ELIZA SCANLEN BALANCES DUAL IDENTITIES IN 'SHARP OBJECTS'

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Eliza Scanlen has always been a storyteller. Growing up in Australia, she passed her childhood years crafting dramas and making short films with her twin sister, embroidering on the tales they were told. “I suppose a lot of children do that. It’s a way of developing your imagination,” she says over the phone from Santa Monica, where she’s spending the season—a nostalgic choice for someone who grew up whiling away her summers beachside in her native Sydney.

A newcomer to the United States, the nineteen-year-old Scanlen can currently be seen on the summer’s hot new HBO show, Sharp Objects, based on the bestselling first novel by Gillian Flynn (the author of Gone Girl and Dark Places, both of which have had their own big-screen adaptations). The dark and twisted eight-episode series comes from the same director behind Big Little Lies, Jean-Marc Vallée, and has positioned itself as the most talked-about thriller of the season. Scanlen is making her Hollywood début in stunning fashion with this breakout role, starring opposite Amy Adams and Patricia Clarkson as Amma, a teenager who balances dual identities as both devoted daughter and her small town’s leading mean girl. The three actresses form an intricately interwoven trio, a mother and two daughters marked by death and years of trauma.

Life has changed quickly for Scanlen in the last year. An alum of the famous Australian soap opera Home and Away, it wasn’t long ago that she was at schoolies week, the traditional Aussie holiday celebrating high school graduation, on the Gold Coast of Northern Australia before her final screen test for Sharp Objects. “I remember shoving my script and the book in my suitcase and practicing on the beach whenever I could,” she says. After plenty of preparation, Scanlen was confident about her prospects: “It had become a part of my muscle memory. That expelled the nerves.”

This assurance is clear in watching her performance as Amma, the two-faced younger half-sister of Amy Adams’s Camille. While under the careful eye of Adora (Patricia Clarkson), Amma is docile and polite—a doll in the large spooky estate they inhabit. She exudes a totally separate personality with her friends as she drinks and parties, a sexualized character who is exploring the transition from youth to womanhood. The idea of these dual personalities became a large part of Scanlen’s preparation to play her character, starting with developing a Southern Missouri inflection. “In Australia, we grow up watching American TV,” she recalls. “I had the American accent down.” The dialect coach she worked with, who ended up coming on board to help the entire cast, played with Amma’s two sides, attaching a lower dialect to her bad personality and a higher and softer one to her good side. Scanlen notes that the differing voices helped her to separate and get into each particular part of Amma she was playing.

Still a teenager herself, Scanlen easily relates to the duality of adolescents. “Our identities are so complex and multifaceted and layered—depending on the person we are with, we intensify different parts of our personality,” she explains. “Amma seems to have that on a more intensified level because Adora is a damaged human being and she’s gone through a lot of trauma in her life. When I was looking at Amma as a character, I saw her as a child coming to terms with her desires squashed by Adora and Adora’s need for her to be mama’s little girl. From an audience perspective, we see the contrast and how good Amma is at taking control over adults.”

Working alongside Clarkson and Adams is something Scanlen is still exuberant about. Calling them masters of their craft, she notes that she was more comfortable taking risks with them around and felt a sense of security in filming. Their connection is obvious in the mother-daughter-sister dynamic at play throughout the series.

Having wrapped the first season of Sharp Objects, Scanlen is now taking time to work on personal projects while doing press for the series. She’s been writing a short film over the last year, and notes how working behind the camera has improved her craft. “Creating my own short film, I’ve learned how important it is to make that shift from the emotional perspective of acting to an intellectualized perspective of storytelling,” she explains. “All aspects of filmmaking go hand in hand and exploring different facets makes you better at the other parts.”

Currently in talks to join Saoirse Ronan, Emma Stone, and Timothée Chalamet in Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Little Women adaptation, Scanlen has skyrocketed to success in short time, but she understands that she still has plenty ahead of her. “I’m still at such an infant stage of my career and it could really go anywhere,” she says passionately. “I’m pursuing my dream right now and still reeling from the excitement. That’s going to take me a while to process. I’m trying to not let it pass me by too much.”

Sharp Objects continues on Sundays on HBO.