Taken from the spring/summer issue of Dazed:

What if your mum became your dad? “It’s interesting to think about how you would take it personally,” ponders first-time actress Tilda Cobham-Hervey, the teen star of Sophie Hyde’s 52 Tuesdays, a Sundance favourite about how a family deals with a mother’s decision to gender-swap. As the title implies, it was shot over 52 consecutive Tuesdays. “We’d only get the script the week before,” she says. “So we never knew what was going to happen to us next. It was like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, or like being in a giant Sims game.”

The unpredictable nature of the project led to some difficulties on set. “When they tried to get me to play tennis, I got there and was like, ‘No, I can’t play tennis,’” she smirks. “‘I’m really bad at this stuff.’” At rehearsals the crew had to get in a second camera and someone throwing balls at her from the other side of the court to make it look like she knew what she was doing. “They were like, ‘Wow. You really can’t play tennis!’”

How did she prep for the onscreen sexploration? “Awkward scenes always seem more awkward than they are, but doing them is kind of scary,” the 19-year-old says. “The first two lines in the film are ‘Fuck!’ and at 16 I just got the giggles and turned bright red whenever I had to say it. That was just not me and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, how am I going to do this without laughing?’ All the sexual content ended up being the easiest bits because it was all closed-set. We were all comfortable by that point.”