Sofia Black-D’Elia Has No Problem Taking Her Time

Gen-Z may be dominating your screen every which way, but Millennials are still having their moment, too—albeit a less dazzling, more pared down, and, dare we say, realistic one. Anxieties about entering your thirties and figuring out what kind of mark you’re going to leave seem to be at an all time high—just look at Tick, Tick… Boom!, The Worst Person in the World, or even Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You if you need proof. The upward trend in addiction narratives is worth noting, too—Euphoria has been both lauded and criticized for its raw, and at times over-the-top depictions of a teen struggling through Narcotics Anonymous meetings between (sometimes attending) high school classes. It’s been compared to the after-school special Canadian drama Degrassi (which will be rebooted for the fifth time next year), and, more accurately, has drawn comparisons to the U.K. series Skins.

Ironically, Sofia Black-D’Elia also starred on the short-lived American remake of the latter, a beloved British drama—she was Tea, the bisexual bad-girl high school cheerleader. The actress returns to the small screen in January—but this time, she plays Sam, another bisexual “bad girl,” though much more realistic in her struggle with alcoholism and crisis about nearing 30, in Single Drunk Female.

Black-D’Elia, who also recently turned 30, can relate to some of Sam’s antics on display in Single Drunk Female. “You tell yourself in your early twenties that you know exactly who you are, and you project it really loudly into the world,” the actress says with a laugh when she meets me via Zoom, flanked by a calendar and a portrait of a cat hanging on the wall behind her in her Brooklyn home. “Then you start to realize you don’t know as much as you thought you did and you have to rebuild. It was nice to play somebody who’s at the same part of their life and journey as I am, even though the things we struggle with and our vices are very different.”

Created by Simone Finch and produced by Jenni Konner and Leslye Headland, the series also stars Rebecca Henderson, Madeline Wise, Garrick Bernard, and Ally Sheedy. Black-D’Elia says it was the team of women behind Single Drunk Female that drew her to the project. “It’s a very bizarre time to be making things,” she says of the series, which was filmed during the pandemic, between Chicago and Atlanta. When she first took a look at Finch’s script, she thought it was so specific—which meant to her that it had to be grounded in some truth, and couldn’t have just been some abstract idea of what sobriety might look like. “Tonally, it was a really interesting challenge,” she adds. “It’s a half-hour comedy, but it’s about something really serious and difficult that a lot of young people go through.”

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