat, we discuss her role in indie film, ‘She’s the He,’ as Sasha, the opposite of Nevaeh, but no less pivotal to her. The ‘Queen of the Weird Girls,’ Pyles dubbed the character, she recounts how formative Sasha was to her, reaffirming her love of acting and being on this journey. It’s the making of the film itself that truly solidified it for her, and so did taking the film to London. Being surrounded by fellow creatives whose love of the craft is catching, creating memories to last a lifetime, and finding herself along the way have all been a tonic for an industry that Pyles herself has described as isolating.
Speaking with Schön! Pyles discusses ‘Cape Fear,’ the dualling personalities of Nevaeh and Sasha, taking an indie film or tour, tapping into your own power, finding yourself through your work, and more.
top. Jean Paul Gaultier
shorts. PRISCAVERA
necklace. PANCONESI
opposite
top. Kiko Kostadinov
boy shorts. GRLFRND
shoes. Mugler
hat. Stylist’s Own
rings. UNOde50
Are you based on the East Coast?
I’m from New York. I just moved to New York a little over a month ago, or maybe it’s nearing two months. I’ve been loving it here. Before that, I was in Los Angeles.
Why did you decide to make the move?
I think it was mostly timing, which is kind of an ambiguous answer. But truly, I kind of was able to look around at my life in Los Angeles, and I loved it so much, and I felt so comfortable in it. I was like, “Okay, maybe it’s time to move,” since I was feeling a little too settled. My family’s there. I have every intention to go back to California at some point, but it felt like a really good time to be in a new place that would inspire me and where I could be expansive.
New York is the city for it. It breeds on creativity. I mean, that’s why people move there, right?
Exactly. I want to go to some good theatre and be a part of some if somebody will let me.
What play would you want to be a part of if you could?
I can’t think of any specific titles I know that are coming down the pipe. I’ve always thought of theatre as a fruitful place to get to use my toolbox. I love the communal aspect. I love the idea of getting down and dirty in a rehearsal for an extended period and then getting to leave it all out there and reinvent myself every night. That energy, that’s something that I’ve been really craving.
I’ve spoken to actors who have done theatre, and they’ve always described it as an exercise. It’s like stretching a muscle, essentially. You’re catering to a new audience show and something new happens every night. It’s a good way to keep you on your toes.
Totally. A lot of the reason I feel like I got into this work is that I do love people. I am so curious about what makes them tick and the response they’ll have to my work. It’s interesting with television, of course — it’s like you work on something, and then you sit with it for a year, and then you give it to the world. Even then, you don’t really get the experience of how people experience it. Or if you do, it’s in some really scary Reddit forum [laughs] that you don’t want to spend too much time in anyway, which is also why I’m banning myself from Reddit.
I’d love to talk about ‘She’s the He.’ I absolutely adored it. You dubbed your character Sasha as the ‘Queen of the Weird Girls.’ I’d love to know where that moniker came from.
I think Siobhan (McCarthy), our director, is brilliant. I think that was written in the script, but it was also something we discussed very early on. She’s not a traditional popular girl. She also exists outside of convention. As she is sitting Ethan (Misha Osherovich) down and explaining the rules of womanhood, she knows those rules backwards and forth, since she’s also broken them herself. We spoke about her maybe having some kind of very rigid mother figure in her life that she had to rebel against. At the end of the day, I think Sasha is that girl I know I have experienced in high school, especially going to an art school where she’s kind of adopting all of the other weird girls or weird nonbinary or queer people.
One of my favourite scenes that happens early in the movie is when she is giving Ethan the makeover, and you can see Ethan having this moment of gender euphoria. Do you remember having a moment of your own when you realized that you were queer? And how did you come to terms with that?
Oh my gosh, this is such a great question. It’s funny because yesterday was New York Pride. I participated in the Dyke March on Saturday. I was asking my friends, “So what was your first pride like? And what did you wear?” I remember mine, I think I was 18. I was still closeted. I was doing the most, I was wearing this sparkly pastel rainbow top and a white leather harness with chains. I was like, “I’m a straight girl.” [laughs] but obviously not. Getting to be in this river of queer people and queer voices and getting to celebrate, I think it’s such an important day of celebration.
For me, it was a moment of, “Wait, everyone here is choosing themselves. Maybe I should do that.” I think there have been a lot of big milestones. Even going all the way back to my first job, where I portrayed Parker Torres in ‘Batwoman’ as gay. My storyline was a lot about self-acceptance. I had to look at myself in the mirror and say, “If you’re preaching this to the nation at large, I think you have to start preaching it to yourself.”
top. Love Thanks
skirt. Susan Fang
opposite
hat. Ruslan Gabisky
top. TAOTTAO
As both Sasha and Nevaeh, you seem to be having a ball. What about these very distinct characters appealed to you? How have each of them pushed and pulled you in different ways?
I shot ‘She’s the He’ the summer before the spring, I booked ‘Cape Fear.’ I think that role was pivotal to me, to be able to walk in the skin of someone like Nevaeh, since there’s an intensity with both of those young women. They’re very different characters. I think being this aspirational, cool girl figure in ‘She’s the He’ and having to walk that truth and be in my confidence and dance and use my body in ways that I’ve never really explored before was incredible.
Since I was a young kid, I didn’t know better, nor was I comfortable in my own skin yet. That was so important to be able to navigate a character like Nevaeh. A lot of those conversations that were happening during ‘She’s the He’ with Siobhan, Misha and the people I was leaning on at the time were hyping me up and getting ready to really embrace someone who does feel very volatile, and very loud in her essence. With Nevaeh, one of the first words that was a jumping off point for me in the character breakdown was ‘feral.’ It was actually written in the audition. That really permitted me to experience the full breadth of the emotional spectrum. I think villains have always been so exciting to me. I sometimes have difficulty categorizing a character as one thing, or as a villain, I guess I have to call it [laughs.] That’s the beautiful thing about a villain, which makes it hard to even dub someone that because they are so deeply complicated.
The dream of any actor is to create somebody who has such a very specific worldview that also doesn’t feel necessarily atypical. That was such a cool undertaking, since it really allowed my process to expand and me to approach the work in different ways. I sat with her for a very long time. I think I booked the job in March, and then we weren’t even using cameras up until June. I had a long time to explore, to figure out her psychology, and that was super exciting for me. I feel so grateful that they trusted me with a role like that, even though I think my work in the past. I think about Minnie from PLL (‘Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin’), and it’s a jump.
How do you separate or compartmentalize these characters? Especially when you sit with them for such a long time. How do you separate yourself from somebody like her once the cameras are off?
This is an interesting question, since, without revealing too much, I’ll come in and I’ll be as chaotic as possible, leave behind a trail of carnage, and then I’ll just disappear. How that functions in a work week is that I’m working one to two days out of the week. Then the rest of the days are about making sure that spring continues to be coiled in a way. It’s so hard to get on set and have to do the most absurd, depraved things ever to Amy Adams if you’re not continuously keeping in motion with the work. That doesn’t necessarily mean sitting in a corner in my apartment, being dark and gloomy.
It looked like watching great movies that I love. I watched ‘The Exorcist,’ or even movies that you wouldn’t think of. I love John Waters films and things that feel slightly left of center, like ‘Polyester.’ I also have to keep my body moving and not become too dormant, since when I have to get on set and do the crazy, ridiculous thing, or do the big laugh, I was able to get there quickly.
I’d love to talk about that scene in the movie theatre with the unhinged laugh because it was equal parts terrifying and hilarious.
It was so much fun. The catharsis of getting to be absolutely unhinged in a public space. That was a really fun day. I read that scene, of course, I’m so familiar with the (Martin) Scorsese and (Robert) De Niro version of it, which I watched front to back probably a hundred times. I knew I’d be watching a kids’ movie, but for some reason, I thought it was going to be one or two kids in the theatre. I came on to set that day, and there was an entire preschool of children there. They weren’t being brought to set until we were basically rolling. We’d have this line of little kids come and shuffle into the theatre, and then I’d have to be an absolute basket case in front of them. But it was so much fun.
top. Kiko Kostadinov
hat. Stylist’s Own
opposite
top. Love Thanks
skirt. Susan Fang
shoes. Stylist’s Own
rings. UNOde50
You’ve said that Vic Brandt and Shiv McCarthy urged you to trust your confidence and femininity, and it’s changed the way that you see yourself and the characters you play. In what way?
I just felt a lot more trust in it, with myself, and with my ability. I put myself in a box and, in some ways, I think probably that was unhealed shame, or feeling like I couldn’t tap into my physical side, or my body. Playing characters like Sasha and like Nevaeh has given me access to myself in a way where I’m allowed to be any woman I want to be. Being a woman of mixed heritage, all of these biases that have been created by the society we live in made me feel, when I was younger, that maybe we weren’t being given chances to play these ferocious women. It made me feel like I could only be one type of girl. That’s been such a liberating thing these last few years, really getting to experience so many different characters, and I want to continue to push myself to people that are intrinsically interesting to me, and also a bit offbeat.
What’s a lesson you’ve learned on these projects that you haven’t learned on any other set?
That’s hard. They just reaffirmed things that I already knew. I had such a beautiful experience, with my cast and my crew on ‘She’s the He,’ and on ‘Cape Fear.’ Doing the work is great, but getting to know some of these artists and these people is even better. I literally saw Lily Collias yesterday. It’s so beautiful to create these communities and get to hold on to these people as long as they’ll let me. Same with ‘She’s the He,’ we got to travel around so much with that film, we did so many festivals across America, and then we even went to London together. It’s an indie film, so those trips weren’t necessarily financially supported by the film itself; it was just something that we all signed up to do, since we love each other, and we wanted to travel around with each other.
How cool is it to go around town with this raucous, rebellious film, and get to do it with your buddies, and get to experience the full beauty of these different places together, and create new memories? That’s been really exciting to me. I want to continue to reinvest in myself, but also to reinvest in the people around me. Emerging voices and collaborators that I want to hold on to for a very, very long time. I want to be 50 years old, looking around me, and being like, “You remember back when we shot that weird thing in our 20s?” I think the industry can be so isolating and incredibly difficult at times, but I just want to be with good people and get to do good work alongside them.
This is the third iteration of ‘Cape Fear’ being put to screen. There’s the Robert Mitchum version from the 1960s, then there’s the 1991 Robert De Niro version. Actually, I guess you could count it as four, since ‘The Simpsons’ did their own twist, too. What were your thoughts reading through the script that first time, and what made it unique?
Right off the bat, when I got the initial audition, it was clear how special the project was. It is so well written, and I think Nick Antosca is a genius. Even from just reading my name, Nevaeh Valentine, he’s created such an incredible web. I was rereading the pilot, since it was the only script I had for a bit of time. I would reread it and find something new, or a little Easter egg, or a thread that I could continue to pull. That’s always the type of script I want to be a part of.
I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into until I booked the role. Even for the callback, we had dummy sides. It was basically the movie theatre scene, but it wasn’t in the movie theatre; it was taking place in a library, and the laugh part of it wasn’t there at all. I had no idea that I’d be paying homage to the ’91 ‘Cape Fear’, or De Niro’s performance, until I booked the job. I remember reading these scenes for the first time, and my mouth was just on the floor. The first feeling that washed over me was fear. I was incredibly intimidated. I wondered how the heck I was going to do this.
It was such a dream, though. I didn’t think that type of laugh was in my toolbox before, so it was exciting to get to find that inside myself. I like to challenge the idea of myself and what I’m able to do. I’m just such a fan of psychological thrillers; they were my first film love in a lot of ways, so getting to be part of a type of show like this has been so exciting, not just as an artist, but as a person who loves consuming media. I watched the show back, and I’m just so thoroughly entertained. I am a fan of some of these performances. I mean, Javier Bardem, Amy Adams, Patrick Olsen, come on!
Nevaeh, and everybody on the show is their own unique brand of crazy. How would you describe her journey in conjunction with everyone else’s? What are her motives?
I feel like the words I continue to come back to are distortion, consumption, and asymmetry. Her relationship with Zach (Joe Anders) and the mutilation of his body, or, as I like to call it, the toe incident, are meant to make him off balance and to make him more in step with her. I think some of it is punishment, but a lot of it feels almost like liberation, in a way, since I think she views the hypocrisy of polite society as deeply warped. I thought a lot about Charles Manson and the Manson family, the way he co-opted religion to manipulate these women, which definitely felt like something that had relevance.
There was a lot to explore with her. I also just had to keep on reminding myself that she is a 16-year-old girl. She’s a very young woman who’s mirroring her father in some ways. She’s not as refined as he; her instincts are not as fine-tuned. She’s a young person. She’s been a dormant volcano for so long, and now she’s exploding with all this energy. I don’t even think she knows how to rein herself in. I would describe her to people in the year between airing, and I would call her ‘my little rat girl.’ I thought a lot about small rodents in this process, since when they’re cornered, they puff up their chest, and they try to be as big as possible. They bare their teeth, and they extend their claws, but at the end of the day, they’re masquerading as the predator, but they’re still prey.
To your point, everybody’s going full throttle. Being in company with these performances, whether it be Javier or Joe, who’s doing such a beautiful and quiet portrayal of Zach’s de-evolution, or regression. It was so inspiring to me and kept me on the path of recommitting to her crazy, and her motivations. I have a hard time with crazy, though, since that’s just actor brain; I have justification for everything.
For her, it seems almost… cathartic, terrorizing this family.
People are going to ream me for saying this, but I do think she’s a very lonely girl, and she’s a very loyal person. She has a huge chasm in her heart that she wants to be filled with love. There’s something about her relationship with Zach — although it is tainted with malice and ill intention — there’s some type of communion that happens between them that feels larger than just a bad girl doing crazy shit. Her devotion to her goals is almost monastic in a way. She truly has sacrificed her young life to do this one thing. Having a companion in that, whether it be Zach or Natalie or her father, that keeps her at arm’s length, she’s foaming at the mouth to have true companionship with somebody or somebody that can hold her the way that she wants to hold people, and sometimes her holding people feels like her strangling them.
hat. Ruslan Gabisky
top. TAOTTAO
opposite
top. Jean Paul Gaultier
shorts. PRISCAVERA
necklace. PANCONESI
photography. Tatiana Katkova
fashion. Britt Mccamey @ A-Frame Agency
talent. Malia Pyles
casting. Emma Fleming
hair. Yukie Yamasaki using Oribe
make up. Mia Jones @ Forward Artists using MPH Beauty
production. Clara La Rosa
fashion assistants. Eliza Flynn, Olivia Reid + Arianna Sandoval
production assistant. Cassidy Cocke
interview. Dana Reboe
