Johnny Sequoyah’s primal instincts

Johnny Sequoyah logs onto our Zoom call while sinking into a massive, brown velvet sofa in her Los Angeles bedroom. Wearing a pair of chic, chunky, tortoiseshell specs, the actor is both effortlessly cool and incredibly friendly, with a remarkable ability to put a positive spin on anything. Telling me about her cosy morning in, she slyly mentions her hangover and points to her castmate, Gia Hunter, who’s still asleep on the bed behind her. “She was having a slumber party with me last night,” she giggles. The two are practically inseparable, Sequoyah tells me, after spending months on set playing siblings. And that is why she and her castmate turned “little sister” were out until 4am celebrating the premiere of their most recent project, Primate. Despite the headache and the lack of sleep, the twenty-three-year-old actor is prompt and collected, putting her best foot forward to seize the day. It’s concrete proof: hot girls have hangovers, too. 

Primate, Johannes Roberts’ latest film, follows Lucy [Sequoyah] as she returns home from university to her family and pet chimpanzee, Ben [Miguel Hernando Torres Umba]. But, when a rabid mongoose bites the chimp, she and her friends must navigate a game of cat and mouse in order to escape the once beloved pet. To prepare for the role, Sequoyah spent months with her nose buried in National Geographic articles and primatologist Jane Goodall’s books to understand why humans would actually want to interact with a chimp; before discovering how it can all go wrong through documentaries like Chimp Crazy. “So, are you an animal person?” I ask. “I’m a big animal person,” Sequoyah reassures me. “I think it actually helped me with my character because my entry point was empathy for my animal, the thing I love most. It turning against you is quite a scary idea.” 

While the actor (understandably) does not condone chimpanzees as pets, Sequoyah grew up riding horses in Idaho and has two childhood dogs that she lovingly refers to as her “emotional anchors”. Bouncing between Boise and Los Angeles for over a decade, she spent much of it as a child actor in projects like Believe and Among Ravens. The result of being on the road, and away from constants like pets, is not lost on Sequoyah; she knows how much it can change a person. “You always feel like you’re different from people your own age,” she tells me. “You’re forced to grow up quicker than everyone else.” While the actor wouldn’t exactly call herself an outsider, she’s convinced that her experience lent to her being typecast in black sheep roles such as Audrey in Dexter: New Blood. 

“Rejection is protection.”

Sequoyah isn’t mad about being typecast, though. There’s a worse alternative. “What’s one thing you wish people knew about you?” I ask. “Just how many ‘no’s it took for me to be here on this phone call,” she replies humbly. “I’m just really proud of myself for not giving up and persevering, even though really challenging things happened in my career.” After dedicating herself to acting since the age of eight, the industry has given her plenty in return. “It’s given me really thick skin,” she says earnestly. “I feel like I finally can handle rejection.” As a teenager,  Sequoyah was re-cast from two television series, but instead of letting this get her down, she made these unexpected changes work for her. “Rejection is protection,” she tells me, before adding that having a support system is everything. “It can feel like you’re in the trenches alone, but you’re not,” the actor says. “I don’t think I would be who I am today if I didn’t have the parents that I have, because they always believed in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself.” 

When Sequoyah finally landed her role in Primate, Roberts had envisioned her character as a nerd with glasses; the inverse of her usual typecast issue. “He said I came in[to the audition room] and just brought something different to the character that wasn’t what he had imagined, but it worked,” she says. Instead of looking elsewhere, the script made room for what Sequoyah brought to the character. In turn, she gained as many skills as possible to better fit the role. Besides the extensive knowledge of chimpanzees, she also learnt American Sign Language. I ask Sequoyah if she’s still able to sign now that the movie has wrapped. She modestly claims that she’s not fluent, but still signs with her castmate Troy Kotsur, and uses it from time to time when the need arises. “I was in a Target last week,” she says, “and I asked one of the women working there, ‘Hey, do you mind showing me where this is?’ She said, ‘I’m deaf’, and so I got to sign and ask her, ‘Do you mind helping me?’ It was just so cool.”

 “It can feel like you’re in the trenches alone, but you’re not.”

Sequoyah also added stuntwork to her list of new skills. Brimming with both pride and gratitude for the practical effects team, she recalls training for months to handle being battered and bruised by a chimp. Sequoyah recalls how satisfying it was to see Primate in the cinema after enduring those scenes. “The most challenging part of stunts is allowing your mind to turn off from trying to protect you from dying,” she says. The actor describes being clobbered by a chimp as “claustrophobic” and thanks Epsom bath salt for getting her through it. “You can come out of these scenes uncontrollably shaking because your body just doesn’t know [you’re not in danger],” she adds. 

Physicality covered, I want to understand how Sequoyah learned to act opposite, what she describes as, a “chimp suit” for hours on end. “It’s not entirely difficult when it looks so realistic,” she says. Umba’s Ben costume included not only the suit, but various masks, animatronics and puppets, all run by a team of over fifty practical effects specialists. However, solidifying her on-screen performance went far beyond the practical effects. “[Umba] and I got to sit down and create a backstory for how Lucy would have grown up, and little nuances that we wanted to bring into the movie,” she reveals, “just to have those connections between our characters; to find different levels of emotion.” 

As our conversation wraps up, talk turns to another animal entirely: the horse or, more specifically, the Year of the Horse. Being born in 2002, it’s a return to Sequoyah’s own zodiac sign and the actor is rightfully manifesting good luck and fortune for 2026. And already, it is promising to be an abundant year for Sequoyah as she looks forward to projects behind and in front of the camera. Her ultimate goal, however, is simple. “I just hope that I get to continue to learn and grow, and challenge myself as an actor,” she concludes. “That would be my dream.”