In the light-filled corner of a Sydney studio, Teagan Croft allows a new character to take form. “She’s a rock star but she catches the light rail. She wears her eyelashes in a unique way and she’s French, obviously. This woman also plays the bass guitar but she doesn’t tell anyone,” says the 19-year old actor of the persona she has constructed for today’s marie claire shoot in Celine signature looks. “That was the feeling the clothes gave me.”
Tapping the heavy heel of her Celine boot to the hypnotic hum of ’90s R&B, it’s clear that this rising star is finding her groove. Croft has spent the best part of a decade navigating life on-and off-screen, since landing her first role at the age of 10. “Something I’ve been dealing with for [nearly] 10 years is the nature of friendships on set,” she explains. “You develop such a strong and intense friendship with your co-stars in such a short period of time.”
Launching onto the scene in the cult DC television series Titans while she was in high school, Croft was also fortunate to find a sense of community within her loyal fan base.
“I moved around a lot when I was in high school and there were times when I didn’t have any [school] friends,” she recalls. “Instead, I had this whole community of people online and they would make videos saying, ‘On the off-chance that Teagan sees this, we want her to know that she’s really loved.’ And I did really feel the love.”
In June, Titans returns to Netflix for its fourth and final season, a chapter that Croft has found bittersweet to close after spending the past five years playing the beloved character Rachel Roth.
Croft’s passion for acting seems to stem from the opportunities it affords for escapism. “The magic of film is that they can create these sets that are so hyper-realistic you actually feel like you’re there,” she says. “I remember during my breaks on Titans I would walk silently on set and pretend that I was a character [in real life]. No-one knew – it was just in my imagination.”
Earlier this year, Croft took on the role of Jessica Watson in Netflix’s hotly anticipated bio-pic True Spirit. It was in this role that the actor found common ground with one of the world’s youngest solo global sailors.
“We started filming during Covid, so I didn’t get to see my family and friends. I was incredibly lonely,” says Croft of her experience capturing Watson’s 210-day solo circumnavigation. “There’s a scene in the film where Jess gets lonely on the boat and there’s no wind and she’s calling her family at Christmas. In real life, it was my sister’s birthday and the first family holiday that I’d missed out on. So I resonated with what Jess would have felt. People talk about acting being cathartic but frankly I hadn’t really felt it a lot until I shot those emotional scenes in the film.”
Following the success of True Spirit, Croft has been busy juggling her audition schedule with her first year of university. So how does she maintain her cool, calm and collected persona? “There’s this ’90s song I play [by A Tribe Called Quest] that reminds me to relax. It goes: ‘Relax yourself, girl, please settle down,’” she says, laughing. With a plethora of exciting opportunities in the pipeline, we can’t imagine Croft will be settling down anytime soon.
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