Don't Underestimate Victoria Pedretti or Her Forbidden Fruits Character

Victoria Pedretti

Photograph by Ethan DeLorenzo

[This story contains spoilers from Forbidden Fruits.]

When Victoria Pedretti is on your screen, just know she’s there for a reason.

“This bitch doesn’t want to do anything she has to do,” the 31-year-old actress quips to The Hollywood Reporter, as she’s solely focused on projects that have an impact on people.

Over the last decade, Pedretti has cemented her status as a modern-day “scream queen” with her intense performances in Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting horror anthology series and later the hit Netflix series You, starring opposite Penn Badgley.

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Now she’s delivering for audiences again in the comedy horror film Forbidden Fruits, directed by Meredith Alloway. The movie follows Apple (Lili Reinhart), who leads a secret witch cult with coworkers Cherry (Pedretti) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) at a mall store. But when new hire Pumpkin (Lola Tung) questions their sisterhood, they’re forced to confront inner darkness or meet violent ends.

“I’m really interested in the conversations that it can cultivate,” she says of the pic. “It’s a fun film, but it’s a Trojan horse for a lot of larger conversations about consumerism, about grief, about friendship and abusive community dynamics.”

Below, Pedretti opens up about why she was attracted to starring in Forbidden Fruits, bringing Cherry to life on screen, why her character approaches sex in a “sport-like way,” her dream roles and more.

Going back to where it all started, what made you first want to pursue a career as an actor?

As most of us who work in entertainment in any kind of way, whether it’s in journalism or otherwise, I feel like we really enjoy films and television and theater. I was obsessed with escapism and stories, and I was glued to my television my entire childhood. I loved the magic of stepping into a theater and the lights going down. And just being able to immerse myself in a story really helped with life in so many ways. And I thought it could be really powerful if I could offer people that.

Watching Forbidden Fruits, I felt like it was a dark, twisty and witchy version of Mean Girls. How did you get attached to the project and what was your reaction when you first read the script?

It’s rare that you read a script that is fun in this way, while also simultaneously dealing with a lot of very unfun topics and things that I think are very humanizing and universal and specific. And it just really resonated with me. I got involved with it a long time ago, maybe three or four years before we actually shot the film. And it was amazing to just stay in touch and be on that ride and then see it come to fruition was so, so amazing. It was cool to have that much time to be able to think about the project, but also for it to mature.

Victoria Pedretti in ‘Forbidden Fruits.’

Everett Collection

Your character Cherry comes off as this ditsy and insecure girl at first, but by the end of it, you realize there’s so much more to her. Talk to me about how you wanted to portray Cherry on screen.

It had me thinking a lot about those kinds of women that we know. There are so many women that are underestimated, so many women that present themselves in ways that people can find distracting or make assumptions about because of it. Whether it’s that people are really nice are not particularly intelligent, you know, that seriousness is associated with intelligence. Also thinking a lot about these iconic sex symbols of women and how often the process of sexualization happens while there is simultaneously this process of dehumanization. And maybe this is me taking my own work too seriously, but I find that really interesting.

I was very fascinated with Marilyn Monroe as a little, little girl because it was cool that she kind of put on the surface what we’re all doing, which is playing characters. The self is a really complex thing that we don’t even get to know fully, so why not play with the way we present ourselves to the world and talk to the world? So much of the tragedy of Marilyn Monroe is that she was made out to be stupid because she was beautiful. She wasn’t allowed to hold the fullness of all of that. And that is so tragic and something that I think a lot of women experience.

Cherry is also really the only character that has intimate scenes in the film. What did your conversations look like with the intimacy coordinator when it came to preparing for those?

It’s interesting because you say intimate, like all the characters have intimate scenes. I found the sex scenes to be incredibly lacking in intimacy, like actual emotional intimacy. Our intimacy coordinator was