Sweet Tooth’s Stefania La Vie open up on the toll of working in TV and film industry
Season two of Sweet Tooth was a hard slog for Stefania LaVie Owen, who plays Bear. Photo / Getty Images
Right now, Stefania LaVie Owen is talking from a van somewhere beneath Mt Ruapehu, not far from the Ohakune carrot. Last year, the location might have been because the Wellington-based actor was shooting the second season of Sweet Tooth, the acclaimed Netflix fantasy series in which she plays Bear, a sort of a post-apocalyptic, heavily armed Greta Thunberg.
But she’s been enjoying her own company, writing songs on her guitar, and contemplating her future while camping in her VW Kombi named Gwendoline. It’s all part of a need, she tells the Listener, to unwind after filming.
Sweet Tooth season two, she says, was much harder than the stop-start first season shot in the midst of 2020′s pandemic restrictions, but as to why, we’re going to have to wait and see.
“I wish I could tell you this one thing that would make it all make more sense, but Netflix has me under contract.
“But man, this one was a marathon … working through the exhaustion and the six-day weeks. So, I’ve come out stronger, but it had its moments where I felt like, ‘Can I do this? Am I kidding myself?’”
That Bear has been the biggest role in the 25-year-old’s career might be easy to say about a newcomer. But LaVie Owen has been acting since her pre-teens. Her first role was one of the murdered girls in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones in 2009. It led to a run of US screen roles. In the early days, she was balancing acting in the US with class commitments at the private Chilton Saint James School in Lower Hutt, over the hill from where her family lived in Pāuatahanui.
She did have some advantages for a young Kiwi actor wanting a US career. Having been born in Miami to a Kiwi father, Mark, and Cuban-American mother, Margarita, and lived there until she was four, she had both an American passport and accent.
Along the way, she’s played daughters to Keri Russell (Running Wilde), Hugh Laurie (Chance), Katie Holmes (All We Had), Melissa Leo (I’m Dying Up Here), and Matthew McConaughey (The Beach Bum). She was also a young Carrie Bradshaw’s sister in the short-lived Sex and the City prequel, The Carrie Diaries. After all those sibling and offspring supporting turns, that Bear was an orphan possibly came as a relief.
“She was a cool character to play, and I was able to do scenes that I hadn’t done before and show different parts of myself, and also challenge myself, whether it’s with the stunts or just exploring my acting craft in a way that I hadn’t before.”
Just before shooting Sweet Tooth, LaVie Owen farewelled her teenage-daughter era in the American indie film Paper Spiders, which is finally getting a New Zealand release.