Sofia Carson Writes Her Own Hollywood Story

Yahoo

5 hours ago

It's already her third movie in less than a year, but Sofia Carson is just as enthusiastic as ever.
'It's going on 10 years of me doing this, which is unbelievable,' Carson says, from the lobby of the New York Edition Hotel. 'And it always feels like the very first time in the best way. I always feel so genuinely excited and grateful, and I feel butterflies anytime I get to see my work on Times Square. It's all so surreal.'
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The 32-year-old broke out in the 2015 Disney Channel movie musical 'Descendants,' before going on to star in a series of movies for Netflix, including 'Feel the Beat,' 'Purple Hearts,' 'Carry On,' 'The Life Life,' and, out Friday, 'My Oxford Year.' She's also been a producer on several of those, positioning her as a new kind of breakout movie star (with a loyal fanbase — over 20 million followers on Instagram — following closely along).
'My mom refers to these moments in my career as catching lightning in a bottle,' Carson says. ''Descendants' was that first. And then 'Purple Hearts' was the second time that that happened. 'Purple Hearts' changed my life yet again. And because I produced 'Purple Hearts' and wrote the soundtrack for that, I think executives in the business saw me through a very different lens, not only as an actor and storyteller, but as a filmmaker and a decision maker, which as a woman in the industry, is a really privileged and exciting place to be in,' Carson says. 'And I don't take that for granted, and it's still surreal to me, but my opinion is respected in that way. So it's been a really beautiful few years, a very validating few years.'
After 'Purple Hearts,' which tells the story of a struggling musician who marries a soldier for health insurance, became an overnight sensation for Netflix when it was released in 2022, Carson found herself in demand for meetings. In that time she met with Marty Bowen of Temple Hill, the producer behind the 'Twilight' movies and 'The Fault in Our Stars,' who presented her with the script for 'My Oxford Year.'
'It's just so beautiful and so powerful, and it also felt like a classic, and that's something I've always gravitated towards in my career,' she says of the movie. 'I loved the idea of being able to bring to life a classic love story.'
'My Oxford Year' sees Carson as an ambitious American grad student, Anna, who travels to Oxford University for a year-long program, where she meets a charming teaching assistant named Jamie (Corey Mylchreest), who has more to his story than he initially lets on.
'This is probably the truest love story that I've told,' Carson says. 'I was very drawn to Anna's character. She lives life in her understanding of living deliberately, which is planning every second of life, which is very much how I've lived my life. In falling in love with Jamie and losing him, I think she learns one of the greatest lessons that any of us can learn. And that is that life is lived in moments and that all we have is a succession of moments, and living deliberately doesn't mean planning every moment, but living them and living in the messiness of them. And it felt like such a necessary reminder for me and for anyone that watches this film.'
Carson's ability to produce a hitmaker became clear to Netflix after her second film for them, last year's 'Carry On,' became their second most-watched film of all time.
'I think that's when it really clicked for everyone, that we have something special going on here. This partnership is really resonating with people in a really unbelievable way,' Carson says.
As for where she goes from here?
'It has been an interesting few months navigating the question of what is next and personally navigating the pressures that I feel,' Carson says. 'Of course, it's an extraordinarily beautiful place to be in, to come off of so many successes, but it definitely puts a certain amount of pressure on me. But it's that reminder of not ever changing what my decision-making factor is, which is 'this project aligned with who I am? Am I proud of the art that I'm making?' And if the answer is 'yes,' then that's what I want to put out into the world.'
In that vein, she's been back working on music, her first love, and is in development on multiple upcoming projects both as an actor and a producer.
'I was very lucky in that I don't remember a moment in my life when I didn't know that I wanted to do this for the rest of my life,' Carson says. 'It started with music and storytelling through music, but in my mind [acting and music] are so deeply connected because when you see videos of me when I was 3 and I was singing 'Evita,' I was performing that song and I was telling that story. So it just always was who I was rather than what I did.'
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