Sascha Nastasi : from London To New York
The teen star talks film, theater, and creating with Rival editors
Growing up in England and attending an all-girls school for performing arts, it was always in the stars that actress and writer Sascha Nastasi would become known for her creative streak. Her family’s ten year stint in London, paired with a background heavy in dance and performance art, led her to a life on screen and stage that is rivaled only by her prowess for writing and the English language. Rival editors got the chance to hop on a call with Sascha and talk about her newest role in the Ashley Avis directed film Black Beauty, and everything she’s been keeping herself busy with during quarantine.
“I really enjoyed growing up in England,” Nastasi says of her childhood home, “and I went to a very quirky school that was very much focused on different kinds of arts.” She says it was quite peculiar, and that as students they had classes like improve comedy as staple curricular choices. “Teachers would come into our school and do workshops with us,” she says, “and going there sparked my love of performance for sure.” Sascha did a musical her last year at her school, Guys and Dolls, which only furthered her love for acting. She didn’t start out as an actor, however, and connected the dots between her love of dance and her passion for acting as she grew as a performer. “I grew up a dancer, training sixteen hours a week very intensely,” the actress says, “and I think performance was always my favorite part of dance.” That aspect of performing, of telling a story, is what drove Nastasi to acting and writing.
Shortly into her dance career, though, Sascha got an injury that took her out of practice for a year, stunting her growth as a dancer. “My progress stalled because when you’re out a year that’s a really long time when you’re dancing professionally,” she says, “and I lost strength.” Then, when she started to act in her last school year, she realized the love that she had for performance of all types. “Then we moved back here because we’re American,” Sascha says, “and because my brother was going to college here in the states. We all wanted to move back. We lived in London for ten years, and it was supposed to be two, but we did love it.” When her family moved back to New York City, Sascha realized how many opportunities the city held for an acting career, and as young as the age of fourteen was telling her mother that acting was what she wanted to practice. “I was very self-serious as an eleven or twelve year old,” Sascha laughs. The actress knew what she wanted.
Fast forward a few years and Sascha is playing the role of Jennifer in Disney’s new Black Beauty film. A couple of years prior she had worked on a short film with the director, Ashley Avis, and the two hit it off. When pre-production for Black Beauty commenced, Avis knew that Sascha would be a good fit for the role. “She’s wonderful and an inspiration to me and we got along really well, personally and professionally,” Sascha says about Avis. The pair kept in touch after the short film concluded, and Avis showed the producers of Black Beauty Nastasi’s reel and tape.
Nastasi’s character, Jennifer, is one of the main antagonists to Mackenzie Foy’s character Jo. They’re around the same age and she is a competitive rider at the barn that John rides at, and, in Sascha’s words, is quite rude. “She likes Jo’s love interest who, of course, doesn’t like her back, which is awkward,” Nastasi laughs. The cast became very close while filming, and Sascha says that everyone on set was amazing and fast friends:
“They’re just a really lovely group of people, and I think that is pretty rare and special. Everyone that I got to spend time with was so fantastic and is a wonderful person and actress. I spent a lot of time with Alex because she plays Jasmine. All of our scenes were to, you know, play best friends who were a little competitive with one another. But we had to play two people who were really close, and I think we just had such a natural friendship and chemistry that we just hit it off really quickly. And it was always so easy to talk to her.”
She says that there was a span of hours during the big classic Black Beauty scene filming where a number of actors weren’t onscreen, so they would all sit in holding and talk and bond. “We didn’t have to work, so we just talked for all that time,” Sascha says, “it was so fun.”
Now, in addition to her film role and burgeoning acting career, Sascha has also acted in a number of stage plays and is an avid writer. She has a hearty love of Shakespeare, and her favorite Shakespearean role she’s ever played is Olivia in Twelfth Night. Going to an all-girls performing school in London she oftentimes found herself playing male and female roles, and as such developed herself as an adaptive and versatile performer. This love of the stage and background in London lent itself seamlessly to a passion for writing, screenwriting, and the behind the scenes storytelling that drives stage and film. “I’m going to paraphrase a Sam Shepard quote,” the actress says:
“Writing is, you know, an answer to loneliness like no other.”
Sascha says that everyone, especially right now, goes through a fair amount of loneliness, and that writing provides a really cool companion in a time where we can’t be around other people. “I also just love people, and I think writing is very similar to acting, even though the skillsets are perhaps very different,” she states. An avid people watcher, Sascha has a love for observing peoples’ eccentricities and complexities, and loves to tell stories about individuals and their lives. “And I also just love words,” she says, “and I think recently my appreciation for the people who can write such beautiful and winding sentences, and poets that understand the weird rhythms of peoples’ speech, has grown. I think all of that is very beautiful paired with the words themselves.”
And that’s what Nastasi is working on in quarantine. In the past few months she’s written a fair amount of short stories, as well as some flash fiction and is brainstorming a couple of shorts. “I applied for dramatic writing for college,” she says, looking forward to the future.
Of course, the topic on everyone’s minds these days is the COVID-19 pandemic, and Sascha is no different. We wanted to ask her how she’s been staying mentally and physically healthy during this time, other than working on her writing. Sascha has OCD that developed after an accident when she was younger, and she’s the first to admit that the pandemic has been hard for people with any type of mental illness. “It’s important for me to go for walks,” the actress says, “because sometimes I can just stay shut in, and that’s not good.” She also says that the more she’s on her laptop and her cell phone, the worse her anxiety gets. “Sometimes I even have trouble falling asleep, and in order to fall asleep soundly I have to read something that’s not troubling to the mind,” she admits.
I think that Sascha has it right, and in these times we could all use more art, more beautiful words, and a little less trouble for our minds.
To learn more about Sascha check out her social medias
https://www.instagram.com/saschanastasi/?hl=en
And if you haven’t seen ‘Black Beauty’ yet go do it now! Streaming on Disney Plus