There’s a moment about twenty minutes into our call when Amélie Hoeferle stops mid-sentence, catches herself, and laughs. She’s just spent several minutes unspooling a story about leaving her family at fifteen to spend a year at an art school in Munich, and she seems almost surprised by how much of it is still live wiring for her. “Sorry, it’s such a long one to answer,” she laughs. It isn’t the last time she’ll apologize for going deep, and it isn’t the last time the depth turns out to be the whole point.

Hoeferle plays Ramona in ‘Sterling Point’, the new series that drops viewers onto an island for a summer and reshapes every character on it. Ramona is guarded, watchful, and — in Hoeferle’s telling — allergic to admitting she needs anyone. Getting her right meant Hoeferle had to reckon with a version of herself she hadn’t thought about in years. She grew up in Tennessee, eventually shuttling to Germany and later Atlanta — a genuinely split upbringing. She spent every childhood summer flying alone to see her grandparents, and at fifteen, she asked her parents if she could spend a full year living with her godmother in Munich to attend an art school there. They said yes, and while she was away, her family relocated from Tennessee to Atlanta. When she came home, it wasn’t to her childhood house — it was to a new city, a new school, and, as she put it, a level of independence she’d built entirely on her own that she was reluctant to give back up.

That whiplash, she realized partway through shooting, is close kin to what Ramona goes through. “I think growing up in the middle of this Venn diagram, one circle being Germany and one circle being America,” Hoeferle says in the days following the premiere of ‘Sterling Point’. “Living in that in-between space is really interesting for me — especially right now, because I’ve never been more in between the two. She’d just come off five years living in Munich, “which feels like my home,” when the show pulled her back to Toronto. “It wasn’t a culture shock, but it was interesting to be thrown into the mind of a sixteen/seventeen-year-old, and being faced with, ‘What were you like at sixteen and seventeen?’ I really faced myself again.”

That version of herself, she says, was someone who’d been granted a startling amount of trust. “I look back and I’m like, wow, my parents really trusted my independence.” At fifteen, tired of splitting her life between her German and American friends, she asked to spend a year at an art school in Munich, living with her godmother. “They thought about it, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, okay.'” While she was gone, her parents relocated from Tennessee to Atlanta. “So I had come back off of that year in Germany — basically being this sixteen-year-old who felt like an adult, took public transport everywhere, didn’t have my parents around — and I didn’t come back to my childhood home. I came back to a home I’d never been to.” She reaches for a film reference to describe that year alone: “I felt like I was in a Mike Mills film — I was ’20th Century Woman’ in my own life.” She pauses on how disorienting the return was: “It was weird. New school, new people, new city — and Atlanta’s very car-centric, so all of a sudden I couldn’t get around.”

Playing Ramona meant sitting back down inside that particular loneliness. “I thought a lot about my sixteen-year-old self when I was playing Ramona — what I was feeling, what I was thinking. I was very lost, but I had a very strong sense of adulthood, almost to a fault, because I’d just spent a year taking care of myself, just like Ramona is. I was very reluctant to give up that autonomy.” She sees the same refusal in her character: “She doesn’t know that she actually needs to accept some support. I think I really refused to accept support at sixteen, too.” Before any of that, there was Muskoka. The show splits its shoot between Toronto and cottage country, and Hoeferle had no idea what she was walking into. “It’s paradise. It’s gorgeous. I had no idea what it was like up there,” she says, still sounding a little stunned by it. “There’s something about taking a boat everywhere that’s idyllic. I don’t think I’ve looked at my phone less in my life.”

Ask Hoeferle when acting first felt like something more than pretend, and she doesn’t reach for a film set or an audition story. She reaches for a children’s novel. Her mother ran a Montessori school with a backyard that dissolved into dense Tennessee woodland — technically off-limits to students, but Hoeferle, who helped out after school let out, would slip in anyway. “I remember reading ‘Bridge to Terabithia’, and as soon as I finished it, I reread it,” she says. “All the kids knew not to go into the woods, but in this time period where I was obsessed, I would ask my mom, ‘Is it okay if I go into the woods?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, go.’ And I would spend hours in the woods pretending like I was in Terabithia.”

Laruicci white dress (right)

The feeling that came with it is one she’s still chasing, professionally. “It gave me a thrill that — it almost felt like I was doing something wrong. I feel this exhilaration in pretending as if I’m in this world, and at some point it bled over into, ‘no, this is real, I am this character’.” She laughs a little at herself telling it. “I think that’s the first experience that I felt that I think is akin to what I feel now when I’m in a story, and me and the director and all our castmates have made this world. It’s this exhilarating tingle of, oh, this is real right now — and we’ve made it, and this is so fun.”

Ramona is, at her core, a yearner. She’s arguably one of the biggest yearners currently on TV, which is a statement Hoeferle doesn’t disagree with. “She’s the type of person to feel an inkling of yearning and then immediately be like, ‘Where’s the closest thing that’ll make me feel closer to this feeling?’ She loves leaning into emotions, whether it’s sadness or yearning. She’s indulgent in that sense.” The playlist she built to get there leaned hard into that mood — “a lot of The War on Drugs, a lot of Adrianne Lenker, Cass McCombs” — plus, unsurprisingly, “Linger” by The Cranberries and Fiona Apple’s “Valentine.” She kept it on repeat during hair and makeup.

Alongside the playlist, she wrote. Every day, in character, to keep a throughline to Ramona between takes. “I think that constant dialogue with her was important to me,” she says, before admitting the more personal reason underneath it: “I’m afraid of forgetting things — especially when you’re on a job, you’re so in the mind of someone else that when I’m done, even watching the show back, I remember what I was thinking as her. I don’t think I would remember that had I not had some evidence of it. I think that’s part of why I was writing — I wanted to remember, and I was afraid of forgetting what it was like to be her.”

Costume did some of that work too. The specific piece that unlocked Ramona for her wasn’t anything ornate — it was a bandana, reserved for the moments Ramona is trying, tentatively, to feel sexy. There’s a scene where Ramona is told that Oona, who is played by the incredible Bo Bragason, is about to arrive at a party, and the script had her staying in the same outfit from the scene before. Hoeferle pushed back. “I was like, no, I think I should change from sweats into different sweats, sweat shorts, and the bandana,” she says. “She’s dressing up. She’s feeling herself.”

She credits showrunner Megan Park with building a set where that kind of pushback was not just tolerated but expected. “We always had an open line of communication — it was like talking to your friend who’s also just happens to be your director,” she says. “We could come to Megan and say, ‘I know it’s written like this, but if it comes out differently on the day, are you cool with that?’ And she’s like, ‘Of course.'”

Laruicci white dress (right)

That trust paid off most in a late-season scene between Ramona and Oona as their relationship begins to break down. “That was one of my favourite days on set, because the camera wasn’t locked off — they shot it handheld, so our incredible DPs were just kind of roaming, and they were like, ‘Do your thing, and we’ll catch it.’ Most of that scene was improv.” She’s still a little amazed by it in the retelling: “There was somewhat of a structure, but I don’t think any of those lines were really scripted. It’s incredible that we got to do that. The foundation of the writing is already so good and so real and so honest that when there was improv, it just fit right in — it didn’t feel like a separate thing. They weirdly know how to write Gen Z characters.”

The Ramona-Oona relationship that anchors much of the season grew out of something unusually organic. Off-screen, she and her co-star didn’t spend real one-on-one time together until late in the shoot. “We were all living basically on the same street in Toronto, so it was very rare for one of us to be one-on-one. We got to know each other in this organic way, in a friend-group setting — which is how I imagine Ramona and Oona actually got to know each other.”

The turn came after an intimate scene the two shot alone together. “We had shot this scene where it was just the two of us, and we’re like, ‘You want to get a beer after?’ Shout-out the Done Right Inn in Toronto.” She laughs. “We were sat outside, and we both realized at the same time — like, dang, we’ve never really hung out one-on-one, and that’s kind of crazy, because I feel like I really know you. I’ve come to really love you.” Nothing about it was engineered, she insists. “I wish I could tell you we had this hour-long session on our relationship. It was kind of just intuitive.” What that built, she says, is load-bearing for the show’s biggest scene: “If it wasn’t for that, I don’t think the scene we did in episode eight would have been possible.”

When asked what advice she’d give her character, knowing Ramona’s full arc, Hoeferle takes a long beat before answering. “I would tell her to let herself enjoy — and to lean as much as she leans into the yearning and the sadness, I would say, lean into the uncertainty. I think there’s great potential for her to find joy and exhilaration in these new experiences that are being offered to her, and to let herself allow that.” She circles back, gently, to why that lesson feels personal. “I think she spent so much of her upbringing having to take care of Gordon, and I think she needs to allow herself to be young. Allow herself to be seventeen.”

It’s advice that loops back to the fifteen-year-old who got on a plane to Munich alone and, a few years later, sold her car and moved to Germany “very naively,” as she puts it, with barely a plan. Hoeferle has spent a season playing someone who’s still learning to accept that kind of leap of faith and, listening to her, it’s clear she hasn’t fully stopped taking leaps of her own. By the end of the conversation, she seems to notice it too. “This was such a nice time,” she says, laughing at herself. “I feel like I was in a therapy session in the best way.” Before we hang up, she offers one last wish, half for Ramona and half for herself: “Everyone deserves another summer in Muskoka.”

‘Sterling Point‘ is streaming now on Prime Video.

Source: https://schonmagazine.com/interview-amelie-hoeferle/

Credits:

photography. Andrew Thompson
fashion. Kara Erwin
talent. Amélie Hoeferle
hair. Blake Erik
make up. Kirin Bhatty
casting, production + interview. Kelsey Barnes
studio. Meadow Studio