The Dark Side of Acting: An Interview with Emily Robinson, Director of Ugly Cry
Understanding one’s own physical form is already difficult. Having that understanding graded by casting directors before you can even articulate an identity is profoundly destabilizing. As a child actress, Emily Robinson spent formative years navigating a framework that constantly evaluated her on a physical level, absorbing the expectations of the entertainment industry as a baseline for her own self-image. “My first memories of being sexualized were not actually being sexualized—they were getting audition breakdowns that were, ‘Oh, she’s sexy,’ or ‘She’s flirting,’ or ‘is voluptuous.’ As a young teen,” Robinson reflects. “Because of that, my understanding of self and body and performativity are so informed by this world.”
Emily Robinson, the writer, director, and star of Ugly Cry (premiering this month at SXSW), is describing an acute hyper-visibility that is a specific occupational hazard of the child actor. However, her words also touch on something universal that almost operates as a shared digital condition. Robinson sees shades of her highly specific Hollywood upbringing in the anxieties of an entirely online generation. “More and more as a culture, young people, whether they’re in entertainment or not, can feel that way with the internet, with seeing other people, seeing how we should be looking.”
For her, escaping that omnipresent gaze meant stepping away from the camera entirely, finding herself within the comparative normalcy of higher education. Yet, stepping into the real world brought its own kind of fracture. “College was absolutely the thing that both broke me in ways that entertainment never could, with certain relationships that were just really the most challenging that I’ve ever had, and also some of the best friendships of my life. That kind of broke me in a way that forced a sort of healing and introspection afterwards, and kind of allowed me to look at my childhood more objectively.”
Her time in undergrad forced a period of introspection, the beginning of an ongoing artistic evolution as she searched for a medium capable of holding that grief. She turned first to prose; writing her novel, Consumed, was, as most writing often finds itself, an act of literary therapy. Writing became a private space to metabolize the psychological toll of being perpetually perceived. “That’s the most in-process writing that I have done, which I think is maybe only possible with prose,” she explains.
By the time she wrote and directed her debut feature, Ugly Cry, Robinson had moved beyond utilizing art solely as an open wound. She was reckoning with her evolution in a style that lacked the freedom of prose. While prose offered the forgiveness required to simply figure things out on the page, writing a feature demanded immediate precision. Ugly Cry was born a deliberate culmination of her experiences, a final reckoning rendered in evaluated hindsight. Utilizing the frameworks of thriller, comedy, and body horror, she actively externalized “these things that at one point were a lot more urgent and spiky in my body.” Ugly Cry is something that can only be created through honesty and self-awareness, something that can only be made by someone who’s already done the processing and is ready to exorcise what remains.
“It’s obviously a much more extreme version of any experience of entertainment that I’ve gone through, on purpose,” Robinson clarifies. “Structurally, it would be deeply concerning if this was my exact lived experience.” Pushing the narrative to these extremes allowed her to dissect the pain of artists pitted against one another by a machine that thrives on their insecurities, capturing the devastation of a world that weaponizes vulnerability.
In a sense, Ugly Cry is entirely about that weaponization of vulnerability. The film follows Delaney, a young actress whose career implodes after losing a dream role due to her aesthetically unappealing tears. Robinson got this idea from her own lifelong fascination with the physical act of crying. At ten years old, she watched actress Virginia Kull deliver a memorable performance in The Orphan’s Home Cycle at New York’s Signature Theater. “It was just so earnest and red and vulnerable. I just felt it in my bones,” Robinson remembers. She spent years trying to replicate that emotional bleed, eventually unlocking her own heavy, mucosal response. Rather than sanitize it for the camera, she learned to lean into its physicality. “I love getting a really juicy, disgusting cry. It feels very satisfying.”
Delaney finds herself punished for that same satisfying release. The entertainment machine demands total emotional extraction, punishing that vulnerability the moment it ceases to be pretty. “To be judged for this moment when you are at your most present, at your most vulnerable, and bearing your heart, and to be told when you are at this most vulnerable moment, you are ugly—I thought was just really kind of devastating.” Ugly Cry gives Delaney the ugly cry she was told to hide, treating it as the honest thing the industry punishes.
Devastating aesthetic judgment often begins closest to home, a reality the film explores through generational trauma. Ugly Cry doesn’t shy away from a complicated dynamic between a mother and daughter, painting a picture of two people who sometimes wound each other despite wanting the same things. In the film, a mother casually remarks that her daughter is “no spring chicken” and needs to play the ingenue, prompting Delaney to get Botox. When her mother is horrified by the result, the ensuing fallout isolates how recklessly we wield language with the people we love most. “The way that our words have power that we don’t necessarily feel in the moment, for these relationships that are so important,” she says, acknowledging her own ongoing evolution. “Patience and taking time with words is something that I still, and probably forever will be working on.”
Despite that onscreen tension, Delaney’s mother is clearly written from a place of unconditional love and gratitude. Robinson brings up a meditation exercise she did where she was asked to visualize three people who loved her and wanted the best for her. She easily conjured three people: her mother, her partner, and a close friend. Yet when she shared this breakthrough with an industry peer, the response laid bare the isolation their profession creates. “They were like, ‘Oh, it’s so depressing, I can’t think of three people.’”
Cognizant of the importance of community in art, she actively sought to surround herself with a trusted community, casting Ryan Simpkins, a fellow former child actor she has known for over a decade. They had auditioned against each other and written together; they had, as Robinson puts it, “survived the industry together.” Their shared survival adds an additional level of honesty to her film. Filming a scene where their characters discuss who truly wants the best for them amidst mutual betrayal dissolved the boundary between performance and lived reality. “Sometimes when you are using words that are not your own, you’re able to think about things that are related and different,” Robinson observes. After Simpkins delivered a line expressing quiet gratitude for being “in it” together, they simply asked to hug. “It just felt really like a beautiful moment.”
That bleak admission from her industry peer—the inability to name three people—touches on the exact spiritual void Robinson’s entire artistic journey has actively worked to reckon with. “This city can make you feel that way sometimes, the internet can make us feel that way sometimes, the world right now can make us feel that way sometimes, and that is sad,” Robinson reflects. To survive a culture that commodifies the self, she realized she had to meticulously construct a reality outside of it. Reclaiming her narrative through Ugly Cry meant divorcing her intrinsic value from her professional output. “It’s so important and hard sometimes to remember that you have to protect your daily life, and your rituals and your relationships and the things that are normal, and create a life that makes you feel grounded and happy and fulfilled independently,” she says. “Then the art and creation and work is a happy cherry on the cake.”