Camila Morrone Doesn’t Want to be the Cringe Horror Girl

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

Camila Morrone spent years in active denial about wanting to act. Growing up watching her Argentine parents — both working actors with thick accents — grind through an industry that rarely made space for them, she absorbed a clear lesson early: this dream had a cost. "It's incredibly ruthless, and very hard to break through," she said, recalling the fear that kept her at arm's length from her own ambitions. She got over it. Now she's leading Netflix's Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen and appearing in the BBC's revival of The Night Manager — which is, by any measure, a solid rebuttal to her younger self's hesitation.

The Education She Built Herself

Morrone never went to drama school, and she used to carry that gap like a splinter. According to Harper's Bazaar, she started taking acting classes not out of inspiration but necessity — the callbacks weren't coming, the feedback from casting directors stung, and something had to change. She built her own curriculum: classes, theater, and a heavy intake of female performances on film. Her personal syllabus includes Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby for comedy, A Woman Under the Influence for dramatic weight, and Possession for horror. The project that first made her take herself seriously was Mickey and the Bear — her first lead role, dark material, and the film she says transformed both her craft and how the industry saw her.

Horror, it turns out, was the frontier she least expected to claim. Going into Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, she held the genre's great performances — Sissy Spacek in Carrie, Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby — at an almost paralyzing distance. "I don't want to be the cringe horror girl," she admitted, articulating a fear that's probably more specific and more universal than it sounds. She describes horror as a discipline of restraint: staying grounded in stakes that could easily tip into theater. When she wrapped the series — in which she appears in every single scene — she let herself feel proud. That's not nothing.

On set with Tom Hiddleston for The Night Manager, she watched someone famous enough to coast choose not to. He arrives at 5 AM, script memorized, fully present — and she's taking notes. "I would love to be as committed, and as excited by the work, as Tom is for the rest of my career," she said. Meanwhile, her personal operating system has simplified: she says no to anything that doesn't produce an immediate gut yes, and yes to everything that puts a pit in her stomach — therapy, difficult conversations, projects that scare her. On the body-image question, she was direct: the pressure toward thinness over the last few years has been, in her word, terrifying, and she'd use any cultural influence she had to push back against it.

Morrone buys one good piece of clothing a year and wears it into the ground — a woman who understands that the most powerful thing in your wardrobe is the thing you actually reach for.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.