Who Is Sasha Pieterse? Catch Up With the Newly Minted ‘Coin Heist’ Actress

At the precious young age of 9, Sasha Pieterse got her first big film role in director Robert Rodriguez’s ambitious kid-superheroes movie. The film tried to ignite the 3-D film craze a good four years before Avatar happened, and was also about four years early on Taylor Lautner before Twilight. The film itself didn’t light the world on fire, despite Sasha’s supporting role as the Ice Princess, whose powers of freezing end up saving the day.

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If you somehow forgot the plot of Good Luck Chuck, Dane Cook plays the title character, who is cursed to have the women he has sex with meet the man of their dreams immediately after their trysts. But who would place such a curse? Well, if you answered “the goth girl he played spin-the-bottle with in 6th grade,” you’re right! Sasha played said goth girl, as you might imagine, for one brief but very consequential scene.

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Pieterse’s role as Amanda Strazzulla on Heroes began on the show’s webisodes, though she eventually crossed over to the main stage. Her powers were spontaneous combustion and pyrokenisis, but she never really got the opportunity to break out before the series ended.

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This is the big one. Initially, you wouldn’t think that the role of Alison DeLaurentiis on Pretty Little Liars would be all that covetable. Not when you know that the whole point of PLL is that Alison is dead and her friends are trying to solve her murder. But as the years went on, Alison’s presence in flashbacks loomed larger and larger; and then she went from “dead” to “mostly dead” to “maybe dead” to “alive, baby!” These last few seasons have been Alison-heavy, though, and Pieterse has really stepped up to the plate, emerging now as the series nears an end as the best bet to break out into post-Freeform stardom.

This felt like a logical pivot off of Pretty Little Liars, to take a role as a high-school queen bee in director Darren Stein’s movie about high school gay boys and the popular girls who want to wield them as accessories. But to the film — and Pieterse’s — great credit, her character (named Fawcett, because who are we if we can’t make multi-layered meta jokes for character names) had hidden depths and unexpected complexities.

Getting a bit part in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie is not like getting a bit part in any other movie. In this case, Pieterse got to play Japonica Fenway, a beautiful young woman who got caught up in drugs and a lawyer played by Martin Short. Her scenes were some of the more unhinged and hilarious in the film, and certainly are among the more memorable moments in Anderson’s bizarre opus.