Barbie Ferreira is not any stranger to darkish subject material (Euphoria, anybody?). But now, she’s stepping into her horror period — and it feels eerily well-timed.
In Faces of Death, in theaters nationwide on April 10, Ferreira performs Margot, a content material moderator for a main video platform tasked with reviewing the web’s most graphic movies. It’s a premise that sounds excessive till you think about how a lot of that content material already exists at our fingertips. The movie, which leans into the 1978 authentic’s notorious “Is it real or not?” conceit, faucets into a bigger cultural shift: the rising blur between what’s actual, what’s staged and what we’ve merely discovered to scroll previous.
Ferreira doesn’t see the concept as far-fetched. If something, she thinks the tradition has already caught up.
“I grew up on the internet. I like to call myself a guinea pig of my generation,” she tells Yahoo. “I’m a very old Gen Z — you could even call me a cusp millennial — so I was really part of the first batch of children who had access to it.”
That outlook comes with a form of double imaginative and prescient, one by which the shock issue that after outlined on-line tradition has slowly worn off. “It was a very different world back then, and I can’t tell if it’s better or worse — I actually can’t,” she says. “What used to feel shocking is now so normalized.”
The position arrives at a second of transition for Ferreira, who was catapulted into the highlight when Euphoria premiered in 2019. She broke out as Kat Hernandez, a fan-favorite character whose arc explored id, confidence and web infamy in actual time.
Now, a few years faraway from the present — which she exited after its second season in 2023 — Ferreira is transferring into a totally different part. The initiatives are darker, the decisions extra deliberate, and her relationship with visibility, particularly on-line, is shifting too.
“There’s this feeling that we’re all under surveillance,” she says. “When actors are a little too personal and people know you too much, it’s hard to suspend disbelief.”
Ahead, Ferreira opens up about unwinding with Nickelodeon, navigating fame in the web age and what it’s like to look at Euphoria from the outdoors — identical to the remainder of us.
You’re enjoying somebody who has to look at disturbing content material for a dwelling. What was the hardest a part of stepping into that headspace?
During the filming of it, I actually needed to be in additional of a darker headspace. [Ferreira’s character] Margot not solely had this unbelievable trauma that was very viral and really public, but in addition her job entails her watching form of the worst of the worst on the web always in speedy succession — nearly such as you’re going by means of TikTok.
I simply thought of how extremely affecting that may be. So what I did was I listened to a lot of actually darkish materials. I used to be listening to Hunting Warhead, which is a podcast about taking down a enormous baby abuse ring on the black market. It was simply very, very darkish — extraordinarily darkish true crime about the web and the way pervasive that may be.
I’d watch outdated web movies of accidents and actually horrifying issues that I sometimes wouldn’t be watching at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday. But as a result of I’m an actor and that’s what I like to do, I used to be actually going by means of all of that.
What did you do to unwind and shake that off at the finish of the day?
After the film, I needed to do the actual reverse. I got here again to L.A. and I solely had a little little bit of time earlier than my subsequent film, so I watched a lot of SpongeBob, That’s So Raven — all the things that would probably make me really feel the actual reverse.
I’d truthfully go to sleep to Hotel Transylvania each night time simply to clear my head of the disturbing elements of filming a horror film. Because regardless that it’s pretend, your physique doesn’t actually register that if you’re lined in blood. So it was a lot of kids’s tv to decompress.
While we’re on the topic of boundary-pushing content material, Euphoria was so surprising when it first got here out. Season 3 is about to premiere. Do you suppose it nonetheless hits the similar method now?
I believe when it first got here out, I actually keep in mind how shocked folks had been that there was this degree of intercourse and violence and abuse being portrayed. I haven’t watched Season 1 in so lengthy as a result of it is extremely efficient — it hurts me to look at at occasions. But I’m certain it’ll nonetheless discover methods to rustle feathers prefer it all the time has.
Are you going to be watching this season?
Oh, I’ll undoubtedly be watching. I’m curious as a result of I do not know what’s occurring.
Even after I see the women out and about, I don’t suppose they know what’s occurring both. They saved it very secretive from the scripts, so I’m actually curious to see what’s going to occur.
You additionally get to comply with the characters years later, so I’m actually . It’s going to be enjoyable.
Faces of Death faucets into one thing actually unsettling — the concept that we don’t know what’s actual on-line anymore. Did it change the method you personally take into consideration what you eat and even what you share?
What I actually beloved about the script was that even in 2023, once we shot this, it was so related — and it’s solely grown in relevance since then.
It looks like yearly we’re desensitized to increasingly more real-life violence that we’re always being proven and that’s being pumped into us.
A 5-year-old may see a video of somebody being murdered on their iPad, and it’s one thing they’re used to.
So for me, it actually aligned with the film. It’s extra of a query than a message. How will we take part in all of this?
What’s your relationship with social media proper now? Has it shifted as your profession — and your visibility — has grown?
As quickly as I began appearing professionally and actually devoted my life to it, I took a step again from the web. I really feel like when actors are a little too private and them an excessive amount of, it’s form of exhausting to droop disbelief.
But I additionally suppose a lot of actors are attempting to determine their very own method as a result of that is utterly new — not only for actors, however for everybody.
There’s this sense that we’re all underneath surveillance always.
Actors have by no means had this sort of entry to each single opinion of them anonymously like [they do] now. Imagine if Joan Crawford had an Instagram Live?
It’s a utterly new panorama to navigate, and I don’t suppose there’s a concrete reply but. I don’t even know if there ever shall be. But yeah, it’s fairly exhausting to be a public determine in the age of the web. At the similar time, I believe everybody feels that method now — we’re all in it collectively.
This interview has been edited for size and readability.
