Article content NEW YORK – The first time Sophie Thatcher had to scream for a living, she couldn’t do it. The actress, then 11, had booked the lead in the musical “The Secret Garden” at a professional theatre in the Chicago suburbs. The director asked her to shriek.
Nothing came out. By the time she was the star of the 2023 Stephen King adaptation “The Boogeyman,” excuses weren’t going to cut it. To get it right, Thatcher locked herself in her mom’s basement and searched “Woman screaming” on YouTube.
Thatcher, a singer as well as an actress, is very aware of her voice, so pushing such an unpleasant sound out of her body never became natural. As we sit at a small two-top in a crowded restaurant in January, she demonstrates her difficulty by singing “yell” rather than, well, yelling it. While her short but spooky filmography might suggest otherwise, the 24-year-old Thatcher isn’t really a scream queen.
She’s more like the raven on your windowsill or the black cat crossing your path. Whether she’s a stranded soccer player turned cannibal in “Yellowjackets” (returning for a third season on Paramount Plus with Showtime on Friday), a Mormon missionary fleeing a deadly trap in “Heretic” (a horror hit last year) or an android rebelling against her programming in “Companion” (a well-received thriller last month), Thatcher’s presence is usually an omen that things are about to get grisly. Her characters just don’t usually scream about it.
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