Victoria Pedretti flexes her camp muscles in ‘Forbidden Fruits’

Victoria Pedretti was fresh out of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama when she was cast in Mike Flanagan’s acclaimed 2018 horror series, “The Haunting of Hill House.”

In her breakout role as Nell Crain, the youngest and most sensitive of five adult siblings reckoning with wounds from a childhood summer spent in a cursed home, Pedretti became the undisputed heart of “Hill House,” anchoring the show with a spellbinding performance that christened her as a scream queen. Her subsequent appearances in “The Haunting of Bly Manor” and “You” were characterized by a similar dramatic intensity, solidifying her renown in the horror genre.

But in Pedretti’s new “Forbidden Fruits,” a horror-comedy directed by Meredith Alloway making her feature debut and produced by “Jennifer’s Body” screenwriter Diablo Cody, the actor shines in all-new soapy splendor.

Set in a Dallas shopping mall, “Forbidden Fruits” revolves around an elite clique of retail employees who run a witches’ coven out of the basement of their boho boutique Free Eden. Pedretti stars alongside Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung and Alexandra Shipp.

Initially asked to look at both the roles of whimsigoth physics buff Fig and the bubbly yet emotionally complex Cherry, described by Alloway as a “Texas Brigitte Bardot,” Pedretti fell hard for the latter.

“She really popped off the page,” Pedretti, 31, says on a recent Zoom interview she takes while on a sandwich run in L.A. “I entered into this glorious flow state.”

“I can’t say I’ve had any experience quite like it, where I really didn’t spend a lot of time questioning myself,” the actor says. “She kind of took over.”

That confidence was perhaps the product of Pedretti performing in two stage plays before “Forbidden Fruits” — or maybe it was the nighttime filming schedule. Either way, Pedretti says she improvised constantly and always kept swinging until somebody said, “Cut.”

The result: Pedretti in Alloway’s instant cult classic is a laugh-out-loud-funny unending well of charm, packing humor into even her most routine dialogue. In her best quotable moments, she seamlessly infuses her sometimes shrill timbre with a dash of Southern drawl. One of her most iconic facial expressions in the film is already circulating as a reaction meme online.

“I was enjoying being in this character so much, I just wouldn’t stop,” Pedretti says, adding that Alloway, who was sensitive to cast members’ interpretations of their roles, supported experimentation.

Alloway praises the Philadelphia-born Pedretti for nailing Cherry’s comedic moments yet also grounding the character in a traumatic backstory — a balancing act the director knew she was capable of after watching “Hill House.”

“I saw her in that show and I was like, ‘Who is that?’” Alloway says. “She is magnificent and so raw. I didn’t feel like I was watching someone acting. I was worried for her.”

After later watching Pedretti nail her role in “You” as Love Quinn, a wealthy, charismatic chef who hides a psychopathic nature, Alloway was convinced of her star power.

Victoria Pedretti in the movie “You.”

(John P. Fleenor / Netflix)

Cody was most familiar with Pedretti’s performance in “You,” pegging the actor as an “intense brunet” that didn’t square at first with her interpretation of Cherry as an Anna Nicole Smith type.

“Then I see the movie and I’m like, oh my God, she has that fragility,” Cody recalls. “She has that humor. She has that sexuality. She has all of it.

“Victoria brought all of those layers and I’m really blown away by her,” the Oscar-winning “Juno” screenwriter adds.

Cody says she wasn’t surprised that the film drew such talent. From the moment Alloway and Lily Houghton, who wrote the play “Forbidden Fruits” is based on and cowrote the film’s screenplay, brought the material to Cody and her producing partner Mason Novick, she became obsessed.

“It feels spiritually like a film that I would want to be part of my body of work,” Cody says. She remembers being especially delighted by the echoes of “Jennifer’s Body” present in Alloway and Houghton’s screenplay.

“Jennifer’s Body” was widely considered a box-office flop and critical failure upon its release in 2009 — grossing only $31 million worldwide against a $16-million budget — but in recent years has enjoyed a reappraisal as a stealth-feminist essential, reclaimed by superfans.

“I don’t think that the world was ready for these kinds of themes,” Cody says of the movie’s ideas, including the cost of toxic femininity, the nuances of female friendship and the pervasiveness of the male gaze.

When it came to promoting “Jennifer’s Body,” the producer adds, “there was a huge emphasis on trying to market it to straight men, based on Megan [Fox] being attractive, and that was not at all the point of the film, so that was frustrating.” Conversely, “Forbidden Fruits” speaks intimately to the female experience and “doesn’t attempt to pander to any other demographic.”

“The current zeitgeist is a great place for a movie like this,” she says. “This movie is for the girls, gays and theys, as they say.”

Alloway, a trained actor who worked as a film journalist before moving into directing, was struck with a similar feeling when she first discovered Houghton’s play, right around the time she was consuming copious media about women criminals, such as Tori Telfer’s 2017 book “Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History.”

“I was so entrenched in why women commit acts of crime,” Alloway said, adding that she was disappointed to find that revenge films on the subject still often revolved around men.

Picking up Houghton’s script, the director recalls feeling relieved. “Oh, this is just about women,” she says, her face brightening. “This is about women friendships, women being pitted against each other.”

In an early meeting with Houghton, Alloway told the playwright she’d like to bring a genre lens to “turn up the dial on the emotions that you feel reading the play and make them accessible to people who haven’t had these experiences — or validate people who have.”

Outside of the opportunity to work with so many other young women, Pedretti said she was drawn to “Forbidden Fruits” because of its use of style and tone.

“It asks a lot of people to try to step into a world like this one,” the actor says of the unabashedly histrionic screenplay. “And as nerve-racking as it may be to take that big swing, you gotta take the big swing.”

“She has that fragility,” says producer Diablo Cody of Pedretti. “She has that humor. She has that sexuality. She has all of it.”

(Evelyn Freja / For The Times)

And swing she does: Pedretti plays up Cherry’s emotional volatility, giving her a full-bodied form of expression. The actor even did her own onscreen makeup (as did Reinhart) and collaborated heavily with costume designer Sarah Millman on Cherry’s wardrobe and styling. Plus, she performed her first topless scene — in a sequence that doesn’t involve men or even sex.

“I’m really proud of the way we use nudity to show a certain kind of unspoken comfortability among women,” she continues. “I remember always getting such a thrill at the comfort level of a girl being like, ‘We’re going to the bathroom together,’ and to me, that is that moment.”

It’s a perfect example of a scene that doesn’t try to speak to anyone except those it’s specifically written for, and one that you only get with women at the helm of a production.

Reflecting on the agency she had to shape Cherry, Pedretti says she is more inspired to explore directorial projects of her own.

“I am so interested in protecting these spaces to be positive, creative experiences for everyone involved,” she says.

Whenever Pedretti does make her feature debut behind the camera (she’s already made a short or two), perhaps Cody will pick up the phone.