Beyond her role in the breakout HBO series, Reid has taken on several heart-wrenching projects this year, including her starring role in Missing. A follow-up to the film Searching, the thriller follows June (Reid), who must take matters into her own hands when her mother goes missing while on vacation in Colombia. “Playing June was the most challenging role I’ve had yet because of the technical aspects of production. Everything was filmed on iPhones, watches, and computers, so I couldn’t rely on stage partners or camera angles to emphasize emotions. It really pushed me as an actor,” she admits.
It’s hard to believe that Reid needed any more pushing, especially considering her uncanny ability to embody the circumstances of her characters’ lives without getting lost in them. When I ask how she does it, she confesses, “I always try to step into my character’s shoes wholeheartedly and experience how they’re feeling and experience their given circumstance while also not neglecting how I would feel. It’s hard at times to differentiate the two, so I always have to remind myself that my character’s reality is not mine. That helps me escape the sadness, fear, or whatever my character’s going through.”
Reid makes a concerted effort to remind herself that there are grains of truth in every character she’s playing, even if she’s in a world that feels far out, like that of HBO’s adaptation of the video game The Last of Us. While the critically acclaimed series follows the fallout from a fungal disease that turns people into zombie-like creatures, it’s not lost on Reid that the global-pandemic story line hits home, as it’s comparable to what we’ve collectively been dealing with for the past few years. She states, “Of course, their pandemic is way different than what we went through, but it’s still a similar situation of feeling isolated and alone and not knowing what to do, and I think that’s so beautifully depicted in the series.” She pauses, then continues, “Even with these last few episodes, you can feel the sadness, the loneliness. That’s what many of us felt during these last few years. My character [Riley] and her friend [Ellie] are just young people trying to figure it out in this crazy world. That’s what everybody’s doing—we’re all trying to figure it out amid all the madness and noise.”
