Talia Ryder watches. In Eliza Hittman's Never Rarely Sometimes Always she carried half a film without a speech, and most of what she has been given since has asked for less than she showed there. She is worth following into better parts.
Fi1m perspective
The shift ends at a supermarket in a small Pennsylvania town, the manager takes the girls' cash through a hatch and kisses their hands, and Skylar lets him, because what else is there to do. That is how Talia Ryder first appears in Eliza Hittman's Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020), and it sets the terms. Skylar takes money from that till, buys two overnight bus tickets to New York, works out the subway, and keeps Jasper (Théodore Pellerin), a talkative boy from the bus, on the hook in case he turns out to be useful. Sidney Flanigan's Autumn has the story; Ryder has the logistics, and not one speech. She was seventeen and it was her first film.
Her trade is reaction. There is a small moment between the cousins late in that film which we will not describe, except to say that nothing is said during it and it moved us more than anything spoken in the picture. Ryder does it with her face and her hands and the way she stands, which is a dancer's way; she trained from the age of three and made her Broadway debut at twelve, as Hortensia in Matilda the Musical, and the dancer is what Steven Spielberg used when he gave her a small part as Tessa in West Side Story (2021). After that came supporting parts in Do Revenge (2022), Master and Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between, and then the lead, as Lillian, in Sean Price Williams's The Sweet East (2023), a road trip through American subcultures that Williams both directed and shot.
We have not reviewed The Sweet East, so we will not judge it at length, but the notices agreed on its shape: a lead who changes with each room she walks into, in a film several critics found thinner than she was. Then there is Craig Gillespie's Dumb Money (2023), in which she and Myha'la play students who cannot agree on how much of the GameStop squeeze to believe. That is the whole of the part. The film is quick and warm and gives its best minute to America Ferrera; Ryder is fine in it, and nobody asked for more. She has said herself, "I prefer working in an environment where it's the director's show." Hittman's was. Gillespie's belonged to a dozen people at once.
Since then she has played the ballerina Joy Womack in Joika (2023), which puts the dance back in front of the camera, taken a part in Little Death (2024), and gone to television for Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The risk for an actor who listens this well is that she keeps being hired to listen. Someone will eventually write her the speech Skylar never got. On the evidence so far, she will not need it.
Biography
Talia Ryder is an American stage and film actress. Born in Buffalo, New York, she began her professional career on Broadway, playing Hortensia in the musical Matilda the Musical from 2015 to 2016 after moving to New York City with her family.
She made her feature film debut as Skylar in the 2020 drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Subsequent roles include Tessa in Steven Spielberg's West Side Story (2021), Gabbi Broussard in Do Revenge (2022) and Harmony Williams in Dumb Money (2023). She has also appeared in Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between (2022), Master (2022) and The Sweet East (2023).
