Olivia Rouyre on not taking herself too seriously

Did you always know that you wanted to be an actor?

Honestly, yeah. I always knew. I don’t even remember making the decision. I was in theater camps and classes since I was a kid and just was really drawn to it. I think a lot of that came from my dad, because he was just so cool to me when I was a kid. He was always putting on different voices and doing little characters to make us laugh, and I wanted to be like him because he was so funny and so animated. That definitely was the first draw towards being in this world and playing different characters.

From watching High School and looking at your filmography, it seems like there’s almost a juxtaposition between how your dad inspired you through comedy and the more serious or dramatic roles you’ve done recently. Do you see yourself doing comedy as well?

Oh, I think it would be so much fun. I love comedy and I think it would be a great time, but I definitely feel more of a pull towards these more serious roles right now in my career. But who knows? I think I want to dip my toe in everything, so comedy’s definitely somewhere I wanna land eventually and try out.

That’s really cool. I ended up going into the arts, and I’m also interested in acting, but I was like, you know what? This is the result of sticking through with chemistry which isn’t horrible, but it’s not really what I want to do. In the American Horror Story episode, did you do your own stunt at the beginning? And if you didn’t, do you want to do more stunt work as well?

The swimming shots that you see were me. We did all of our own stunt work, but we also had stunt doubles on set who did some of the diving and swimming scenes. I’m 90% sure that the stuff you see in the episode is actually me and the other actor Bobby, who played my brother — it was us and the divers. The stunt doubles were there as a safeguard just in case. It was so much fun. We had a whole day of dive training as well. I would definitely love to do more stunt work. I think it pushes you to different limits and new things. So I would a hundred percent in the future, maybe not Tom Cruise level, but I definitely want to do more stunt work.

Ever since I saw that Margot Robbie in Suicide Squad did a lot of her own [stunts], I was like, that sounds really fun.

It’s just so cool and it pushes you in a different way. It’s a different added layer to the work. 

Let’s go back to High School. How do you bring your roles to life? And specifically, how did you bring Phoebe to life as a character who was also based on a real person?

Tegan and Sara gave us so much freedom within the characters, they really didn’t want to give us too much information on what they were like in real life because they trusted us to bring them to life in our own way. My process changes every time with every character. I don’t have a set checklist of steps, but most of my prep time before shooting is familiarizing myself as much as I can with what the story is, who the characters are, why they’re doing what they’re doing, what their purpose in the story is, and trying to find ways to ground myself in these people. The hardest part of that is getting out of your head and getting out of your own way. Just trusting yourself and trusting your work and then letting it all go. But mainly I try to familiarize myself as much as I can with [the story] and then feel it out and let it be what it is.

That’s fair. So just going off of the moment or going off of what your partner’s giving you, because I’ve taken a couple classes and acting is more reacting than it is about establishing something.

Yeah. It’s definitely all listening and I think you can do as much prep work as you want for the character or for how you think it’s going to be, but it changes every day on the day. But like you said, you’re reacting off someone else, so just knowing the character enough to feel safe in playing around and being thrown off.