I brought this up with the actor toward the end of our free-flowing, one-hour phone conversation ahead of the release of her next film, “Backspot.” And unsurprisingly, considering an earlier admission to me that she loves to disappear, she had already known people were asking this question ― and she was pretty chill about it.
“I feel no pressure, and never have, to paint a picture that isn’t actually me,” she explained. “And that changes sometimes.”While Instagram can sometimes be Sossamon’s “little picture show theater,” as she put it, disconnecting from the internet and social media in particular has also proven healthy for her.
The actor didn’t think she was in the space to take on work, and at that moment at least, she didn’t feel the financial urgency to do so. “Like most of us, I was having just a really tough time being human,” Sossamon remembered. “Just up and down, roller coaster, since the pandemic — you name it.” With just three or four days of shooting to capture the character, Sossamon immersed herself in the role of a woman who we see constantly vacuuming a spotless house while her husband watches sports in another room. A woman whose life has in many ways stagnated, just as her fiercely independent daughter’s life starts to soar — and on her own terms.
“I just felt it in my core and in my bones,” the actor said. “I was like, ‘I know what I can do here.’ I knew that in my current state, I was so raw and vulnerable that I would be able to access it without overthinking it.”She had essentially just keyed into the very thing that led her to acting in the first place. Early on in her career, she moved to Los Angeles as a dancer, which “is definitely a cousin or sibling,” as she put it, to being an actor.
It begins to feel like a performance. “I think there are some actors out there that love it so much that they’ll do anything with any material. They’ll have fun no matter what. And I wish I could say that, but I can’t, if I’m being honest.” Fair point. Though, despite the “wild west” terrain of independent films, Sossamon has made a number of them since her early-career marquee titles. Were the slew of independent films she did — the acclaimed “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” from 2005, “Wristcutters: A Love Story” the following year, and many others — a purposeful pivot?“At first, it was considering scripts that came,” Sossamon said. “Sometimes I needed to make money.