Taken from our Spring 2023 issue, order your copy here.

Popping up on a Zoom call filled with excitement for her interview, Camila Morrone, or “beam of sunshine” as interviewer Patricia Arquette calls her, instantly proves how she earned her endearing namesake. But, what draws these two stars together? Well, their capacity for unfiltered conversation is most certainly a part of their bond. “How were you conceived?” The iconic actress and director, Arquette inquires, eliciting endless laughter from the young actress who quickly retorts, “Do you want the details?” Aside from their undeniable kinship, what brings the pair together is Gonzo Girl. Based on the novel of the same title by Cheryl Della Pietra, the movie, which stands as Arquette’s directorial debut, tells the story of a struggling writer who takes an assistant job with a controversial novelist. Featuring a cast filled with the likes of Willem Dafoe, Elizabeth Lail and Arquette herself, Morrone stars as Alley Russo, a writer endeavouring to leave her mark on the world. “I think that when you hired me for Gonzo Girl I experienced this emotional wave and I was excited that somebody was seeing something deeper in me and someone believes in me.” Speaking on having experienced her fair share of no’s, the plethora of projects she has on the way and pursuing her ambitions, Morrone confides in Arquette as she covers our Spring 2023 issue.

PATRICIA ARQUETTE: What’s the story of your parents? How did they meet?
CAMILA MORRONE: Oh my God, no one has ever asked me that. My parents met at a club named Tequila in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My mum was 19 and my dad was 27. He was one of the biggest male supermodels in the world and she was just starting her modelling career. He was living and working in Paris at the time, so my mum followed my dad to Paris where they fell in love. They moved to Los Angeles together to pursue acting and I was conceived shortly after.

PA: Wow… So where did you grow up?
CM: I was born and raised in L.A. and then I moved to New York for work for a few years when I was 17, but found my way back to L.A.

PA: We’re in such a business where there’s an outside perspective that everything’s wealth, decadence and extravagance, but you always struck me as someone who had this deep base of being really grounded.
CM: Well, my parents were working actors. I didn’t come from excessive wealth and watching them gave me a deeper appreciation for the business, and also fear, because I know what the other side of the coin looks like in this industry. It can be really cutthroat and scary and can be ruthless. So I think knowing that, while also growing up in L.A., was this great contrast. There can be that aspect of Hollywood which is very glamorous and all the things that are written about it, and yet that wasn’t necessarily my reality.

PA: I had the honour of directing you in this movie Gonzo Girl that we just finished. We had a very low budget and we were scampering around everywhere but you worked so incredibly hard. What is your work ethic? I’ve never seen any actor as prepared as you were.
CM: First of all, that’s literally the biggest compliment anyone on Earth could give me, so thank you. I was good in school and was able to balance my grades with having a job, which at that time was modelling. I just knew that I always really wanted to be financially independent. And I think through modelling, I was able to gain a really strict work ethic, and have a deep understanding of what it is to work hard for your money. If I didn’t show up, I didn’t get paid and I would get in trouble. It was a job.

PA: In Gonzo Girl there’s an undercurrent of competition and desirability and also in Daisy Jones & The Six, I noticed there were a lot of similar conversations. That show takes place after the sexual revolution, right? Have you had fun exploring this territory of women in different periods of time and different mechanisms, survival and discovery?
CM: Yeah, that’s a really great question that I don’t even know if I ever really thought of. I think when I read the character of Camila in the book, it was hard for me to understand why she was giving this guy so many chances. I know the number one rule as actors is not to judge your character, but I was torn. Is she a victim or is she the empowered one? And I think I learned how to justify Camila and understand what she wanted was bigger than his flaws or hiccups. She has such a strong idea of what she wanted out of life and he wasn’t going to take that from her or stop her from having the dream life she wanted. She stays back while her partner goes on the road and ultimately gets to do whatever he wants. It was hard for me to understand her reasoning.

PA: You’ve been working pretty back-to-back acting-wise, you have Marmalade coming out also. Tell us a little bit about that part.
CM: Marmalade is the character I’ve played that is the furthest from me. Looks-wise, dialect wise, background wise, we are so different. It was just one of those jobs similar to Gonzo Girl where I thought, ‘Wow, I don’t know if I can do this, I’m terrified. I want to bail the day before we start shooting, I want to call my agents and say get me out, pretend I’m sick, I can’t do it, I’m too scared.’ But then you just do it, you just rip the band-aid off and go for it. I haven’t seen Marmalade yet, but it was a fun experiment for me to be so big and lavish and gregarious and out there. I try to tap into the parts of myself that I feel align with each of the characters I’m playing and Marmalade was just a really silly, crazy and fun version of Cami.

PA: People can be notoriously mean when they’re preteens and teenagers, how was that for you, especially with the competitive nature of the modelling world? Did you feel supported?
CM: It’s funny because in modelling, I was not the most successful and I had to work on my looks and on my physique, and care about those things. And then when I transitioned to acting, the note I received for the first few years of my career was always that I was too sensual or too Californian. So, I did things to try to blend in more, because I wanted to be taken seriously and didn’t want people to look at my history as a swimsuit model and think that I couldn’t play a deep, interesting and smart character. Luckily, I’ve done projects now where people can see me in that light; I think Gonzo Girl will be a really great example of that. I think that Mickey and the Bear, the film I did a few years ago, was a really amazing business card for me that I could show and say, ‘I promise you I can play a 17-year-old girl from Montana who lives in a trailer park.’

PA: It is this weird gauntlet and all of a sudden, you’re in this labyrinth of wondering which way you should turn. But you also have to be really smart to even recognize what’s going on on the outside. As much as we try to act like we’re progressive in 2023, we really do still diminish women that are empowered sexually or comfortable with their own beauty.
CM: And you would think a casting director would be able to see that but as you said, they’re still biassed and it’s not as progressive as we think – they’re not able to see you unless you come in as the character. I think that when you hired me for Gonzo Girl it just was this emotional wave of, ‘Somebody sees something deeper in me and someone believes in me.’ You could have chosen any actor in the world and it even makes me emotional talking about it now, but for someone to really see you and go, ‘I believe in this person and there’s something here that I like and something here that I can work with,’ those are the moments where you really do feel seen.

PA: How did you end up getting this part in Daisy Jones & The Six?
CM: When I went in for the audition, they were already deep into the process and had a couple of people they liked. I came back for a chemistry read with Riley [Keough] who was already attached to Daisy Jones and I had a great connection with her. We had a really great read and I got the job. Then we went out to find Billy together, which was really a fun casting process. But it is so difficult when you have someone in front of you who’s being vulnerable and trying their best and wants something so badly – how do you look at that person and say, ‘No?’ But I’ve been on the other side of it. I’ve gotten a lot of no’s in my life, sometimes it feels like constant rejection. Then once everyone was cast, the pandemic happened, so we all just held on to this project and eagerly waited to get the call that it was starting. We waited over two years.

PA: Wow, I think you just said something really interesting to me about rejection. As a model you must have to become comfortable with rejection. And I feel like a lot of kids these days struggle with loneliness and they’ve dealt with a pandemic and they want to look like what they see on Instagram and they want relationships they see in movies and they don’t really build up resilience as far as rejection is concerned. You have to fail a lot and little by little you start taking it less personally.
CM: In our industry, for every 50 no’s that you get, you’ll get one yes and that is what keeps you going. That one moment and that one opportunity is worth all the tears and deep feeling of unworthiness. I can’t say that I have found the answer or the balance for myself as I have gotten older. It is a constant struggle and it never feels good and it always hurts on some level. But somewhere in there, you have to believe that if you work hard enough and the universe conspires in your favour, things will come to you.

PA: What was your hardest scene to film in Daisy Jones & The Six?
CM: I remember being in a lot of pain in the last episode when she’s wearing the purple dress when she’s asking him, ‘What can she give you that I can’t?’ I think that scene was very mature and very adult and composed. It wasn’t erratic with screaming, it was a really deep-centered pain of not feeling like enough and loving someone so deeply, but not being able to make them happy. I think that day kind of shook me up quite a bit.

PA: You are a responsible actor. Do you work with a lot of coaches and acting teachers? Have you studied a lot?
CM: I will not walk into an audition or do a self-tape without working with an acting coach. I self-taped and auditioned for so many years, with not a lot of success, and when I started working with various coaches, I realised that they were seeing things that I wasn’t even noticing. So if I did a period piece audition, I remember my acting coach telling me to imagine that there’s a metal rod coming through the crown of your head and coming out the centre of your body and you have a corset on, so your breaths are very small because your ribs hurt. Things I would never have thought about in an audition because I’m not wearing a corset, I’m wearing a tank top. But I realised at that moment that I needed to have someone help me and remind me of these things. Or for our project, Gonzo Girl, there’s a lot of drug use and tripping out on hallucinogens, so I worked with someone with a focus on that because it’s quite hard to play high.

PA: Do you love acting?
CM: I love it more than anything on earth.