Rising Stars Part Three: Ingrid Torelli
Ingrid Torelli was breathtakingly spectacular in her performance as Lilly D’Abo, totally stealing the show and giving us one of this year’s iconic horror characters and my personal favourite.
When I watched Late Night with the Devil a few weeks ago, I immediately knew who I wanted to do my next iteration of Rising Stars on. Ingrid Torelli was breathtakingly spectacular in her performance as Lilly D’Abo, totally stealing the show and giving us one of this year’s iconic horror characters and my personal favourite.
I was so floored by Lilly’s penchant for eerily staring directly at the camera that I constantly had to rewind to watch those scenes again. It was as if she was staring into the very pits of the audience’s souls; gloriously enthralling. Speaking to Steve Varley on his show, Torelli said that she was given the freedom to play Lilly however she felt was right: “They encouraged me to just follow my instincts, and at the time I guess I just felt like it was right to look at the cameras”.
Torelli added that the performance was so intense that she started crying for hours after one scene in particular (don’t worry, no spoilers!). She said, “You have to get yourself out of it, remind yourself that this is just make-believe”. Her co-star David Dastmalchian was full of praises for the young Australian actress, telling TheWrap that her performance was one of the spookiest he’s ever seen on set: “I’ve been on set with some of the most wildly prolific actors who can scare the pants off of anybody. And yet Ingrid was so grounded in this space that felt so dangerous and so on the edge of the precipice, that every moment we were working together was like, ‘What’s about to happen?’”. Given the fact that Dastmalchian has shared the set with the likes of Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, his praise of Torelli speaks volumes to how masterful she was in Late Night with the Devil.
Lilly wasn’t only frighteningly chilling during filming either, as Dastmalchian went on to add that Torelli was even spine-chilling behind the scenes. He said, “I went to say hi [in her dressing room], and she was staring at herself in the mirror getting ready to do a scene. She had this crooked kind of smile on her face, and it sent shivers down my spine in a way that not even Malcolm McDowell made my spine shiver when I worked with him”.
Going back to her roots years before Lilly, Torelli’s acting career kicked off back home in Australia on the theatre stage. She played the titular role in the Melbourne season of Matilda the Musical, which earned her the 2016 Helpmann Award for Best Female Actor In A Musical. Her triumph was one of a record-breaking 13 Helpmann awards Matilda the Musical won that year. She also received a nomination at the 2017 Green Room Awards for Best Actress In A Musical. After that, she switched her focus from theatre to film and television, earning roles in Red and Blue (2017), One Last Leaf (2018), They Can’t Hear You (2018), Holy Spirit (2019), The Mirror (2019), Five Bedrooms (2019-2020), The End (2020), Bloom season two (2020) and Force of Nature (2020). Late Night with the Devil wasn’t her only 2024 film either, as she also plays a role in the sequel of Force of Nature released in February, Force of Nature: The Dry 2.
Torelli is a tremendously skilled actress who put her talent on display long before Late Night with the Devil; going back to her theatre days. She’s also, by all accounts, an incredible person as well, which makes me even more of a fan of her. Dastmalchian referred to her as “a gift to our film”, saying, “She is a wonderful, lovely, sweet young woman who I trusted so much that she would babysit my children when we were shooting the film”. She already has an award and a nomination rewarding her for her prowess on the theatre stage, and I’m supremely confident that this amazing young lady is going to continue to dazzle for years to come and she’ll undoubtedly continue to add to her list of accolades.