It’s all happening for Sophie Lowe. After scoring the lead role in the American ABC network series Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, the English-born, Aussie actress is set to star in US-set road movie What Lola Wants.
Sophie plays the title character who runs away from home and fakes her disappearance as a kidnapping. In a desert diner she meets a guy played by Beau Knapp (Super 8) and they head for Mobile, Alabama, pursued by sinister forces. Her parents offer a reward of $1 million for her safe return.
Written and directed by Aussie Rupert Glasson, who’s based in Los Angeles, the film starts shooting in LA and the city’s outskirts on June 27. The cast includes Robert Taylor, who stars in the US TV crime series Longmire, and Dale Dickey.
Glasson is producing the film with Ayisha Davies of Ultrafilms, with whom he collaborated on his first film, Coffin Rock. “We are thrilled that we can make the dates work with Sophie,” Davies told IF. “Her ABC series is going into 13 episodes so there is a lot of buzz around her, which is fantastic.”
The talent agency CAA will pitch the film to US distributors and Sydney-based Screen Corporation is handling international sales. There’s no Australian deal yet. “Our finance model doesn’t require us to have an Australian DG (distribution guarantee) at this stage so our sales agent will handle that once we have a finished film,” Davies said.
Shooting was originally scheduled for last October but that was postponed after an Australian private investor dropped out.
Lowe’s credits include Beautiful Kate, Blessed and Blame and TV’s The Slap and Satisfaction. She shot three movies in the past 18 months including Two Mothers, a drama adapted from Doris Lessing’s novel The Grandmothers that co-stars Robin Wright, Naomi Watts, James Frecheville and Xavier Samuel.
She was part of the ensemble cast of US writer-director John Huddles’ The Philosophers, the saga of a philosophy teacher at an international school in Jakarta who challenges his class to choose 10 of their fellow students who would take shelter underground and reboot the human race in the event of a nuclear apocalypse. And she journeyed to the Austrian Alps for Markus Blunder’s Autumn Blood, a thriller about a 16-year-old girl and her 10-year-old brother who are attacked by hunters after their single mother dies.