On her first day of filming the latest season of Sugar, Sasha Calle had a feeling a déjà vu. It wasn’t that she had been on set with Colin Farrell before or that she was ever behind the wheel of a Corvette Sting Ray, but something did feel familiar.
“I had no idea where we were shooting. A lot of the time, you’re just so focused on so many things, and then you get driven to a location, you go, ‘Wait a second,’” remembers Calle, who quickly realized that production was shooting on the same street as her old college, the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in Hollywood.
Standing on the corner of Yucca and Cahuenga, a block away from her old dorm room, she couldn’t help but feel a little sentimental. “I arrived at that college and I had no idea or concept of what Hollywood would look like,” she says. “I always thought I was going to go back to Boston. I arrived in L.A. and I kind of just hustled it out.”
Fast forward 13 years and Sugar is just the latest role for the East Coast native, whose year started out with the release of Netflix action thriller The Rip. In a short amount of time Calle has built a career that has run the Hollywood gamut, from soap operas (Young and the Restless) to superheroes (DC’s The Flash) to festival indies (On Swift Horses). And, up next, she will be in Mike Flanagan’s Exorcist take with Scarlett Johansson and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
But, for now, back to Sugar. Calle signed on for the second season of the Apple neo-noir as Val, a jack-of-all-trades sidekick and protege to Farrell’s John Sugar. In addition to working with Farrell and Sugar’s creative team, including showrunner Sam Catlin, shooting in Los Angeles was one of the perks of the job.
Calle, who also shot Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses in the city, knows it is a rarity getting to shoot in L.A. at a time when film and television productions are heading to other corners of the globe. “Filming is now so spread out, we can make movies in a lot of places, now,” she says. Shooting in L.A. meant that Calle’s Great Dane, Dragon, was able to come to set and the days could be filled with little moments of personal serendipity, like when production moved on to the same lot where she spent two-and-a-half years shooting The Young and the Restless right after graduating acting school. She says, “We’re going to all these locations. I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I have a memory here. I have a memory there.’”
The other big perk of being cast in Sugar? The car.
Val’s introduction come by way of a carjacking that sees Sugar’s baby blue 1966 Chevrolet Corvette stolen and then quickly and conveniently retrieved by Val, who just so happens to be standing nearby when the theft happened. “That car is stunning,” says Calle. When it came to driving the car onscreen, Calle quickly volunteered her services. Calle remembers, “They were like, “We’re gonna have a stunt jump in and drive, and I was like, ‘I’ll do it.’ They’re like, ‘Well, it’s expensive, and we need it to go a little faster.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it. I’ll go fast but not too fast.’” After some test drives around the studio lot to understand the quirks of the vintage car, she admits, “I went fast.”
Via Val, Calle was dropped in the middle of Apple’s high-concept series that blends the look and feel of a classic Los Angeles detective story, and layers on top a distinct science fiction twist. While she had very little rehearsal time with Farrell, Calle says that they built their rapport in front of the cameras. As their characters were getting to know each other onscreen, Calle was also getting to know Farrell. She says, “When you walk on set, and there’s a completely different human there, there’s something so exciting about going, ‘I wonder what they’re gonna throw at me?”
And Farrell isn’t the first veteran Calle sparred with onscreen this year, appearing opposite both Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in The Rip, which follows Miami officers who are put in a compromising position when they discover millions in cash in a stash house during a raid.
“They just set a really amazing standard,” she says of Damon and Affleck and their Artists Equity banner, which was founded on the principle of sharing backend bonuses with the cast and below-the-line crew. “They really treat everyone equally and respectfully. You feel really taken care of.” And, Calles adds, “Catering is fucking supreme.”
As is the case with so many up-and-coming talent, Calle has also had to weather the ebbs and flows and shifting priorities of a forever consolidating industry.
Cast as Supergirl by a previous regime at DC, Calle made her feature film debut as the character in 2023’s The Flash. It was a role that earned Calle both attention and praise, but shortly after release, filmmaker James Gunn and producer Peter Safran were tapped to run the Warner Bros.-owned comic book outfit and retooled all of the projects in development.
This summer, a new Supergirl, which starred House of the Dragon actress Milly Alcock, headed to theaters. The movie was attacked by online trolls and later plagued by poor reviews. It ended up underperforming at the box office, and later THR reported on behind-the-scenes creative turmoil.
When asked about her hope for the future of female superheroes onscreen, Calle offers, “I think that women, time and time again, have shown the world that they can make movies. I think we have shown so many people that we can lead these movies. And I really hope that Hollywood can start seeing that, again.”
Season 2 of Sugar is now available on Apple TV.
