Amélie Hoeferle was a 14-year-old girl waiting for her mom at a Cleveland, Tennessee, coffee shop, when a woman in her 20s approached her for a conversation that would change the trajectory of her life and career.
She’d just finished her homework up and was nearing the exit when the young woman stopped her. “She said, ‘I know this is going to sound really weird, and it’s really freaking me out. I’m writing a screenplay right now and you look exactly how I imagine this character to be,’” a present-day Hoeferle tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Neither Hoeferle or her mother knew what to make of it, but Hoeferle was never afraid of the woman nor scared of the situation. That 20-something woman, writer-director Erica Scoggins, it turns out, was a family friend, so a meeting was set to talk about the script. They spent hours talking and ended up making a short film together.
“That was my introduction to film,” says Hoferle. “We went to a couple film festivals with it and flew to France. Erica’s really the main reason why I thought it would even be an option for me in life to do this.”
Hoeferle, now 24, still regularly keeps in touch with Scoggins. The pair saw each other just weeks before the premiere of the actress’ Prime Video series Sterling Point.
Hoeferle plays Ramona in the Megan Park-created coming-of-age series, which premiered Aug. 5. Sisterhood, something Hoeferle feels deeply about, plays a major factor in Ramona’s story. She and Sterling Point’s other lead character, Ella Rubin’s Annie, spend much of the series navigating their newfound relationship after meeting in the series premiere.
“The concept of finding out you have a sister, but you don’t obviously have a relationship with her, really interested me,” Hoeferle says. The actress has a sister herself — she clarifies they’ve had a more conventional sibling relationship since birth and recently moved in together — so shooting Sterling Point really hit home.
What initially drew her into the project was the complicated relationship between Ramona and Annie. It’s the heart of the story in Sterling Point, and it’s something that Hoeferle and Rubin talked about at length. “Sisterhood between two sisters is so raw, and it’s complicated. It’s a complicated relationship. When it’s good, it’s so good,” she says.
“It feels like you are the luckiest person on earth to get this. I’m going to cry,” she adds, tearing up. Hoeferle admits she’s thinking of her real sister, who she’s thanked her parents for giving her.
On the other hand, “When it’s bad, it’s earth-shattering. It’s like the rug is being pulled out underneath you,” she says.
Hoeferle has a supportive and loving family, but she nonetheless relates to Ramona’s feelings of not having any family outside of Annie. “In those very rare moments where my sister and I don’t get along, it feels like my life is being really challenged, and my stability is being challenged because so much of who I am as a person, I am because of her,” she says.
The feelings are easy to analyze after the fact, sometimes less so on set in front of cameras and a room full of people. Hoeferle found that the days where she and Rubin’s character had tension in their scenes could be particularly hard, because she couldn’t always access what it was like to be in such a fraught situation.
“In those moments, my sympathetic nervous system might be a bit more on fire, and I have less access to what I’m saying, what I’m doing,” she says. “There’s a dolly all around you, and I felt so much internal pressure that day to portraying this in an honest way,” she says. Of one particular scene between Ramona and Annie, she says, “I couldn’t seem to access what that honest way would be because I feel like I almost suppress the memories of me fighting with my sister.”
Those days were exceptions while making Sterling Point, however. “I was very thankful that I got to play a sister and explore that in a different world with different circumstances than my own,” she says.
A big part of what made the experience, and the show itself, work was her chemistry with Rubin. “I wish I had an interesting answer for you, but it was very natural,” she says.
Hoeferle had a feeling from the minute she met Rubin during the audition process that the pair clicked, but she wasn’t always sure of the future. “I wouldn’t even say I had a feeling it was going to be the two of us because I did not have that confidence with myself,” she says.
When the pair met, Hoeferle had pneumonia. She wasn’t feeling the most confident and was soldiering through antibiotics, but she could still feel something special was happening.
“You know when meet someone and you just feel a certain air between the two of you? There was something there with her in the room and it felt right,” she says. “We’re on the same railroad tracks right now. We have the same goal in mind, and that really translated onto set and into the scenes.”
Hoeferle also liked that her character was sad, as odd as that might sound. She was able to show a “real” and “raw” portrayal of depression in a young woman, which enticed her to the role. “[Ramona’s] a sad person, and she has every reason to be,” she says. “She’s gone through things that I have never gone through. She’s gone through more than most 16- or 17-year-olds do.”
Park gave Hoeferle and the rest of the cast much more freedom than most creatives would in finding their own characters. “I’ve done barely anything, so to be in a scene and for Megan to go, ‘Yeah, this is the script, but just go and play,’ was really disarming in the best way,” she says. “There’s just a level of understanding. I felt very trusted.”
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