Imogen Poots on Lessons Learned Making Cameron Crowe's 'Roadies' That Improved Her Experience on 'Outer Range' (2025)

With Outer Range’s eight-episode run underway over on Prime Video, Imogen Poots took the time to join us for an episode of Collider Ladies Night to revisit her journey from her earliest credits to joining the cast of Amazon’s supernatural Western.

Outer Range puts the spotlight on Josh Brolin’s Royal, the head of the Abbott family who’s doing everything he can to keep their ranch up and running. Royal’s already got quite a bit to sort through when the show opens, but things get increasingly complicated when he gives a backpacker (Poots) the OK to camp on his property and then even more so when he discovers an enormous, inexplicable hole on his land.

As always on Collider Ladies Night, we made our way through as much of Poots’ filmography as possible in an effort to pinpoint the steps needed to reach her latest release, Outer Range. Many lessons were learned along the way, but some of the projects that made the biggest impression were the ones that helped her figure out the types of stories she wanted most wanted to tell. Here’s what Poots said when asked for the titles that helped put that into focus the most:

“I did some films in my early 20s that I really loved doing. I loved the experience and I loved the subject matter. We made a tiny movie about Tim and Jeff Buckley that I just loved making. It was almost like a blending fusion of life and art totally because we were filming in the East Village in New York and I was falling in love with New York, and it all kind of conflated in a beautiful way. But then it wasn’t until — it was probably around the time of doing Green Room actually when I felt a new type of excitement and sense of, ‘Alright, this is what I care about,’ and this is a kind of project that I objectively can be like, ‘This is a good film and I can defend it,' I can talk about it on both sides, as a movie and as an actor. And I think that really changed a lot for me having made choices that I didn’t feel reflected that in the same way.”

Poots has been applying that thinking to feature films for years now, amassing a resume with dozens of highly unique titles helmed by some of the most unique voices out there. However, even after so many very active years in the industry, Outer Range only marks the second time Poots played a lead role in a series. The first in that department? The role of Kelly Ann in Cameron Crowe’s Roadies. Anticipation was sky-high for that one with hopes that Roadies could have an Almost Famous feel, but the Showtime series was canceled after just one season. What went wrong? Poots offered some insight into the reality of telling a story in the series format:

“[Cameron Crowe] wrote this beautiful character and the pilot was what we shot first. It’s so much more unpredictable with TV because with a movie, you have the script and that’s what you go and shoot, and with television, often you get the pilot and then it can be 12 months later that you get the other episodes, and in that time a lot of things have changed and people have weighed, and all of that. So I felt with Roadies, I loved the pilot. It was almost like we made that movie, that story, and then I felt okay that we didn’t go past the first season. I felt like the story that Cameron set out to tell was told. And I also question, ultimately, was TV the right medium for that story? Perhaps it would have made more sense to condense it into a film. That’s kind of where my heart sat with that one.”

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While things may not have panned out as hoped on Roadies, Poots did learn some invaluable lessons from the experience, lessons that contributed to her decision to join the cast of Outer Range. Here’s how she put it:

“I’d been given a sort of run-through of the bible of the show and the synopsis early on by Brian Watkins and Zev Borow who showrun the show. But what was different, and I think Roadies perhaps prepped me for this was I really didn’t know anything about Roadies. It was all a surprise. I had no idea that the character of Kelly Ann would have a romantic storyline as well and I had mixed feelings about that at the time. And so with this, I was able to ask those kind of questions up front and be like, ‘Listen, I don’t want to play this hippie chick who just is there to sort of be mesmerizing,’ whatever anyone thinks [that they’re] there to do on screen. [Laughs] But they were really cool about that, and they were very upfront about what her arc would be and how much I would have to do. And I really loved how even just the early conversations about the character when it came to wardrobe, when it came to things like that where I felt really heard on my concerns and really supported. It was a good learning curve to have had a different experience before and then be able to sort of be that thorough, I suppose.”

Poots took a moment to go into detail on a particular wardrobe battle she was eager to fight:

“There was a moment where I got word that someone behind the scenes somewhere, who knows, wanted Autumn to wear daisy duke little jean shorts and a crop top. I was like, ‘Hm, yeah, I guess that would be kind of stupid to wear that if you’re hiking alone through the American West.’ So it was a back and forth conversation and in the end, we won, which is great. 2022, you know, hopefully that’s heard. But the fact that those conversations still occur was very interesting to me, and I think I very much felt a battle because it’s predominantly a male show with some extraordinary women in it, with Lili [Taylor] and Tamara [Podemski] and Issa [Arraiza], but I think there’s often a sense that, ‘Oh, because this is a blonde 30-something actress, her role is to be some sort of a siren,’ or lean into this kind of, as I said before, mesmerizing sensibility and actually, it’s like, no, I’m an actor playing a part in a show with a bunch of other actors and we’re telling a story. And so, it’s just important to have that heard in those kinds of instances.”

Eager to hear more from Poots? We’ve got you well covered in that department! You can catch her full episode of Collider Ladies Night right now in video form at the top of this article or listen to the 40-minute conversation uncut in podcast form below: