Victoria Pedretti Finds Her Center

Los Angeles is in the middle of a heatwave, and Victoria Pedretti is in yellow Crocs and a pale pink tank, half her hair pulled back off her face. “Someone [online] already recreated Cherry’s look—the show’s not even out yet,” she laughs. She’s talking about her Forbidden Fruits character, the Texas mall worker who joins a secret coven after the loss of her family. I recall the already-iconic ensemble: the tiny pointelle cardigan, the hair-sprayed blond curls, cheeky red bloomers, fringed boots, cowboy hat, and the same wide, blue eyes that are across from me now in an almost empty bakery on the East Side.

In person, Pedretti strikes me as a little reserved. I have to wonder if this first impression is circumstantial—interviews are a narrowly specific type of interaction, and most actors are in the habit of taking some level of care when dealing with the press—but the more we talk, I get the sense that her composure is just part of her personality: she has a lot to say, but she is careful about the way she says it. “I like talking about ideas, I like having my beliefs challenged, I like learning and growing with people,” Pedretti tells me. “So I’m confident in what I have to say, but I’m not always confident in how I look. Whereas Cherry is flipped,” she explains. “She’s really confident in how she looks. She has no qualms about that. It was beautiful every day walking around practicing feeling super comfortable in my body.”

Forbidden Fruits, directed and co-written by Meredith Alloway and with Diablo Cody as a producer, has since been released in theaters. Recalling some of the dark sensuality and colorful femininity of nineties cult horror classics, it’s a new exploration of female friendship and its often toxic hierarchical dynamics, set in the not-long-past Girlboss era. Here, whether or not actual witchcraft is present is sort of irrelevant—led by Apple (Lili Reinhart), the small coven (fellow members include Lola Tung’s Pumpkin and Alexandra Shipp’s Fig) has all the makings of a true cult, and the film, in its fun, self-indulgent, violent, contemporary way, seems to challenge the belief that sheer power, and a reductive hatred of the male race, equates to progress. Cherry, growing up in Texas, likely came from a sheltered religious background, Pedretti tells me, and she may not have ever learned how to think for herself. After the loss of her family, she seems to reject the idea that she should hide, and she slips into the coven—where “she just trades one cult for another, and she loses a lot of herself in it,” Pedretti says. “But there’s a lot to love about her. She has this beautiful innate sex appeal and confidence.”

Born and raised in Pennsylvania between Philadelphia and Bucks County, Pedretti attended Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh before coming to Los Angeles to work. The child of artistic parents—writers, poets, performers—she grew up seeing the possibilities of creative work and rebelled against the attitudes of some peers that success as an actor was impossible to achieve. “I’ve never been very good at following rules,” she says. “I also just really want—have always wanted—to help people. And I do see my work as a service, I see it as being beyond entertainment.”

This desire and belief, she says, came from witnessing the way many actors she grew up watching were able to capture humanity in a well-rounded way. “Representation of a whole, flawed human being made me feel alive. It ultimately made me more compassionate toward myself and validated my own life experience,” Pedretti explains. She doesn’t believe in forcing or perfecting too much, in work or life. “My dad read me some quote the other day from Winston Churchill—‘perfection is the enemy of progress.’ I do want to be allowing myself to be discovering as I go. Imperfection is innate to human beings.” Attaching yourself to one idea can get in the way of others that might come through; change, she says, is inevitable. “I’m not the same actor I was years ago.”

Early in her career, Pedretti appeared in the Netflix horror series The Haunting of Hill House, establishing herself as a performer with an almost eerie emotional depth. She appeared briefly in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood as a Manson Family member, and her role as Love Quinn in the Netflix series You explored a complex and often self-contradictory character. Horror seems to suit her. She made a recent surprise guest appearance in Netflix’s new miniseries Something Bad is Going to Happen; after the announcement that Peter Gould’s Disinherited pilot was picked up in December, she’ll soon be busy making the crime drama. In the meantime, she intends to make the most of a period of quiet—it’s part of the process. “I really do believe in allowing ourselves to get a little bit bored to find inspiration,” she says. “Art is not just about producing. It’s about thinking. I do a lot of thinking. I find a lot of inspiration in quiet, still moments, where I’m not consuming other art. You have to open yourself up to the opportunity for inspiration to strike.”

To Pedretti, acting is, above all, a form of play. The way she explains it, rarely—though not never—does she feel she’s pulling from personal experiences in her work as much as simply using her imagination, and entering a state in which it’s free to flow through her and into the world. Spirituality, too, she believes, is a vital part of her process. “Actors are ultimately mimics, in a way,” she begins, gathering the thought. “We’re replicating what we see, or how we see things. I think creating parameters, having ideas, then allowing the spirit of the character to move you—you enter a state where you can feel a little out of control, and allow it to surprise you.” To her, this is spirituality. “I don’t have any idols or anything like that,” she says. “I think that’s misleading.”

Forbidden Fruits is now in theaters.