Right now, Stefania LaVie Owen is talking from a van somewhere beneath Mt Ruapehu, not far from the Ohakune carrot. Last year, the location might have been because the Wellington-based actor was shooting the second season of Sweet Tooth, the acclaimed Netflix fantasy series in which she plays Bear, a sort of a post-apocalyptic, heavily armed Greta Thunberg.
But she’s been enjoying her own company, writing songs on her guitar, and contemplating her future while camping in her VW Kombi named Gwendoline. It’s all part of a need, she tells the Listener, to unwind after filming.
Sweet Tooth season two, she says, was much harder than the stop-start first season shot in the midst of 2020′s pandemic restrictions, but as to why, we’re going to have to wait and see.
“I wish I could tell you this one thing that would make it all make more sense, but Netflix has me under contract.
“But man, this one was a marathon … working through the exhaustion and the six-day weeks. So, I’ve come out stronger, but it had its moments where I felt like, ‘Can I do this? Am I kidding myself?’”
That Bear has been the biggest role in the 25-year-old’s career might be easy to say about a newcomer. But LaVie Owen has been acting since her pre-teens. Her first role was one of the murdered girls in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones in 2009. It led to a run of US screen roles. In the early days, she was balancing acting in the US with class commitments at the private Chilton Saint James School in Lower Hutt, over the hill from where her family lived in Pāuatahanui.
She did have some advantages for a young Kiwi actor wanting a US career. Having been born in Miami to a Kiwi father, Mark, and Cuban-American mother, Margarita, and lived there until she was four, she had both an American passport and accent.
Along the way, she’s played daughters to Keri Russell (Running Wilde), Hugh Laurie (Chance), Katie Holmes (All We Had), Melissa Leo (I’m Dying Up Here), and Matthew McConaughey (The Beach Bum). She was also a young Carrie Bradshaw’s sister in the short-lived Sex and the City prequel, The Carrie Diaries. After all those sibling and offspring supporting turns, that Bear was an orphan possibly came as a relief.
“She was a cool character to play, and I was able to do scenes that I hadn’t done before and show different parts of myself, and also challenge myself, whether it’s with the stunts or just exploring my acting craft in a way that I hadn’t before.”
Just before shooting Sweet Tooth, LaVie Owen farewelled her teenage-daughter era in the American indie film Paper Spiders, which is finally getting a New Zealand release.
While the fantasy series may be the biggest thing she’s been in, the film, she thinks, is her best work. She’s Melanie, the college-bound only child of widowed Dawn, whose anxiety and delusional disorder then spiral out of control. Dawn is played by Lili Taylor, best known for her roles in Six Feet Under and American Crime, among many others. Both actors are put through the emotional wringer in the film, which has won acclaim for its portrayal of mental illness and its effect on the sufferer’s family.
The script by directing-writing couple Inon and Natalie Shampanier is based on their experiences with Natalie’s mother and how an at-first quirky neurosis developed into fully fledged psychosis. LaVie Owen could feel that authenticity in her first read of the script. “I just had a really strong feeling that I needed to be in the film.
“It’s a special one. It sheds light on things that have been in the dark for way too long.”
LaVie Owen says her family background gave her a grounding in mental health issues.
“We have bipolar [disorder] in the family. It runs down the line … and we’ve been lucky that our family is very communicative, and emotionally intelligent to be able to take us through that. I’m very fortunate to be in a family that it’s safe to go through those episodes or feelings and we’ve bound together through that.”
Being a child actor has taken its own toll.
“It’s had its challenges, for sure. It’s been interesting, looking back. When you’re just going through it, you don’t really realise what you’re going through. You just have to kind of survive it. I remember, like, when I was 12, it was my first time being flown over to do a TV show in New York and ‘Okay, this is cool, this is awesome.’ But looking back, I went through a lot of stress, and I did break down at times on set.
“Coming back from a really intense environment like that to just slot into school is quite … I mean, I managed it. I just did it and put on my uniform. But it does come at a cost of feeling like an outsider just kind of going through mini-traumatic situations.
“Again, in my teenage years, when already being a teenager is tough as hell, having the acting thing on top of that when you’re going through puberty, and you’re changing, and your hormones are going crazy, it is confusing and the pressure is really difficult.
“But I’ve learned through now being in the film industry for quite a while how to help myself, how to heal myself, spiritually and mentally and physically,” she says.
“So, like right now, after the Sweet Tooth experience, I’m on the road, I’m sleeping in campsites and I’m just going back to the basics because when you’ve been in a world for a long time, and this Sweet Tooth one was a year, it really does something to you psychologically. It’s like you have to find yourself again.”
Yes, she’ll go back to acting if it still resonates or there’s a script she loves.
“I want to continue it, but I don’t want to just do thing after thing after thing and burn myself out just to get to a certain place. I really do love acting. But I love a lot of things.”
Paper Spiders is in cinemas from April 20; Sweet Tooth season two starts streaming on Netflix on April 27.
