Yahoo Lifestyle Stephanie Suganami on Her Journey to an A24 Horror Star in Sundance Movie ‘Opus’
Name: Stephanie Suganami
Sundance project: “Opus,” the A24 thriller from writer/director Mark Anthony Green starring Ayo Edebiri, John Malkovich, Juliette Lewis, Murray Bartlett, Amber Midthunder, Young Mazino and Tony Hale. After premiering at Sundance, the movie comes out in theaters March 14.
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Notable past credits: Suganami, known online as @steph_shep, first rose to fame as Kim Kardashian’s assistant, eventually becoming chief operating officer of Kardashian West Brands. An environmental activist, she founded a “climate club” called Future Earth and has worked with organizations in the space including Al Gore’s The Climate Reality Project.
Suganami originally moved to Los Angeles 15 years ago to be a dancer, having danced from the age of two until she was 24.
“I wanted to be on tour. I wanted to dance on film, I wanted to do Broadway at some point,” she says. “My path, I guess just like any artist, you kind of fall into other jobs to pay the bills when you pursue the dream.”
She started acting classes in 2018, and has had smaller roles in things like the Netflix movie “Something From Tiffany’s,” the Starz series “Power Book II: Ghost” and the Ryan Murphy show “Doctor Odyssey.”
Suganami and Green first met at San Vicente Bungalows back in 2019 through a mutual friend, and connected over their Midwestern roots (he from Kansas City, Mo., she from Ontario, Ohio).
“It was my first meeting with someone about a potential role,” she recalls. Green explained his vision for “Opus” and told her about a potential part for her, but she tried not to get her hopes up.
“You take it with a grain of salt when someone’s like, ‘I’ve got a role for you,’” she says. “But he really is a man of his word, and he in 2023 called me up and was like, ‘Hey, an audition is going to be coming in your inbox. I really, really want this for you, so just send in a tape.’”
The movie, somewhere between a horror and a psychological thriller, follows a writer, played by Edebiri, who travels to a remote island at the invitation of a reclusive pop icon, played by Malkovich, to hear his long-awaited comeback album. Suganami plays Emily, a social media influencer invited on the trip to cover the experience.
Within a few weeks of sending in her audition tape, Suganami was touching down in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to begin filming.
“Leading up to it I was very nervous just because it was my first feature film and my first experience shooting something like this,” she says. “But for some reason, the second I got there, I was like ‘I’m OK. This is good.’ I really want to attribute this to Santa Fe — the energy in Santa Fe is so magical and special and I fell in love with the city. I’m so grateful we got to shoot there because there is something very grounding and calming about Santa Fe.”
When she wasn’t in a scene, she asked Green to let her hang out on set and take it all in.
“I wanted to absorb, I wanted to learn. And I just got to watch everyone do their job in a way that they were so detailed and thoughtful and passionate, and I think you can really see that in the final product because everyone really wanted to create and felt really proud of their craft,” she says.
Suganami grew up “obessed” with performing and would lose herself in the worlds seen in TV and movies, something she resonated with in the themes of “Opus.”
“In ‘Opus,’ discussing the parisocial relationships that we have with fictional characters or celebrities or TV personalities, I always kind of felt like the people that I watched on TV I did have a relationship with,” she says. “So it’s really interesting now to see how that’s shifted, especially with social media and things like that.”
Aside from Green, who she sees frequently in L.A., she hasn’t seen the rest of the cast since filming so was looking forward to all that the Sundance schedule had on deck.
“We have a whole day of content,” she says. “It is going to be so fun to do TikToks with John Malkovich.”
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