Suzanna Son Is in a State of Perpetual Motion
Jacket, bodysuit, lavaliere, pumps, Louis Vuitton. Earrings, watch, rings, Tiffany & Co.
On St. Patrick’s Day, Suzanna Son hops on a video call from the back seat of a moving car. She has just touched down in Chicago, where she’s filming a top-secret role in Season 3 of Ryan Murphy’s Monster, which centers on the notorious Wisconsin killer Ed Gein. “Have you ever done an interview on the move like this?” she asks with a giggle.
An interview on the go is fitting for Son, who seems to be in a state of perpetual motion. Her breakout role came three and a half years ago, when she played Strawberry, a 17-year-old doughnut shop worker in the Sean Baker film Red Rocket. (Baker discovered Son, who grew up in Washington state, after running into her outside of the ArcLight theater in Los Angeles.) Next came a role in HBO’s The Idol, playing Chloe, a teenage cult member and former heroin addict. After that, Son played a high schooler named Megan in Fear Street: Prom Queen, a Netflix-backed slasher directed by Matt Palmer and based on the novel of the same name in R. L. Stine’s book series.
Jacket, shirt, cardigan, skirt, socks, Miu Miu. Earrings, ring, Shay Jewelry.
To get into the headspace of each new character she inhabits, Son assigns them a personal scent. Prom Queen’s Megan, whom she describes as a stoner who’s always game to lend you a lighter, smells like weed and vanilla body spray, she says—Twilight Woods by Bath and Body Works, specifically. “She’s very Joan Jett,” she says. “I love her—sometimes I spray that cheap vanilla body spray and smoke a joint to just be reminded of her energy.”
To tap into her role on Monster, she wears a perfume that has notes of gasoline, saffron, and mandarin. She says Megan is her favorite character to date, so much so that she’s been wearing the character’s perfume—Dark Dreams by Ephemeral Dyadic—on her own time, too.
Jacket, bodysuit, lavaliere, pumps, Louis Vuitton. Earrings, watch, rings, Tiffany & Co.
With both Fear Street and Monster, Son is trying on a new personal scent as well: horror. “I like playing characters who react the way a normal person might react to horror,” Son says. She’s a fan of the genre: “They feel like dreams I had as a child,” she adds. “I used to have terrible nightmares, and nothing really reminds me of those nightmares other than a very esoteric horror movie.” Now Son finds herself down the rabbit hole, creating horror that feeds other people’s nightmares. During the first day of shooting Fear Street, Son came face-to-face with one of her own fears: screaming in public. (She calls the experience shooting the film “Matt Palmer’s boot camp.”)
“I like playing characters who react the way a normal person might react to horror.”
Fear Street is her first project without a musical element. Son calls music her first love, and her previous roles in The Idol and Red Rocket showcase her vocal range—anyone who’s seen the latter likely has Son’s haunting performance of “Bye Bye Bye” by NSYNC (slow, longing, a bit irreverent) burned in their frontal cortex.
Son isn’t turning her back on music—in fact, she’s “very close” to releasing five or six songs of her own. “I want to start singing live this year,” she says. But don’t expect to see her headlining Lollapalooza anytime soon: “It won’t be crazy big. Just $30 tickets, little shows here and there...I want to start small and have my audience grow with me.” When she’s writing songs, she weaves the roles she’s played into her lyrics. On her upcoming release, she says some songs are from her perspective, and some are filtered through her characters.
Jacket, shirt, cardigan, skirt, socks, Miu Miu. Earrings, ring, Shay Jewelry.
Clearly, her work life won’t be slowing down anytime soon, but IRL, Son is laid-back, like California personified. She likes to longboard; she cooks a lot; she’s into knolling (she recommended I check out the Reddit community r/knolling, where people painstakingly arrange objects into either parallel lines or right angles). This year, she’s trying to go out more.
Toward the end of the call, I tell Son I’m curious—if she were to play herself in a movie, what perfume would she choose? After some careful consideration, she selects Escentric’s Molecule 01, a fragrance with just one note—Iso E Super, which is slightly woodsy, a little ambery, and a touch acidic. “Just one ingredient,” she says, “that somehow manages to feel like a whole world.”
Hair by Sami Knight for Rehab; makeup by Alexandra French at Forward Artists; manicure by Jolene Brodeur at The Wall Group; produced by Anthony Federici at Petty Cash Production; photographed at Malibu Creek Ranch.
A version of this story appears in the Summer 2025 issue of ELLE.
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