The Big Picture

Welcome to a new episode of Collider Ladies Night with
Heretic
star Chloe East.
During her chat with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, she recaps her journey in Hollywood thus far, including her experience working with Steven Spielberg and Amy Adams.
East also revisits her time making A24’s
Heretic
, and reveals her take on the film’s ambiguous ending.

Get ready for the rise of Chloe East. She headlined 2016’s Jessica Darling’s It List, appeared in a number of episodes of Liv and Maddie, and was a series regular on both Kevin (Probably) Saves the World and the 2021 HBO Max series Generation, but the one-two punch of The Fabelmans and Heretic in the feature film realm will undoubtedly put East on the map in a wholly different way. In fact, it already has. She’s got a number of highly anticipated projects on the horizon including Liz Feldman’s new Netflix series No Good Deed,Kogonada’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, and At the Sea starring Amy Adams.

East was a scene-stealer in Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award nominated feature playing Monica, Sammy’s devoutly Christian (Gabriel LaBelle) girlfriend. However, it’s Heretic that proves she’s a true powerhouse in a leading role. She headlines alongside Sophie Thatcher as Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes, respective. They’re two young missionaries making the rounds in suburban Colorado telling the locals about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Eventually, they knock on Hugh Grant’s Mr. Reed’s door. Little do they know, he’s ready for them, and he’s determined upend their beliefs in the church.

With Heretic now playing in theaters nationwide, East joined me for a Collider Ladies Night chat to revisit her earliest inspirations, general love and knowledge of cinema, what it’s been like finding her voice in Hollywood thus far, and pinpointing the pitch-perfect tone for her character in Heretic.

Quentin Tarantino Inspired ‘Heretic’s Chloe East to Act
In particular, Tarantino’s 2015 release, ‘The Hateful Eight,’ made a huge impression on the rising star.
Image via TWC

East isn’t just a hugely talented actor. She’s also a cinephile. While prepping for our Collider Ladies Night conversation, it took a mere few past interviews to realize that East isn’t just deeply passionate about making movies, but also about watching and learning from them, so it was no surprise when she pinpointed Quentin Tarantino as a significant early inspiration.

“The movie that kind of got me into movies, and I think started a very, to me, healthy motivation to want to act and be in movies was actually
The Hateful Eight
. It was the movie that got me into movies. I went to a 70mm projection. It was so awesome, and
I went home and watched a bunch of Quentin Tarantino interviews and his top movies
, and was looking down the list like, ‘Who’s Jean-Luc Godard? Okay, I need to watch those movies.’ I went down it and just had more of a passion for movies. I feel like I’m more driven by the movie itself than necessarily playing a character because I just want to be a part of good movies and [work with] good directors.”

East Is Trying to Find Her Voice in Hollywood, and Amy Adams Set the Perfect Example
East will share the screen with Adams in At the Sea from writer-director Kornel Mundruczó and writer Kata Wéber.
Image via Searchlight Pictures

East found great success as a young actor in film and television. One of her first major screen credits came via the HBO smash hit, True Blood, and from there she went on to headline the book-to-film adaptation of Jessica Darling’s It List and score a role in the popular Disney Channel series, Liv and Maddie. However, now she’s moving forward in Hollywood as a young adult, and with that comes the opportunity to find and use one’s voice in a different manner. That’s something that East is coming to learn right this very moment. She explained:

“Honestly, I’m experiencing it currently, right now, and a lot this year. Every director works differently, and they have completely different approaches to how they direct their movie and their notes to their actors. What I find is there are some directors who are very set in like, this is the way they see the scene, this is the way they want it, they want it to be set a certain way. I find — and I think it’s coming from a dance background, too —
if someone tells me to do something, I make the change, and I move on. It doesn’t matter, my opinion on it. So I’ve been trying to become better at voicing my opinion.
”

Someone who’s proven to be greatly inspiring in that respect? Her At the Sea co-star, Amy Adams:

“I just worked with Amy Adams and
she was always really great with voicing her idea of the scene and how she should play it
, and a lot of times I feel like the director just needs to hear what you wanna do. They might assume that you don’t know. But I would hope most actors put thought into the choices they make. So yeah, I’m still trying to find my voice and make a stance on certain things. But yeah, it’s hard in my dance brain. When I get told to do something in a certain way, I’m like, ‘Yes,’ and move on.”

East Is Also a Director, and She’s Inspired by Steven Spielberg
Image via Universal Pictures

East is also making great strides in finding her voice behind the lens. She recently directed and starred in the short film Tanning Zone, and credits her The Fabelmans helmer with inspiring her approach to directing actors.

“It sounds so annoying to be like, ‘Well, Steven Spielberg said …’ but I do appreciate the way Steven gives actors notes. There’s not a lot of fluff. He’s very concise. When he gives a note, you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re the best director that walked this earth, and this is, of course, how you give notes.’ They just make sense and they work. So
I do like how much trust he gives to his actors he chooses, and that he makes really fast decisions
. I guess I’ve tried to apply some of that in the way I direct, and just finding things based on the people who are in it, and being okay with it being different from what you’ve had in your head.”

How Chloe East Crafted a Pitch-Perfect Performance in ‘Heretic’
“Paxton is very innocent and has a bubbly way about herself, so it was finding how far to stretch that.”

23:57 Related This Little-Known Pedro Pascal Sci-fi Film Reignited Sophie Thatcher’s Passion for Acting While on Collider Ladies Night, Thatcher revisits that ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2 finale and discusses making A24’s latest, ‘Heretic.’

Yes, Heretic is a horror movie, but the Scott Beck and Bryan Woods written and directed film also has a cheeky quality to it. Hugh Grant’s Mr. Reed is toying with his visitors, and that sparks a number of amusingly twisted yet playful beats in the film, moments that East leans into extremely well.

At the start, Thatcher’s Sister Barnes is quite clearly the more formidable force of the two, whereas Sister Paxton has a habit of diffusing awkward and tense moments with humor and/or telling Mr. Reed what she thinks he wants to hear. However, as the film progresses, it becomes undeniable that Sister Paxton is capable of far more than the film suggests at the beginning.

“I feel like when you do an audition, at that time, I did have the whole script, and I read it and I had my own take on it. I think even the first couple weeks of shooting, it was finding the line of, ‘Okay, this movie has this tone and it’s not a campy missionary movie.’ It has this tone, but I think Paxton is very innocent and has a bubbly way about herself, so
it was finding how far to stretch that where it’s not this Disney character who’s just a character
, and finding who she is as a real person who fits this tone. That was a little bit of a discovery along the way.”

In addition to shaping her performance via that discovery, East was also able to ground her character in two personal ways. First, via her own experience growing up in the Mormon church, and then also leaning into her real-life sentence structure tendencies and speaking cadence. She explained:

“I was pulling from friends I knew growing up. But I thought, just me as a person, I have a way of not talking normally sometimes, like right now, and just the cadence of sentence structure and how you say things. I think Paxton is very fun and colorful with the way she talks, and so I was trying to keep this version,
maybe it’s a caffeinated version of myself
, as the structure, even when they’re in terrifying situations. But even in the audition, we have that beginning monologue, and I remember in the audition I changed ‘pornography’ to ‘porno-nography,’ and I just thought, ‘This girl doesn’t really know.’
It’s not in a super naive, stupid way, but it’s more endearing
, so it’s kind of finding the line of like, what does she know, what doesn’t she know, and just trying to get it right and find that line.”

Chloe East’s Take on ‘Heretic’s Ambiguous Ending
Has Sister Paxton lost her faith?

As one might expect, toward the end of our conversation, we veered into spoiler territory and I made a point to ask East about Heretic’s ambiguous ending. After Sister Barnes’ death — her real death — Sister Paxton manages to escape Mr. Reed’s house. While standing outside, a butterfly lands on her hand, a reference to something Paxton says earlier in the film; when she dies, she wants to be resurrected as a butterfly to visit her loved ones. So perhaps this butterfly is actually Barnes sending a sign! Trouble is, the next shot reveals the butterfly was never really there at all.

While East admitted, “I don’t love to answer this question because I do think my view of it changes,” she did offer up her current take on the moment:

“I think there’s a lot of strength in Paxton, and
I do think she’s admirable for knowing praying doesn’t work
, but she does it because ‘it’s nice to think about someone other than yourself,’ to quote the movie exactly. But, I think there’s a beauty in that, and I think Hugh’s character is always saying, ‘The more you know, the less you know,’ and I think there’s a strength in, ‘Yeah, I know all these things are problematic. Yeah, I know, but I still choose this.’ It’s like Mr. Reed can take away everything from her, he can strip her through all the facts, but she doesn’t let him take that away from her. So that’s kind of my interpretation of it.”

East also offered up a behind-the-scenes memory of filming that scene of the movie, a scene that proved especially emotional for her.

“When we were shooting that at the end and we got outside after being inside for so long on a sound stage,
I had an issue where I could not stop crying when I got outside
and shooting that scene. It was a struggle towards the end shooting inside of, ‘Okay, I gotta do this again,’ and the floodgates opened up and this other level of just, I don’t even know what it was, and I remember Scott and Bryan telling me, ‘Okay, we need less tears. It’s not that sad. You’re out here!’ And I just was fighting, and I think I realized what I thought of the movie, and was like, ‘Am I Paxton?’
I just kind of felt like it was more personal than I expected.
”

Looking for more from East on her favorite films and experience making Heretic? You can catch our full chat in the video at the top of this article!

Heretic follows a disillusioned former monk who embarks on a perilous journey to discover the truth behind a mystical artifact rumored to hold immense power. As he encounters various factions vying for control, he must reevaluate his beliefs and determine the moral path amidst an unfolding conspiracy.Release Date November 8, 2024 Director Scott Beck , Bryan Woods Runtime 110 Minutes Distributor(s) A24 Expand

Heretic is now playing in theaters nationwide.

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