
Emily Bett Rickards on the refreshing nature of “Autumn and the Black Jaguar”
Fresh & Bright
Jan 27, 2025 Web Exclusive
For all that Emily Bett Rickards wanted to bring to her latest film—a starring role in Autumn and the Black Jaguar—as it turns out, the project gave just as much back to her.
Coming out of a global pandemic and a sidelined industry as we all sheltered in place, Autumn turned out to be the ideal first acting gig out of the gate for Rickards. The film, which centers on a 14-year-old girl (played by Lumi Pollack) who moves from NYC back to her native home in Peru to help save her village and the jungle cat she’d grown up, provided the sort of buoyant, hopeful narrative that an ailing world needed. Or at least it worked that way for Rickards.
“I think just for me, as Emily, that was the sort of the cylinder that was wanting to get filled there,” Rickards says. “I think as an actor, and not as the character, I think I was searching for what Lumi just naturally brings, which is this freshness, this fun, this lightness to life.”
As show business slowed and even stopped in the wake of COVID-19, Rickards and everyone else found themselves wondering when and if things would ever begin again—and what it would look like on the other side. At the time, creativity was sort of manic in that it was there and then it wasn’t. There was this fear that things were going to change all of a sudden. Then this beautiful script about helping each other and helping our planet as a greater community comes to my life.”
Rickards says the production of Autumn itself was healing, especially as she got to work with Pollack. “When we went to go shoot it, I’m shooting with this amazing young actress, Lumi. It’s not only due to her age, but to who she is—she brought a freshness and lightness to how she interacts. She’s also incredibly bright and was having fun. I think it was a good reminder that no matter how old you get, you have access to those things that get burned out of us sometimes.”
Rickards’ character (Anja) allowed her to channel some of her own anxieties in getting back to work as she portrayed a nervous biology teacher who accompanies Autumn on the adventure. “I think my nerves were there. I hadn’t been on a set in two years, and it was the perfect character for it. I needed something that Anja was able to fill and she needed something that I was able to fill, right? There’s this beautiful exchange, like an alchemical thing, right? When you have the privilege of meeting a character and embodying them. I think I was nervous, but she was nervous and that was fortunate.”
After receiving the script, Rickards, who is most famous from her work in Arrow (as Felicity Smoak) and is also starring in the upcoming Queen of the Ring, says she knew she was in fairly quickly. “I remember reading it for the first time and it was almost this cradling of the world. You didn’t have to beat the message into someone. Using the eyes of youth to tell a story where our hope gets lost is a real accessible way to get to all of us. When you grab something and it resonates with you, then you’re like, ‘Oh, this will be great. Let me help serve this message, right?”
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