Victoria Pedretti makes fear convincing without making it loud. Her Nell Crain in The Haunting of Hill House gives us good reason to follow her, even when the writing is less persuasive than the performance.
Fi1m perspective
Watch how quietly Nell Crain speaks about being afraid in The Haunting of Hill House (2018). Pedretti plays her as someone who has lived with fear since childhood, and has had to find a way of saying so. We were moved by that quietness: it makes Nell's distress seem familiar to her, without making it any less painful. In a family drama with ghosts, that restraint matters: we can believe in the person speaking without needing to be persuaded by every supernatural threat around her. Pedretti gives us a reason to care before the series asks us to be frightened.
Director Mike Flanagan gives her room to do that by putting the Crain family before the ghosts. Kate Siegel's Theo, gloved and sharp with everyone, offers a useful contrast to Nell's quieter manner. Pedretti was the find of the series for us, although the adult cast is uneven. The programme runs long and talks too much towards the end. Her performance remains a reason to stay with it, even when we wish Flanagan would get on with the haunting.
After that breakthrough came Love Quinn in You (2018), a role she played across the second and third series from 2019 to 2021. The part extended her work into morally ambiguous characters, while keeping her within the psychological thriller. Penn Badgley's voice-over turns courtship into surveillance; that device needs credible people around him if we are to feel the harm in all his watching. We find You entertaining and uncomfortable, but its blunt social satire and hurried plotting limit what it can say about its characters. Pedretti's ability to make emotionally troubled people credible is valuable in this sort of material; we would still like the programme to give its difficult questions more time.
The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), in which she plays Dani Clayton, kept horror central to her television work. She also has supporting film parts in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019) and Ava DuVernay's Origin (2023). We would welcome more work outside horror; Nell is persuasive enough to make us curious about what else she might do. Start with Nell, and allow Flanagan a few more speeches than he needs.
Biography
Victoria Pedretti is an American actress. She attended Pennsbury High School and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting from the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama in 2017.
She gained recognition for playing Nell Crain in the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House (2018). Subsequent roles include Dani Clayton in The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) and Love Quinn in You (2019–2023). Film appearances include Leslie Van Houten in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019).
On stage, Pedretti appeared in a Broadway revival of An Enemy of the People (2024) and the play Tender Napalm (2024). She received an MTV Award and nominations at the Critics' Choice and Saturn Awards.
