Josie Totah Belongs Here 

Given how much she’s accomplished already, it’s easy to forget that Josie Totah is still only 24.

After starting out as a child actor and later breaking through with her scene-stealing, Critics’ Choice-nominated turn as Lexi in the acclaimed Saved by the Bell revival, which she also produced, Totah has continued to expand what audiences might expect from her. She moved from comedy into period drama with the Apple TV+ hit The Buccaneers, where she plays the wonderfully complex Mabel Elmsworth, before pivoting into horror with Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei’s Faces of Death. Now, with her turn as Tina in Mike Flanagan’s much-anticipated eight-episode reimagining of Carrie for Prime Video, Totah is pushing herself into another new corner of her career.

Adapted from Stephen King’s 1974 debut novel and executive produced by King himself alongside Flanagan and longtime collaborator Trevor Macy, Carrie stars Summer H. Howell in the title role as the deeply repressed misfit high-schooler who, after her father’s sudden death, is thrust into the unforgiving ecosystem of a modern American public high school. There she has to navigate a viral bullying scandal that tears through her community, the relentless pressures and casual cruelty of the social media age, and the awakening of mysterious telekinetic powers that rise alongside her adolescence, all while grappling with the suffocating grip of her fiercely religious mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan). Rounded out by an impressive ensemble that includes Siena Agudong, Alison Thornton, Joel Oulette, Arthur Conti, Thalia Dudek, Amber Midthunder and Matthew Lillard, the series premieres worldwide on Prime Video on October 7.

Totah plays Tina Blake, one of the students orbiting Chris Hargensen’s (Thornton) clique, a character who barely registers as a name in King’s original novel and has been all but invisible in previous adaptations. In Flanagan’s expanded eight-hour version, however, Tina finally gets the room to breathe as her own three-dimensional character, and Totah takes full advantage of that space, finding the vulnerability and insecurity beneath someone audiences might otherwise have written off as just another mean girl.

For Totah, who has been a longtime fan of Flanagan’s work through years of sleepovers watching The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher with her best friend Dylan Mulvaney, the chance to step into his universe was one she couldn’t pass up.

“My best friend Dylan is like the biggest Mike Flanagan fan in the world, and she’s rewatched all of his shows a million times,” she recalls. “Every time I’ve ever had a sleepover at her house, Usher is on, or Hill House. So that was kind of my introduction to it, just having sleepovers and watching his shows with her. He’s just so amazing and so good at what he does, and he’s everyone’s favourite, so yeah, I was a fan, and I was so excited about getting to work with him. And it was everything that I thought it would be.”

That devotion, Totah admits, is such that Flanagan could probably put her in almost anything and she’d say yes.

“Obviously it was going to be amazing and nuanced and tell all these important stories about coming of age and fitting in and everything, and obviously that helped,” she says of what drew her to Carrie specifically. “But you know, I would do a mayonnaise commercial if he directed it.”

Coming into the show, Totah was also already deeply familiar with the source material, having first watched Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation on a plane as a kid, where the experience left a lasting impression on her.

“I actually watched the movie on the plane when I was a kid, and I remember being so scared on the plane,” she laughs. “I was a fan, yeah. I thought it was amazing, and I also cried, because it’s scary, but it’s also a very emotional story.”

If there’s one thing Flanagan’s expanded version of Carrie does exceptionally well, it’s the way it gives every character in Carrie’s orbit room to breathe, even, and perhaps especially, the ones that could have easily been written off in the original novel as one-note villains or sympathetic bystanders.

Totah brings a lot of shades to Tina, and one of the first scenes we meet her in is a fascinating moment where she interacts with Chris and, in one fleeting exchange, we see that Chris’s cruelty extends to her too. It’s a deceptively simple beat that instantly complicates the dynamic between them, setting the tone for the rest of Totah’s performance across the eight episodes.

Given how thinly Tina is drawn on the page, and how minor she is in previous versions of the story, Totah had a rare kind of creative freedom stepping into the character, with no definitive prior version to measure herself against. Flanagan, she says, encouraged her to really play with who Tina could be.

“When I did the audition, my friend said, oh, that’s so funny,” she recalls. “And I was like, but I’m being dead serious. And I think that was kind of how I came to the character. She’s just so desperate to fit in. She’s just so desperate. And I really wanted to lead with her being desperate, not with her being malicious and intentionally mean. She’s just so desperate.”

That angle is what gives Tina much more depth across the eight episodes, moving her far past the archetype of the disposable mean girl. After Chris tells her she doesn’t hang out with people who get fewer than 100 likes, we later watch Tina eagerly show her a post that has passed 150. Chris barely reacts, but the moment says a lot about Tina’s need for approval and how desperately she wants to belong.

“She just wants to fit in. She’s a little stupid, but she also comes into herself. She gets a bit more self-aware as it goes on and finds herself outside of Chris,” Totah explains. “Stupid isn’t the right word. I just mean she’s ignorant, like she’s not purposefully mean. She just doesn’t know better, and then she eventually learns better. Hopefully.”

There’s a danger with a character like Tina that she could very easily read as just cruel, just cold, just complicit. But Totah refuses to let her live only on that surface, instead searching for the softer, more recognisable emotional logic driving her choices, and the fact that people very rarely see themselves as the villain of their own story.

For Totah, the answer was as universal as it gets.

“I think just the universal feeling of wanting to belong and to fit in is what got her there,” she says. “I think that’s what I focused on the most.”

Also central to the show’s success is the chemistry between its young ensemble, who clearly bonded off-screen over the course of production. Given how emotionally intense the material becomes across the eight episodes, having those relationships to lean on was essential.

“They’re awesome. They’re really great, and they’re so amazing in it, and they were all so lovely to work with,” she gushes. “We had a really fun time. I’ve never watched so many. I’ve never half-watched so many movies as I did with Arthur [Conti, who plays Billy]. We maybe started a million movies and didn’t finish them because we were just talking or hanging out.”

“We always found ourselves not really working, like often not on consecutive days in a row, so we had a lot of days off. So we would just eat a bunch of junk food and watch movies and it was very silly,” she adds.

It’s been eight years since Totah publicly shared that she is transgender, and in the years since she has built a career that has repeatedly resisted being boxed in, moving freely between comedy, period drama and now horror while continuing to expand into producing and directing.

For Totah, though, the way she frames that evolution is much less about breaking barriers and much more about getting to keep doing the thing she wanted to do as a child.

“I’m just so grateful that I keep getting to do fun projects and keep living my dream,” she reflects. “This show is such a great example of just achieving another thing in a genre that I haven’t before, and I am so grateful to get to just be a part of it, and to show everyone that we’re still doing it. I’m still acting. The dream that I had at 10, I’m still doing it.”

Carrie is not the only recent project that has allowed Totah to stretch into unfamiliar territory. Her turn in Daniel Goldhaber’s Faces of Death, alongside Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery and Charli XCX, gave her the chance to play within a much more comedic, self-aware register of horror, a genre she says she is eager to keep exploring.

“I would love to do more horror. I would love to do lots of genre stuff as well, and more character-driven narrative stuff,” she says. “Obviously it’s so fun, and I would love to do more.”

Comedy remains just as important to her. Ask Totah about the kind of career she admires and Rose Byrne’s name comes up almost immediately, specifically the way Byrne can move from something as broad as Spy to a performance as emotionally raw as If I Had Legs I’d Kick You without either feeling like a departure.

“I love Spy. I love Rose Byrne’s career. I love that she can be so funny,” Totah gushes. “She can be so funny, and then she can do If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and be so incredibly moving and emotional. I’m just so ridiculous, and I just love being ridiculous on camera. I like being silly. And I want to get paid to do that.”

Totah is beginning to expand beyond acting entirely, too. Alongside her work as a performer and producer, she has recently made her directorial debut on a still-under-wraps project.

“I just directed something, so that’s going to come out soon, maybe next year,” she reveals. “It’s British. That’s what I’ll say. It’s not that I can’t say anything, I just don’t know what to say, but it’s fun. It’s British, and I directed it.”

“It was really fun. It was intense, but super fun, and I really want to do it forever,” she adds.

Totah has also spent much of her career around women who have refused to stay in just one lane themselves. Mindy Kaling co-created Champions, which gave Totah one of her first lead television roles; Amy Poehler directed her in Moxie; and Tina Fey later personally reached out to Totah about playing Titi B. on Mr. Mayor, a role Fey had written with her in mind. Then there’s Tracey Wigfield, who wrote Lexi specifically for Totah in Saved by the Bell and gave her the opportunity to step behind the camera as a producer on the series.

For Totah, seeing women like that move between acting, writing, producing and directing gave her an early example of just how expansive a career could be.

“I’m so lucky that I got to work with Mindy and Tina and Amy, and all these women who just do it all,” she says. “I feel so grateful that I was kind of raised by those environments that they created, and Tracy as well. They all inspired me.”

Those experiences have also shaped the way she thinks about projects now. Where the role itself may once have been the most important factor, Totah says the people behind the work increasingly matter just as much.

“I think now that I’m a little older, it’s a lot more about the people too, doing it with good people,” she reflects. “Because you spend so much time with them, and you want to make sure who you’re working with. I’ve been really lucky to work with great people.”

Also on the horizon is a return to The Buccaneers for season three, which recently wrapped production and finds Mabel embarking on another new arc.

“It was so fun. They’re all just like my best friends on that show, and we had just the greatest time. Such a good experience. This season was the best, and I think it is the best season yet,” she says. “My storyline is super fun and exciting, and there’s something new to it, which is fun and cool. It’s like a dynamic in it that’s a little bit inspired by one of Nicole Kidman’s movies, which is my little tease. There’s like a little sensual dynamic that she has that we kind of mirror in a way.”

For all the directions Totah’s career is moving in, there is something remarkably simple about what she hopes audiences take away from Carrie. It also feels particularly fitting for Tina, a character whose desperation to belong drives so much of what she does.

“I hope they take away from the fact that we are all beautiful and magical in our own ways, and that you belong here, you’re here for a reason, and that also your greatest flaw is probably your superpower,” she reflects.

Between Carrie, The Buccaneers season three, her directorial debut and filmmakers she would still love to work with, including Coralie Fargeat, Julia Ducournau, Ruben Östlund and Alma Har’el, Totah seems increasingly uninterested in limiting herself to any one kind of work.

Asked to sum herself up in a single cinematic image, which shot in a film would best embody her, she pauses before rattling off three very different possibilities.

“I do love Robin Williams with the cream on his face, and it’s on fire,” she says in reference to Mrs. Doubtfire, before pivoting. “But also, just Isla Fisher running down the street in Confessions of a Shopaholic with all the bags in her hand, I just feel like that’s so me. Or maybe in the movie Revenge, when the drugs kick in.”

“I think I just want to keep doing fun stuff,” she says.

Carrie is now streaming worldwide on Prime Video.

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