‘Rebel Ridge’ Is AnnaSophia Robb’s Grown-up Moment

Leigh Nordstrom
·4-min read

“I was dropping stuff off at my dry cleaner and he was like, ‘I think I saw you this weekend,’” says AnnaSophia Robb. The 30-year-old actress has been in recognizable projects since her major breakout at age 9 in “Because of Winn-Dixie,” yet there’s something different about number-one-movie-on-Netflix notoriety, as she is experiencing with the success of her new film “Rebel Ridge.”

“It’s one of the things I didn’t really anticipate. With streamers, because it’s accessible all over the world at the same time, that is a different experience than a movie coming out in the theater,” Robb adds.

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Robb has been attached to “Rebel Ridge,” from director Jeremy Saulnier, since her first audition in 2019, and with the pandemic and a few casting changes it took several years for it to come to life. With the final product out now — and garnering more than 30 million views in its first three days on Netflix — she knows it was worth the wait.

“I’ve been working for a long time and I feel very grateful to be part of something where the story will last. I think in the culture where things pop up and then they go away, it’s like you’re the hot thing for a week maybe, and then it disappears. I don’t feel that way about this project,” Robb says. “I’ve lived with it for so long that I feel like it’ll hold up. That’s why we make stories.”

AnnaSophia Robb
AnnaSophia Robb

“Rebel Ridge” follows a former Marine, played by Aaron Pierre, who takes on a corrupt small town police force. Robb plays Summer, an aspiring attorney working in the clerk’s office who is also battling a painkiller addiction.

“She’s a mother, she’s an addict, she’s standing up for justice. She really has so many decisions to make, and I think she’s a really good example,” Robb says. “I hold her in my heart because I think she has so much on the line to lose, and yet she risks everything to do the right thing.”

The film shot for four months in New Orleans, which has become Robb’s second favorite city — “maybe a close first” — after New York.

“I love the culture, the people and the music. I love the heat and the Spanish moss,” she says. She heads back down south to Atlanta in a couple of weeks to start work on her new Peacock series “Grosse Pointe Garden Society,” a murder mystery set within a garden society.

“I think in the byline it says ‘mischief and mayhem,’ which I love,” she says.

The project will star Aja Naomi King, Matthew Davis, Alexander Hodge and Melissa Fumero, among others.

“When you sign on to do a TV show, it’s such a commitment. You don’t know how many seasons you’re going to do, hopefully you go more than one, and you better like these people. And I really love and trust all of them,” she says of her costars. “And it’s completely different vibe from ‘Rebel Ridge,’ which is fun.”

After breaking out in “Winn-Dixie,” Robb went on to have an illustrious career as a young actor, starring as Violet Beauregarde in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Bridge to Terabithia,” “Soul Surfer” and “The Carrie Diaries,” as a young Carrie Bradshaw. “Rebel Ridge” sees her entering a more mature phase of her career, one she is excited for audiences to join her in.

“So many people see my work and they think of the films that I did when I was younger, which I’m so proud of. I’m so grateful for those projects, but it’s also fun to be able to grow up,” Robb says. “I saw wrinkles on my face for the first time. I was slightly horrified, and then I was also like, ‘I made it. I’ve been doing this for so long and I was like ‘I’m a grown up now.’”

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