Let me introduce you to a rising star, an amazing actress, and a woman who will works wonders in the future. I’m talking about Bibi Lucille, and yes, she was declared all of those things as of recently. She won the Woman of the Future Award, The Rising Star Award of Starnow, and Best Actress Award at the Island of Horror Film Festival. That’s pretty interesting, like many of her roles, including Trust on Amazon Prime, Purgatory on Apple TV, and This Was a Man on West End. And speaking of roles, Bibi has gotten a rather fantastic role in aseries called I Am Sophie. It tells a story in a horror fiction genre as a young influencer named Sophie Young who vlogs about her life. Sophie also deals with finding her true self and realizing how she’s more than just the daughter of some millionaire. Then slowly over episodes, Bibi’s character Lara comes in and starts fitting into her videos in weird horror-esque ways. People were genuninely commenting if anyone saw that weird glitch or that person pop up in the background.
It was a bit out of place for me to be doing this interview given our content on this site, but Bibi did get to work with Canadian actor Danny Mahoney and the series I Am Sophie has been making its rounds in Canada, so I went right ahead to learn more about this series, and Alternate Reality Gaming, or ARG in general. Prepare yourself for quite an episode, or several on this journey with me.
HNMAG: So, it’s my understanding you worked with Danny Mahoney in Purgatory. Did you two connect well with each other?
Bibi Lucille: Oh, yeah. He was my work husband on that set. He’s just lovely and I think he got nominated for supporting actor at the Indie Series Awards, which was in LA. He was just amazing, got into the character and was also such a laugh as well. We had a lot of fun together. He’s super busy, so we see each other once a blue moon now.
HNMAG: And was there any Canadian productions or productions in Canada you were on?
Bibi Lucille: No, I think there have been distributions in Canada but I’m dying to get Canadian Visa so I can go and work out there. I feel like Canadians are the perfect mesh of British and American. You guys have the British sense of humour but the American positivity, which is like my perfect kind of person.
HNMAG: So you hope to be in a project shot in Canada soon?
Bibi Lucille: Yeah, I want to try my hand in Vancouver or something, I need to come visit.
HNMAG: Let’s get into the series, I Am Sophie. How is ARG blurring the line between fiction and reality?
Bibi Lucille: I’ve never heard of an ARG before I am Sophie, and when the creator Tom first approached me 5 years ago he started explaining the concept. He works primarily at Youtube so he was talking about the algorithm and how sometimes it can be unfair to people. All he wanted to do was create a series that looked like some real vlogs happening from a real woman called Sophie, who seems to be like this millionaire’s daughter. Like those blogs of really rich kids where they’re 20 and blowing their cash and dad’s cash. People really bought into it, they believed that this Sophie character was a true person. The way he kind of blended this very real looking vlog, and then fiction horror stuff coming in, I thought it was really clever.
HNMAG: And how has the viewership for that been? Have you noticed a significant percentage for Canadians?
Bibi Lucille: A Canadian Reviewer a few years ago got really involved with it and he ended up doing Q&A with the cast, and then I think it reached quite a lot of Canadian audience. I think it reached kind of internationally, because I suppose YouTube is just kind of a platform for everyone.
HNMAG: Just how are ARG designed to present the illusion of reality?
Bibi Lucille: I think the way it did that was through the vlogs in terms of looking really real. Especially like script and the creator rented out this set. It’s not a real private jet, but they have film sets that looks like half of a jet that they made up for film. He was renting out stuff like that, so it looked like a genuine vlog of this rich girl in a private jet. We all had a trip to Greece years ago during some of the first episodes, and made it look like she was in this mansion, going on boat rides and everything. That’s kind of how we created the illusion for that.
HNMAG: Let’s talk about your character and how she helps out the story to go further.
Bibi Lucille: Lara at first is kind of introduced in a way that she’s this crazy fan of all of Sophie’s vlogs. Some of her webcam footage starts leaking into the vlogs, and so Sophie decides to go to Lara’s house and figure out what’s going on, making a cute little vlog about meeting a fan. Lara ends up losing it a bit, and she starts screaming at Sophie and really showing her weird obsession. Weird sounds start happening around the house as well. Then as that goes on, Lara starts to imitate Sophie, it’s almost as if she hacked into her YouTube.
Then someone we don’t know starts watching Lara’s origin story, that’s when he discovers her vlogs from years ago, and discovers her gameplays. A lot of people liked when she was gentle and even Bibi admitted she loved the more kinder version of Lara even during filming.
HNMAG: And what about Sophie finding her true self outside of being a millionaire daughter. Is it a difficult task for her?
Bibi Lucille: Hmm, I don’t think we know if she ever finds her true self. Because she’s so heavily the stereotype of this character at the beginning. The second she starts getting taken over by Lara, we don’t really see the kind of character development in that respect of her. Having this outside view of herself, and being objectifying of herself, she’s kind of just genuinely freaked out by everything and then is just ready to disappear. That’s what happens with Sophie, but it’d be interesting to see more of that and I think more of that will be in the next few episodes.
HNMAG: How are alternate reality games incorporating different forms of media into a narrative that’s supposedly in real life?
Bibi Lucille: I suppose there was fiction and film and then, a genre called unfiction, which I didn’t know was a thing until the web series. Then there was the medium of gameplays and doing video games and filtering that into the narrative. That was really interesting, it kind of reminded me of Bandersnatch in Black Mirror where you have to click on the different choices and it takes you in a different direction. Because the audience were so involved in each episode and you’ve got the comments section where people can talk about their theories, but you don’t really get that kind of interactiveness with a film series or a streaming platform. Like doing live theatre, but online. That’s what he was doing, online theatre, video games, and then fiction/unfiction narratives. There were lots of different genres going into it.
HNMAG: And why are they made up of such cryptic messages and puzzles, scattered across the Internet with some elements of the physical world?
Bibi Lucille: Yeah, that was one of the most exciting parts, I think. It does kind of tie in to the whole video game immersive aspect of it. Because you do feel like you’re playing a game, you’re collecting clues, walking around on different things. You’re scrolling on the reddit, the discord, and also social medias that the creator opened up. Like TikTok, Instagram, and pulling different clues from that, plus the YouTube. It really does feel like you’re doing a puzzle online and it’s just really immersive. I would love to see more of that in general online, and in more of the mainstream genre because it seems like a very close tight-knit people enjoy it and kind of know about it in a weird way.
HNMAG: Do you have a favourite Alternate Reality Game yourself?
Bibi Lucille: I don’t, I’ve not really dived into aside from I am Sophie, becuase I didn’t really know where to start. It also is kind of hard to find them unless you dig around on Reddit. There was one a few years ago, during COVID and I think it was on TikTok called The Backrooms. It’s these weird empty spaces that look like a bad dream, they feel weirdly familiar. Like you’ve seen them in a dream, and it was an ARG with the backrooms plus this animated character and you wake up in this new backroom in every video. You could comment and say what you wanted to see next. That was something I really enjoyed.
I Am Sophie manages to give someone an unsettling feeling every episode given its genre in horror. Bibi admits she’s a coward and gets freaked out easily from the content even if she’s in it. Go on ahead, check it out now, let’s increase the Canadian demographic some more.