Tommi Rose on The Devil’s Mouth, Sweet Magnolias & Music

When I spoke to Tommi Rose, she was in the middle of one of those career moments that, from the outside, can look like everything is happening at once.

Her new survival horror film, The Devil’s Mouth, had arrived globally on Prime Video on July 29, and Tommi told me that it was, at that moment, “number one on Amazon Prime in the world.” Season 5 of Sweet Magnolias, meanwhile, had landed on Netflix just weeks earlier, marking her third season appearing as Olivia Harris.

Photography by Paul Smith.

Yet the longer we talked, the less this particular chapter of her career felt like a story about two releases. Acting, after all, is only one part of the picture. There is also music, writing, directing, producing, painting, and an increasingly clear philosophy connecting all of them.

That instinct to create stretches almost as far back as she can remember. She grew up in musical theater after her parents put her in acting classes when she was around four years old because, as she tells it, she had so much energy. At around 14, she began working in film and television. It was also around that age that she started writing songs.

“I just love every facet of the creative world that I can possibly be a part of,” she told me. Even in the opening minutes of our conversation, she kept coming back to collaboration, the fact that it takes so many people to make a movie, just as it takes people coming together to make a song.

That collaborative instinct sits at the center of The Devil’s Mouth.

Directed by Jeff Wadlow, the film follows a group of friends whose trip through a remote cave system in Thailand turns into a fight for survival when they encounter a deadly shark. Tommi plays Adrienne alongside Kathryn Newton as Sara, Lana Condor as Max, Nico Hiraga as James and Gavin Casalegno as Greg. The production filmed extensively in Thailand, including Krabi, Chiang Mai and Bangkok, with much of its cave action created on large water stages.

When I asked her what felt most significant about the response to the movie, she didn’t point first to the difficulty of making it or even to the scale of the release. She talked about the audience’s excitement, the unusual sense that viewers seemed ready for the movie before anyone had to convince them to be.

“Normally, I feel like with a lot of projects, you’re having to get everybody excited. And with this one, it kind of just already came packaged because the cast is so incredible… I think that everyone kind of trusted this cast that we were going to do something great with this. And I’m really, really proud of us.”

When we turned specifically to Adrienne, it became clear that what attracted her to the character was not perfection.

Photography by Paul Smith.

Adrienne can be raunchy. She can be boy-crazy. She has flaws. But Tommi saw underneath all of that a young woman who genuinely tries to show up for the people she cares about. She pointed particularly to Adrienne’s relationship with Sara and the small ways she checks on her throughout the film.

“She’s not your perfect good friend,” she explained. “She’s a little boy crazy, and she’s got her flaws, but she tries to be a good friend, and she really, I think, has a good heart.”

That emotional core becomes even clearer through Adrienne’s relationship with Greg.

I asked her how she and Casalegno managed to establish the couple’s affectionate, lived-in dynamic before the film’s survival elements took over. The answer was essentially: very quickly.

They met roughly two days before shooting began. One of the first scenes they filmed was also one of the first scenes in the movie, requiring Adrienne and Greg to already feel physically comfortable and almost constantly attached to each other.

She remembers cornering Casalegno and asking him “a million questions” about himself. They talked so much during those first few days, she joked, that her throat became sore. With little rehearsal time, they also built much of the relationship through improvisation, learning one another’s comedic timing as they went.

That spontaneity was only one kind of challenge.

Filming The Devil’s Mouth meant spending enormous stretches of time in and around water. Director Jeff Wadlow has said that the characters are actively swimming for roughly 85 percent of the movie, while other members of the cast have similarly described exceptionally long days shooting in water.

Photography by Paul Smith.

When I asked her for the moment that most made her think, I cannot believe this is my job right now, she immediately separated the answer into two categories: one physical and one mental.

The physical answer involved a harness.

For one shark attack sequence, she was strapped into a bulky rig around her waist and legs. Skin-colored shorts and her bikini bottoms concealed it from the camera, while a wire attached to the harness allowed the production to drag her across the pool and then underwater.

The stunt itself, surprisingly, was almost fun. The water being forced up her nose was not.

“There’s something in your brain that just does not want to be dragged underwater by a cable, you know, that’s just not… not the way you want to spend your Wednesday.”

She laughed about it in retrospect, but the mentally hardest day of the production carried none of that absurdity.

It was the day Greg died.

She remembers spending the day wailing, screaming and crying through Adrienne’s grief. Somewhere inside that process, another piece of the character clicked into place for her: Greg was not simply another member of this friend group. Adrienne was the reason he was on the trip.

That detail transformed the loss into guilt.

“The only reason he was there was because she asked him to be, and it was only for her. It wasn’t like this group trip that we all planned together. He was just there for her… So, emotionally, that day was really, really hard for me. I remember getting back to the hotel, and my throat was, like, burning. It was so hoarse, I could barely talk. And it was just… it was really hard… it was a hard day for Adrienne, so it happened to be a hard day for me.”

That emotional bleed between character and performer became easier to understand as she described the environments around her.

She credits the production team with making the caves convincing enough that the actors could sometimes forget the artifice altogether. One detail she had nearly forgotten until hearing Lana Condor mention it in another interview was a motorized shark fin that production would send racing around the pool.

Everyone knew it was fake.

The body, she suggested, sometimes had other ideas.

“There’s just a chip in your brain that doesn’t want to let go of the fact that you’re watching a shark fin swim around you,” she said.

Photography by Paul Smith.

The intensity also changed the relationship among the cast.

When I asked whether shooting under those conditions created a different kind of closeness, she answered without hesitation.

“100%. I think we are bonded for life.”

Their bodies were taking a beating. She remembers meeting Condor in the hotel lobby talking about needing massages. Other cast members, she said, ended up requiring hospital visits at different points for issues including food poisoning and exhaustion. The experience made it essential that everyone trust one another and look out for each other.

“I would not have wanted to be in those caves with anybody else,” she said.

And sometimes the best defense against exhaustion was considerably less profound.

“Somebody would make a joke about peeing in the pool and it would just make everything a whole lot lighter.”

From there, our conversation made what felt like an enormous tonal jump—from shark attacks and flooded caves to the considerably warmer world of Sweet Magnolias.

She first appeared as Olivia Harris in Season 3 and returned in Seasons 4 and 5. The fifth season premiered on Netflix on June 11, 2026.

After three seasons with Olivia, I wanted to know what she understood about her now that she could not have understood at the beginning.

“I literally channel her in my everyday life sometimes,” she told me.

She admires Olivia’s certainty. She knows who she is. She is blunt and honest, qualities Tommi has always loved about her. But the Olivia who returns from touring Europe in Season 5 is also somewhat different from the character audiences originally met.

There was even an accidental visual marker of that evolution.

She finished filming The Devil’s Mouth in Thailand with red hair, flew back to Los Angeles and, only a few days later, headed to Atlanta for Sweet Magnolias. Rather than immediately change it, the production allowed her to keep the red hair.

What began as a practical decision started to feel narratively appropriate.

Photography by Reina Marin.

She saw it as a visual representation of Olivia growing up—a character learning that people can behave differently than she hopes without automatically becoming bad people, and becoming increasingly willing to let others into a life she had once kept fairly closed off.

That change is perhaps most visible in Olivia’s friendship with Annie Sullivan, played by Anneliese Judge.

For Tommi, the relationship carries another layer because Judge is also one of her closest friends away from the show. She told me she had seen her the previous night; the two had gone to an open mic night together.

“I just feel really lucky that… our off-screen friendship gets to also… be immortalized in this show.”

There is something fitting about her using the word immortalized, because the longer we spoke, the more our conversation became about what happens when an artist gives something to an audience and watches them make it their own.

She has experienced that across projects with devoted audiences. Before Sweet Magnolias, she played Simone in the second season of Nickelodeon’s I Am Frankie, and she later appeared as Larissa Genrette in Netflix’s Outer Banks.

What continually surprises her is the creativity of the fans themselves: the artwork, the edits, the ways viewers take something made by one group of artists and use it to create something new.

“I love to think that creativity inspires creativity,” she told me.

But her answer became considerably more personal when she talked about viewers who recognize themselves in one of her characters.

“Anytime that I can feel, like, my performance gave any sort of, like, understanding to somebody or comfort to somebody, or they see a trait that they have in themselves in this character, and it makes them like themselves more, because that is… that’s why I do what I do.”

She knows that feeling from the other side.

She has watched characters and seen qualities she recognizes in herself—something “nerdy or too bold or too blunt or too this or too that”—suddenly reframed as something worthy of affection because a character she loves possesses the same trait.

By that point, we had spent plenty of time talking about Adrienne and Olivia.

So I told her I wanted to talk about Tommi.

“That girl,” she joked. “Get her out of here.”

Her professional identity has never fit especially neatly into a single box. Beyond acting, she is a recording artist, songwriter, writer and director, and her own press materials also describe her work across producing and screenwriting.

I asked what she wishes people understood when they expect someone like her to choose one lane.

Photography by Reina Marin.

Her answer gave me the organizing idea I had been looking for throughout our conversation.

“There really is just an artist. That’s really what… it’s an urge to create. And that urge, you can give it whatever title you want. You can say that that’s an actor, you can say that that’s a painter or a chef… But at the end of the day or at the beginning of the day, I should say, it really is just this innate need to create.”

She believes that urge exists, to some extent, in nearly everyone.

As children, she pointed out, we paint pictures. We sing. We dance. We create before we have learned to ask whether we are any good at creating. Somewhere along the way, some people lose that freedom—sometimes because another person told them they were not good enough at the thing they enjoyed.

She rejects the premise that being good at something is what gives us permission to do it.

She paints constantly. She also readily admits that she does not think she is very good at it.

That might actually be part of the appeal.

“I almost love that I’m not very good at it, because it’s just a desire to create. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be about the finished product… I don’t think that you should think much about the finished product when you’re creating. I think it’s just the act of expressing. And translating the human experience to the best of someone’s ability.”

It is difficult not to see the philosophy reflected in her own career.

One medium can feed another. Acting can inform songwriting. Music can shape performance. Writing can become directing. Painting never has to become a profession at all to still be worth doing.

“You have to be bad at something before you’re good at something,” she told me. “You have to be a beginner before you’re a professional.”

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked her what she was most excited to show audiences next.

The answer was, fittingly, several things.

She told me she was preparing to make a thriller with three close friends, a project whose appeal seemed inseparable from the people making it alongside her. Music, too, is moving back toward the foreground.

She said Casalegno and Hiraga had repeatedly encouraged her to make an album after hearing unreleased songs she had written. She admitted that music had been sitting “on the back burner” for a while, but said she was putting together a team and was ready to start taking it more seriously. Writing and directing were possibilities too.

Yet even as the possibilities multiplied, the thing she seemed to be chasing remained remarkably consistent.

Photography by Paul Smith.

“The collaborative aspect of art is so intoxicating to me,” she told me. “I love feeling like I’m really connecting with people.”

By then, the question of which lane Tommi Rose belongs in seemed increasingly irrelevant.

Acting. Music. Writing. Directing. Painting. Perhaps something else entirely after that.

Our conversation began with two projects arriving almost on top of each other, but it ended somewhere much more fundamental: with an artist talking about why she needs to make things in the first place.

The destination, I got the sense, matters considerably less than continuing to follow that impulse.