Megan Park grew up without a television in her family home. It is an unlikely origin story for the actor-turned-filmmaker behind Sundance sensation My Old Ass and current YA Prime Video hit Sterling Point, but Park admits that while growing up in Lindsay, Ontario, the prospect of a career in Hollywood wasn’t on her bingo card.  

“I come from a small town in Canada,” Park says. “Nobody in my family was in any way connected to the industry. We are lovers of the arts, and we would see theater shows, but we didn’t have a TV in my house, so I really had no idea this world existed.”

Park now counts herself as one the few contemporary filmmakers who have been able to successfully navigate the transition from acting to filmmaking. After years of establishing herself in front of the camera with a starring role in ABC’s The Secret Life of the American Teenager, in which she starred alongside Shailene Woodley, she has now emerged as one of Hollywood’s most exciting writer-directors. 

Park has two films under her belt – The Fallout, a drama about the aftermath of a school shooting starring Jenna Ortega, and Aubrey Plaza comedy My Old Ass about a teenager who meets her 39-year-old self while on a mushroom trip – and now Sterling Point marks her first foray into the series world. She created and directed all eight episodes and also exec-produced and was co-showrunner on the series alongside Fake Empire’s Josh Schwarz and Stephanie Savage, the pair behind hit teen dramas The O.C. and Gossip Girl. 

Park also now counts LuckyChap Entertainment as a frequent collaborator. Margot Robbie’s company produced My Old Ass, Sterling Point and is behind Park’s upcoming third feature, romantic comedy Die Alive, starring Zoë Kravitz. That film, which Park wrote and direct from an original concept for Apple, is set to shoot later this year in New York and sees Park pivot from the YA genre, a space she admits she didn’t initially mean to dominate so well but has “been a bit of a happy accident.” 

“The Fallout was obviously going to be centered around young people and the aftermath of this school shooting,” Park says. “But My Old Ass, I was really writing it and thinking about it from ‘the old ass’ perspective.”

She continues: “It’s been a really fun and cool challenge to create really authentic and elevated content for young people because I feel like there should be more of it and it’s been a really exciting and fun challenge to try and give them something that feels like you’re not talking down to them.”

With Sterling Point, Park takes that sensibility to a larger scale. The eight-part YA series hit number 1 on Amazon Prime following its launch on the streamer on August 5. Set against the backdrop of a summer in Canada, the story centers on 17-year-old Annie Jacobson, played by Ella Rubin. Raised in New York City alongside her twin brother, Connor, and their loving adoptive father, Annie’s life changes when she inherits a mysterious grandfather’s island in Canada. There, she discovers new friendships, budding romances and long-buried family secrets, including the existence of a sister, Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle), who is her late adoptive mother’s biological daughter. 

Park’s own mother was adopted, which inspired Park to write the series. “Her parents had one biological child and couldn’t have any more,” she says. “She always felt very loved and never felt any desire to seek out her biological family.” 

Park’s father also had one biological sibling and one adopted sibling so the premise of a family with a mix of adoptive and biological children was “all very close within my family.”  

“My mom didn’t want to find out about her biological roots so I would never disrespect that, but I truly feel the same way she does – I don’t feel that desire,” Park says. “I thought there hadn’t been a story centered on family and adoption that showed adoption in that point of view, which is so valid.”

Park says she wanted to explore what happens when two young women who share a mother in different ways are forced to define their relationship for themselves.

“I really wanted the core of the story to be about family and sisterhood,” she says. “They both have the same mom in a different way, and they are sisters but how are they going to find their version of family and their version of sisterhood?”

Schwartz and Savage were the only team Park and LuckyChap sent the script to. Their response was immediate, and their expertise became an accelerated education for Park, who had never worked in a writers’ room.

“They really taught me everything about structure and what those things are that you need and then they helped me figure out what the tone was and how to tell these stories,” she says. “They were so pivotal to writing these episodes and building out this amazing group of people and they were so wonderful at giving me the creative space so that I could focus on what I needed to do to direct the episodes.”

First steps

Growing up in a small town some 80 miles north of Toronto, Park became interested in acting in high school and found opportunities on productions shooting locally. “I felt like I found my people with acting and I got some success with it,” she says. “They film a lot of movies in Toronto and they’re always looking to cast local people for smaller parts so I kind of got my feet wet doing that. When I graduated high school, I begged my parents to let me defer university for a year so I could try acting.” 

Her first major audition was for The Secret Life of the American Teenager, which premiered on ABC in 2008 and ran for five seasons. She ended up getting the role of Grace Bowman, a conservative Christian cheerleader navigating romance and faith. 

“That show changed my life and opened up so many doors for me,” Park says. “It was a nonstop job and I was loving it. I met some of my best friends doing that show – it felt like college to me.”

However, something was missing for Park. “I didn’t find myself,” she admits. “I would watch Shailene and she was so passionate about scripts that she would get and these roles and I could see something in her that I didn’t feel about acting myself.”

Park continued acting, appearing in projects including Young Sheldon, Jane the Virgin and Entourage. But it was her experience making The F Word with Daniel Radcliffe, Zoe Kazan, Adam Driver and Mackenzie Davis that changed the direction of her career. When she spoke to Kazan, who was also writing and directing at the point, about an idea she had for a show, Kazan encouraged Park to try putting one of her own ideas on paper.

“To me, she had just, like, hung the moon,” Park says. “I thought, ‘Wait, she thinks I could write? That’s so insane to me.’”

Park opened her laptop and started writing. “When I started writing it down, it was like love at first sight,” she says. “It was instantaneous and I just realized that this was what I had wanted to do.”

The first script became a dark comedy pilot that was bought by CBS but ultimately did not make it to series. Park nonetheless considers the experience a masterclass. She soon began directing campaigns and music videos, including work for Billie Eilish, Gucci Mane, Alina Baraz and Blackbear. In 2017, Park directed Lucy in My Eyes, which premiered at the Austin Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Short. Soon afterward, she wrote The Fallout in just two weeks.

LuckyChap and Indian Paintbursh boarded her second feature, My Old Ass, which stars Plaza and Maisy Stella. The film opened to rave reviews in Sundance and was quickly scooped up by Amazon in a competitive bidding situation. 

Directing style & beyond YA

Park says her greatest strength on set is her ability to communicate with actors, and her time in front of the camera means she can “quickly figure out what actors need from me and what they don’t need from me.” 

“I was so scared to direct because I thought you had to be such a cinephile,” she says. “Growing up without a TV, I’m like decades behind on the classics. I don’t know camera lenses and although I feel very comfortable on set, I did think you had to go to film school to be a director. But now my whole philosophy with the set is that ‘I don’t know everything and I don’t need to know everything. That’s why you hire incredible DoPs and you hire people who are great at what they do.”

Park is now gearing up to direct Die Alive in New York with Kravitz, which is shooting in New York later this year.  “We’re comping it – which seems really crazy – as Stepmom meets Big Daddy. Zoë gets to be really funny in it.”

Park says it’s another “personal” story for her that explores parenthood, ageing parents, love and loss – themes that have become increasingly relevant to her own life. “It’s really a story that feels closest to where I am in my life so far,” she says. “It feels more personal in a way that I’m excited but also nervous about. Hopefully it’s something that makes people laugh really hard, and also cry, if we can get it right.”

She adds: “I keep joking that ‘heartfelt’ is not a cool Hollywood word to use in meetings. But I think when you try to weave it in amongst humor, or heavy subject matter, that’s where the magic happens.”

By the end of our call, Michael Sheen is animatedly sharing stories of his family’s (potential) UFO sightings in south Wales.

He was 12 or 13 when he was walking home from school in Port Talbot. Coming around the side of a nearby mountain was what Sheen describes as “a formation of lights.” They went out toward the sea, hovered there, and vanished. “I was looking at this and I thought, ‘I need to go in and tell the rest of my family,’” the star recalls. “But then I thought that if I go in, I might miss it. So I just stood and watched. I couldn’t believe what I’d seen,” he continues, “I can’t explain it, and I’m not saying that they were UFOs, but I don’t know what the hell they were.”

Sheen, a prolific actor whose credits include Twilight, Masters of Sex and Good Omens, has hopped on Zoom to discuss his latest Welsh project, Out There, a sci-fi caper from debut filmmaker Simon Ryninks that tackles two seemingly disparate themes: grief and aliens. Backdropped by the nostalgia-packed optimism of 1999, it earns its world premiere in competition at Edinburgh Film Festival on Friday, with a star-studded ensemble that includes Aneurin Barnard (Dunkirk), Iwan Rheon (Game of Thrones) and newcomer Nerys Amber Stocks.

Stocks plays a young teen named Maz, an amateur astronomer still grieving the disappearance of her scientist father (Rheon). She is convinced she has spotted something suspicious floating above her sleepy Welsh hometown and recruits the support of her best mate Elis (Tom Moya), UFO-obsessed conspiracy theorist Bryn (Barnard), and local psychic Shifty Gruff (Sheen) to uncover the truth — one far more complex than they might have anticipated.

For Ryninks, this is as personal a story as you can get. “The idea came about from my mum’s passing and knowing that I wanted to write something about grief,” the British filmmaker, who grew up in both Aberystwyth and London, tells THR. “I was returning to west Wales a lot and I feel very connected to her being here. I knew I wanted to do it in a funny, gentle way. Then at a certain point, I discovered the Welsh history with UFO sightings.”

It turns out that Wales has a particularly rich history in the Unidentified Flying Objects department. In the 1970s, there was a spate of sightings and cover-up rumors from across the north of the country all the way to Broad Haven on the west coast. Happening upon this information, for first-time feature filmmaker Ryninks (who is also doing a master’s in folklore), felt like fate. “To use UFOs as this metaphor for searching for something — for closures or answers that are out of reach or elusive in some way,” he says, “I could really relate to that hunt for meaning.”

Sheen, meanwhile, is admittedly always very interested to hear about emerging Welsh voices. He has long been a champion of the arts in his native Wales, personally funding (and becoming artistic director of) the newly named Welsh National Theatre. As a super-fan of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Ryninks and Out There were a no-brainer. “Reading this script and seeing [this] journey for Maz, a 16-year-old who starts to [use] the stars and spaceships to reconnect with her father… That journey through grief, but in a very feel-good, heart-warming, coming-of-age story, I thought the combination of those elements and the weird characters she comes across — including the one I play myself — I just love the quirkiness of that,” Sheen says. “[Using] the sci-fi elements as a way to explore things that are much closer to home.”

For Sheen, it was also an opportunity to honor his late father, a stalwart of the Port Talbot community, who died last year aged 85. “The town has a history with the steelworks and real challenges of deprivation,” he adds, “but to look to the skies and to believe there’s something up there is a very powerful metaphor for a lot of things.” Meyrick Sheen was photographed by Roo Lewis in 2023, who set out to capture the town as part of a project for the Port Talbot UFO Investigation Club. “I was very moved by seeing the portrait of my father in that,” says the younger Sheen, “so this script really pushed buttons for me.”

Ryninks was delighted to have enticed such a high calibre of Welsh talent aboard this small indie. He enlisted the help of a friend, English actor Johnny Flynn, who knew Rheon. Rheon was pulled toward the role of Maz’s father, Lew, “as an exciting opportunity to play something a bit different than he’d played before.” For the kooky, mischievous and not-often-sober Shifty Gruff, Sheen was always the number one choice. “He’s got this quality about him, which is both really lovable and funny,” begins the director, “but then you’ve seen him play characters where he’s a bit edgy as well, where you’re not sure if you can really trust this guy. I liked that contrast for Shifty. So I wrote it with Michael in mind, then basically just spent a year hoping and praying he would say yes, like a UFO believer. I just had faith that he was out there, waiting for contact.”

Sheen, an established star with the kind of career freedom you achieve only after decades of acclaim, was up for anything. “I love those shops you go into with all the crystals and the weird UFO-ology books,” he says about Shifty’s mystic store. “I could spend hours in there, knowing full well that it’s all nonsense. But he’s into all that, and also the local drug dealer — all organic, obviously — and I love the combination of him being really dodgy, but [there is] also something really hopeful in him as well. There’s an innocence and naivety to him. [But] you know you’d find him in your living room at a party and think, ‘What are you doing here?’ I’ve definitely met a few Shifty Gruffs in my time.”

These characters had already been living in Ryninks’ mind for five years — it’s been seven since he first decided to make Out There — but he’s still pinching himself that he was able to get such established Welsh talent to take them on. “And Nerys and Tom,” he adds, “who are brilliant up-and-coming, future stars.” He considers some of the other icons he would love to tempt back into Welsh indie cinema: Matthew Rhys, Alexandra Roach, Callum Scott Howells, Morfydd Clark, Taron Egerton and Luke Evans all come up.

Sheen tells THR that if there’s any way he can use his platform to promote and support Welsh directors and writers, he will: “Because they’re the ones who are leading the way for us.” Whether it’s through the Welsh National Theatre (WNT) or Sheen’s production company RedSeam, he is keen to reverse years of industry-wide neglect. “We’ve just got to keep pushing, because for a long time if you had a Welsh project, the people with power would say, ‘Does it have to be in Wales? Could it be set somewhere else?’”

The 57-year-old adds: “And if there was a Welsh leading part, then oftentimes it would go to someone not from Wales. And of course, I’ve played characters from outside of Wales, and that’s fair enough. But when it’s in the context and history of being overlooked, being marginalized, and not getting the chance, I think it’s important to be aware of that.”

Sheen is buoyed by the work done in recent years, with big Hollywood movies shooting in the region and production companies such as Bad Wolf setting up camp there. All the more reason, he thinks, to get Wales on the map. “We’ve got the infrastructure and the locations and the actors — a really rich wealth of stories and history that’s untapped… A lot of that depends on collaboration and people making those connections,” he says about putting his name to projects. “It’s Matthew Rhys going, ‘Yeah, I’ll come down and do a one-man show about Richard Burton to raise funds,’” Sheen beams about Rhys’ 2025 stint in Playing Burton at the WNT.

Out There is a testament to the work being done behind the scenes, from emerging and established voices united by a passion for Welsh storytelling. Ahead of its Edinburgh premiere, Ryninks is feeling very grateful — and reflective. “There’s something a bit bittersweet about releasing something that has been yours and yours alone,” he says. “Obviously, lots of people worked on it and did a great job, but it’s been your thing for so long, and then you’re not in control of any aspect of it anymore — how it’s received, how people experience it.” Even still, the filmmaker is excited to let Edinburgh audiences begin probing this surprisingly affecting piece on loss and extraterrestrial life. He and Sheen want viewers to know: They come in peace.

The 2026 Edinburgh International Film Festival runs Aug. 13-19.