Zoë Winters on Being the Center of the ‘Materialists’ Discourse and the Safety of Working with Celine Song [Interview]

There’s been a lot of talk about Materialists.

That in and of itself isn’t especially surprising. After all, it is the follow-up to filmmaker Celine Song’s Oscar-nominated debut, Past Lives, starring three of Hollywood’s most visible stars. (Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal all have the distinct notice of releasing multiple films within the space of a few months.) It was also a sizable box office hit, with a global haul of $104 million, making it A24’s third-largest hit ever and the year’s highest-grossing independent film. 

What is surprising is the breadth, tenor, and tone of the conversations, which have ranged from “broke boy propaganda” to the film’s membership in the romantic comedy genre and whether it succeeds as such. Whatever the topic, the conversations have yielded remarkably intense reactions across the board, with some loving the film’s unguarded take on modern dating, and others outright despising it.

One of the most fraught but important conversations is Materialists’ handling of the painful possibility of dating: sexual violence. In the film, Sophie, played by Zoë Winters, is one of Lucy’s (Dakota Johnson) matchmaking clients, a woman who has struggled through several bad dates to find her perfect match. It seems like, after multiple tries, Lucy has finally paired Sophie up with someone who meets her standards and vice versa, right as she’s getting serious with her new boyfriend, Harry (Pascal). The promise is promptly shattered when Lucy learns that Sophie’s potential perfect match sexually assaulted her on their date. Sophie sues Lucy’s company, and Lucy finds herself unmoored, her pragmatic perspective on love and dating shattered by a very real threat that women face as they seek the right partner.

Sophie’s assault casts a pall over Materialists, which had been a humorous examination of the transactional, checkbox nature of the New York dating scene, formed around Lucy’s love triangle with Harry and ex-lover John (Evans). Again, there were intense discussions on social media around the assault’s function within the film’s storytelling. Was it an awkward, perhaps triggering fit, or was it a bracingly honest reflection of what we could potentially face when we put ourselves, borrowing Lucy’s parlance, on the market? The answer leads to another question that hints at the film’s appeal to the never-ending discourse: what does the answer say about the audience and what they took away from the film?

In our conversation, Winters suggested that the potential for intense self-reflection is what ultimately drew her to Materialists and Sophie. “I was really drawn to her arc,” she explained. “I think she really goes through something in the film and lands in a very different place than where she began. I tend to think that, in our day-to-day lives, we don’t really change as people. People continue in their patterns, their habits, their circumstances, and routines. But then life just acts upon you in certain ways, and it forces you to change. It can come in death, birth, love, or assault, in this case, and these major factors move in on us, and we’re undeniably changed by them, and that’s what happens to Sophie in this movie. The chance to play someone who actually changes was really interesting to me.”

Sophie’s monumental change in Materialists makes for an incredibly vulnerable acting experience. What Winters found particularly helpful in exploring the character was Celine Song’s collaborative environment throughout the production process. “Celine was so available and so clear,” Winters recalled. “I felt that I was immediately ushered into the process during the prep and included in the development of the character in a way that gave me a sense of ownership over Sophie and let me be introduced to the rest of the creative team.”

The inclusive atmosphere manifested in several ways for Winters. Early in the development process, Song tapped Winters to help curate Sophie’s Instagram feed, connecting her with the art department and traveling all around New York, where she took selfies at key cultural touchstones that would eventually end up in the film. Winters also filled out Adore’s matchmaker intake form, imagining herself as Sophie. (She noted that she didn’t get as far as the $50,000 application fee.) She then shared that form with Song, so she could understand how Winters was actively developing the character. 

“I just felt very taken care of,” Winters said. “I felt like [Celine] really took her time in letting us settle in and be comfortable. She held the characters very carefully and with a lot of tenderness. Even the adjectives that she would surround the characters’ names with created this feeling that I found really informative. It was this really soft, tender approach that I found very clear and very smart. She had an extremely clear and beautiful vision in building a character.”

When it came to building Sophie, Winters shared what she and Song had in mind. “She wants to be loved,” she said. “She wants to love, she wants to be known. We wanted to go with softness with her. There are definitely points when she’s sharp and laser focused in her expression, but I also wanted this rose-colored roundness, [along with her being] ferociously insecure, lonely, and desirous.”

That rose-colored roundness comes into view the first time we meet Sophie in Materialists as she’s debriefing Lucy about her first date with one of Lucy’s matches. She’s ecstatic, claiming it was the best first date she’s ever had. What she doesn’t know is that her match felt differently, cruelly so. “I’m trying to settle,” Sophie tells Lucy with a frustrated, desperate gravel in her tone. The scene is played for laughs, with Sophie representing the unrealistic expectations and standards of the New York upper-class dating scene. It also makes the turning point of Sophie’s character arc all the more shocking and gut-wrenching.

“I think my approach was to actively play against what would happen to Sophie and try to protect her happy ending,” Winters said of conceiving that scene. “Celine and I really aimed for that first flush of a crush. Then, pretty quickly, Sophie gets rejected, and we see her frustration. I wanted to get to that thrill of having a good date, and then also capture the other parts of Sophie, like the impatience and bitterness.”

Winters continued, “I think it could have been easy to lean into her being sympathetic in that moment, but I was more interested in playing her petulance and impatience. I wanted to capture this desire and also this loneliness and insecurity that manifests as fractious. She gets upset and takes it out on Lucy a bit. And I think that’s really human. And with the humor of it, difficult people are funny. I think people who want things are funny. It’s embarrassing to want something, and that’s funny to watch. I really wanted to play into this deep urgency for her to find what she’s looking for, which is love and her non-negotiables. The one thread I wanted to maintain throughout the whole film was her sense of trying. I wanted to lean into that before the world tries to break her.”

The arrival of that breaking point, Sophie’s sexual assault, was conceived with a lot of care by Winters, Song, and eventually Dakota Johnson. They mapped out almost everything together, especially the emotional and psychological consequences of Sophie’s assault. What wasn’t explicitly defined, either in the preparation process or in the film’s text, were the specific details of the assault. “It felt like something I needed to explore and hold alone,” Winters said. That approach also allowed room for interpretation on behalf of the audience. “We’ll all bring our own story or imagination to it. I think, as long as the different specifics didn’t get in the way or confuse the movie, it was fine.”

The next time we see Sophie is when Lucy tracks her down in the street, hoping to offer something of value to her client, despite her boss’s warnings about interfering with the investigation into the assault and the subsequent lawsuit. Furious, Sophie calls Lucy out on her approach to Sophie’s matchmaking efforts. She accuses Lucy of treating her like she was worthless, connecting Lucy’s lack of care to the devastating violence. It is one of the film’s standout scenes, a bracing and brutal condemnation of the cynical worldview that Lucy had built her career on, and a sobering truth about the dating landscape that few romantic films, comedy or otherwise, actively engage.

“Once I was inside of it, I was doing my best to enter this fugue state and let what happened happen,” Winters said of Sophie and Lucy’s confrontation. “I was aware in the writing of the scene that Sophie is not only telling Lucy about the deep trauma that occurred, but also she’s calling Lucy on her shit, holding her accountable, or holding her for what she thinks she should be accountable for. So, in working through those beats and talking through with Celine and Dakota, I knew there was space within the scene to have real spine and bite and to also have this deep trauma and hurt. I tried not to control it as much and let myself be surprised by just listening to Lucy and responding to that.”

I asked Winters what surprised her most when she was inside the scene. She replied, “What surprised me was looking at the script and wondering how Sophie arrived at certain things, and trying to build those bridges for myself. Once I got inside of [the scene], it totally made sense to me. The fact that I arrived at her thinking was an incredible surprise, because I’m different than Sophie. I wouldn’t have connected certain things in that scene that got connected, or made certain statements that she made. But once I was inside of it, I was overwhelmed in arriving at that thinking. Her spine, her wit, her fight, and her bite in that scene felt exciting.”

A core pillar of that confrontation is the idea that Lucy viewed Sophie as “worthless,” which John parrots when he takes her upstate to regroup after she breaks up with Harry. Both Sophie and John directly challenge Lucy’s initial philosophy that dating and romance can be broken into checkboxes and, God forbid, algorithms. However, Winters believes that the reality is more complex and internalized than an accusation or even an observation.

“Early on, Celine and I had this conversation about Sophie, and we talked about how one of our most intimate things is our self-hatred,” Winters explained. “I think everyone has it to some degree. I think a lot of her deep insecurity and questions of self-worth are at play when she says that to Lucy, but, and there’s a really big ‘but,’ that feeling of worthlessness is there for a reason. There’s language in the movie that discounts and undermines Sophie and her value in the ‘market,’ and then she’s assaulted. So, I think she is correct in thinking that she doesn’t have value to everyone, because she doesn’t. It’s not just an insecurity she has; it is happening to her. She’s horribly mistreated, and she’s not treated as having value.”

Winters continued, “But then Sophie says that she values herself, and I believe her when she says that. I do think that Lucy values her, and I know that Celine values her, but I think that she has correctly assessed that others don’t.”

According to Winters, the concept of value is what defines the film more than the hotly contested genre designations of either being a rom-com, a rom-dram, or some amalgamation of the two. “For me, especially with [Sophie’s storyline], the movie is about dating and value, what makes us feel valuable, what we place value on, what we want, or what we think we should want. I do think it’s a rom-com drama, or a romantic comedy if you can divorce yourself from preconceived ideas of what that genre tends to engender in you.”

What Materialists has engendered is, as I mention in the lede, a lot of conversation. While Winters has opened herself to the full breadth of the discourse, she shared that people have reached out to her about how the film has opened them up to their own insecurities in the world of dating, most notably height. The common thread, though, is ultimately what Song hoped to achieve: a discussion about worth in love and romance. 

“Celine really was exploring the ways we talk about people when we’re in private, and the superficial, damaging ways in which we commodify one another,” Winters said. “I think what Materialists said about people, in the interactions that I’ve had, is that people are interested in dating and insecurity, and I don’t think it has to be an ugly thing.”

Materialists begins streaming on HBO Max on November 7.