Millicent Simmonds’s favorite movie right now is The Truman Show.

“It’s so unexpected because the story is just so different,” she explains, recounting the Jim Carrey vehicle about a man who has no idea his entire life is being broadcast to the world as a television show. It came out in 1998, predating the Kardashians, Justin Bobby and his combat boots — even Nick, Jessica, and the chicken-or-fish question. It’s five years older than Millicent herself, who at 15 has already made audiences take notice — first with 2017’s Wonderstruck, and this year with the eerie A Quiet Place.

But the premise in The Truman Show is also the kind of acting exercise that excites Millicent, who would love to take on a role as layered as against-his-will reality star Truman Burbank. “You’d be acting in a show but you’re acting as if you don’t know you’re on a show, which I think is so incredible,” she adds. Either that, or she’d like to play a villain. Or a double agent. The ideas keep coming to her. “I think it would be really cool to have a dual role.”

She certainly has the range for such a task. A Quiet Place was arguably the most successful horror film of the year, thanks in no small part to Millicent’s performance as Regan. She played the eldest of the Abbott children, whose deafness, she wrote for Teen Vogue earlier this year, was “an advantage for this family.” (Like her character, Millicent is deaf, and uses American Sign Language; a translator joined us for our conversation.) Fans clamored for a sequel to the John Krasinski-helmed thriller; before that happens, Millicent is switching gears and starring in a two-episode arc on the Disney Channel’s Andi Mack.

“I went from a more somber, depressing, scary movie to something a little bit happier,” she jokes.

There, she’ll play Libby, a character that was created for her after the show filmed a season one episode at her school in Salt Lake City, Utah, and cast students as extras. The writers loved Millicent so much, they built a storyline around her. “I was immediately blown away by her talent,” executive director Michelle Manning remembers.

After Andi Mack (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) and Jonah (Asher Angel) decide they work better as friends than as a couple, Andi discovers that Jonah already likes someone else — that’s Libby. True to Disney Channel fashion, the characters are tasked with working through their feelings; in this case, Andi and Libby realize they have a lot in common and become friends.

It’s proof, Millicent says, that "things like that don't have to be awkward if somebody is labeled as an ex-girlfriend [versus] a current girlfriend. Our characters are mature enough that they learned how to communicate with each other and didn't make it this kind of weird, awkward feeling.”

Communication is a hallmark of the series, which is in its third season on the Disney Channel. Millicent’s episodes feature sign language: she taught her costars how to use ASL, and helped them practice simple sign language and facial expressions between scenes. And while the episodes’ dialogue provides some clarification for certain terms — Libby signs the letter J and creates a dimple in her cheek to signify “Jonah,” for example — the show will not feature closed captioning or subtitles, so that viewers are encouraged to follow along with the signing used on screen.

“We wanted [Millicent’s] dialogue to be like any other dialogue on the show, and we knew that subtitles would defeat the purpose of the message her character portrays,” show creator Terri Minsky told Teen Vogue. Instead, the show opted for a storyline that stresses the importance of direct interaction — in doing research for Millicent’s episodes, Terri explained, the writers found articles that highlighted SMS texting as a tool for those in the deaf community. In one of the episodes, Jonah thinks that nonstop texting with his new girlfriend is fine — it’s what everyone does all the time, anyway, he reasons — but Terri points out that “Jonah completely misses Libby’s annoyance that he isn’t making any efforts to learn sign language, because he is so busy texting.”