Bloody Tennis Interview: Sandra | Fantastic Fest 2026
There is plenty about Bloody Tennis designed to push reality toward the extreme, but Sandra Guldberg Kampp understood early that her way into the film couldn’t be through its excess. It had to be through Sophie.
Speaking with Horror Movies Uncut during Fantastic Fest 2026, Kampp discussed finding the humanity inside the film’s heightened world, physically preparing to portray an elite tennis player and navigating a character whose desire to belong repeatedly collides with her instinct for self-preservation.
For Kampp, Sophie’s uncertainty was immediately recognizable.
“I think I could see a lot of myself in her as well,” Kampp told HMU. “It’s that feeling that you’re chasing something that you really want to do, but you’re kind of there, but you’re not really there.”
Sophie enters an elite environment without necessarily feeling like she belongs there. She has earned the opportunity to attend the academy, but she isn’t immediately established as its best player or comfortably accepted as part of its inner circle. That creates an insecurity beneath her ambition — a persistent question of whether she is actually good enough to occupy the space she has fought to enter.
“She’s kind of the outsider,” Kampp said. “She doesn’t get in from the beginning. She feels a bit left out.”
That outsider perspective becomes particularly valuable once Bloody Tennis begins escalating beyond the recognizable pressures of competitive athletics. While increasingly extreme circumstances surround Sophie, her responses remain rooted in something much more familiar: she still wants to belong.
“There are a lot of insecurities regarding, like, ‘Am I good enough for this?’ But still a lot of persistence,” Kampp said.
It was that combination that helped anchor her performance. The film may operate in a heightened reality, but Sophie isn’t initially approaching that world as though she already understands its rules. Kampp saw her as someone attempting to survive an unfamiliar environment while still pursuing the thing that brought her there in the first place.
The character’s romantic relationship further complicates that struggle. In an environment where vulnerability is increasingly difficult, the relationship provides Sophie with something she cannot easily find elsewhere.
“She wants to feel safe, and she wants to feel free in some aspect of this crazy world that she just entered,” Kampp explained.
That relationship gives Sophie a space to be vulnerable when nearly every other part of her life demands something different from her. As Kampp noted, Sophie doesn’t even have the normal escape of simply calling home and retreating into the security of family. She has to adapt.
Before Bloody Tennis, however, Kampp wasn’t deeply immersed in tennis herself.
“I wasn’t before,” she said when asked whether she followed the sport. “I definitely got more into it after knowing I was gonna play this part.”
Preparing for the role gave her a new appreciation for the athletes behind the sport, particularly the psychological demands placed on players operating at an elite level.
“There are some incredibly talented and cool athletes out there,” she said, adding that preparation pulled her into understanding “their mental toughness basically in this game.”
Kampp’s own athletic background began with gymnastics as a child. Although a fall eventually left her frightened enough to move away from the sport, she believes that early physical foundation remained useful.
“It does kind of set you up when you’re very physical as a child,” she said.
For Bloody Tennis, the challenge wasn’t simply learning to hit a tennis ball. Kampp had to convince audiences that Sophie had spent years developing the body and instincts of a serious player.
She had approximately two months of intermittent tennis training before production and supplemented those sessions by watching the sport extensively. Rather than expecting to develop years of technical ability in a matter of weeks, she concentrated on understanding how a tennis player moves.
“I was trying to understand the physicality more than being able to play the actual sport,” Kampp said. “That’s a different game in itself.”
That distinction shaped her preparation. The goal was not to become an elite tennis player before cameras rolled. It was to portray one convincingly enough that Sophie’s history as an athlete felt embedded in the performance.
Kampp responded by throwing herself into strength and conditioning.
“I worked out a lot,” she said. “I was probably the fittest I’ve ever been going into this film.”
For Kampp, the physical work also became another route into Sophie’s mentality. If she couldn’t reproduce the complete technical skill set of someone who had played tennis for years, she could make sure her conditioning reflected the discipline that such a person would have developed.
“I felt like I could at least try to show up as someone who looked very fit and would have trained a lot, like probably Sophie would have done in the past as well,” she explained. “Especially if you’re lacking the skill set, you can at least compensate in other aspects.”
That meant extensive strength training and approaching the preparation with the same discipline she imagined Sophie would bring to her own athletic career.
One unexpected element of the performance was Sophie’s American identity. Kampp is not American, and the character’s connection to Detroit created an additional challenge.
The actress said she initially pushed against explicitly identifying Sophie’s hometown because she knew how difficult it would be to completely absorb a highly specific American dialect within the production’s preparation window.
“I was actually really fighting for us not to mention at all where she’s from, because I’m obviously not American,” Kampp said.
She worked with a dialect coach but remained conscious of not forcing an accent she didn’t feel she could fully internalize in the available time. The Detroit reference ultimately remained in the finished film, making the smaller behavioral details surrounding Sophie even more important to the performance.
Kampp’s work stood out during HMU’s Fantastic Fest coverage precisely because Sophie rarely feels swallowed by the heightened movie developing around her. She remains ambitious, insecure, physically capable and vulnerable — sometimes all at once.
That humanity also appears to be what Kampp hopes to carry into whatever comes next.
Asked what kinds of opportunities she would like an unusual project such as Bloody Tennis to open for her, Kampp didn’t identify a single trajectory.
“I would love to play a drug addict one time,” she said. “I would love to play just someone’s daughter in something.”
The contrast is intentional. After inhabiting a character inside a film as heightened as Bloody Tennis, Kampp isn’t looking to repeat the same experience indefinitely.
“I’m very open to a lot of things,” she said. “As long as I continue to do something different, I would be very, very happy.”
If Bloody Tennis demonstrates anything about Kampp, it is that range may be exactly where the opportunity lies. Sophie exists inside an outrageous world, but Kampp doesn’t play the outrageousness. She plays the athlete who worked to get there, the outsider who still wants inside and the young woman searching for someplace safe enough to remain herself.
That grounded approach gives Bloody Tennis something particularly valuable when everything around Sophie begins going off the rails: someone recognizably human standing in the middle of it.
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