’Suncoast’s Devastating Hospital Scene Proves Nico Parker Is More Than Just Thandiwe’s Newton Daughter 

If Nico Parker’s performance at the end of Suncoast—a new coming-of-age drama now streaming on Hulu—doesn’t reduce you to a blubbering mess, we are simply not the same. She delivers a heartbreaking performance as a teenager girl messily grieving her brother in a depressing hospice care room. It’s the kind of performance that had me furiously Googling to figure out who, exactly, this kid was. Color me shocked to discover that Nico Parker from Suncoast is, in fact, the daughter of actor Thandiwe Newton and screenwriter Ol Parker. Yes, a nepo baby. But if this nepotism is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.

Written and directed by Laura Chinn in her feature debut, Suncoast first premiered at Sundance Film Festival, and stars Parker as a teen girl named Doris. For last 10 years, Doris has been caring for older brother Max, who has brain cancer. Now no longer able to move, talk, or even eat without a feeding tube, he’s living out his remaining days in a Florida hospice facility. It just happens to be the same facility where Terri Schiavo—the subject of a real-life, landmark right-to-die court case in the early 2000s—is staying.

Despite Doris’s extenuating circumstances in life, she longs to be a normal teenage girl. Her mother Kristine (played by a fantastically hostile Laura Linney), simply can’t understand. Kristine’s overwhelming anticipatory grief for her firstborn son has left her bitter. All of her focus is on Nate and his comfort. She doesn’t have a modicum of affection to spare for her other child. And she certainly doesn’t have any patience for Doris’s aversion to spending quality time with her brother before he’s gone.

It all comes to a head when Max dies the night that Doris is out at her prom. Despite what she’s said, Doris is distraught that she never properly said goodbye to her brother while he was alive. In an absolutely heart-wrenching scene, she sprints to the hospice facility… and arrives too late. Still wearing her sparkly prom dress, Doris breaks down over her brother’s body. Parker delivers the performance of a lifetime.

“Don’t go,” she wails through sobs. “I don’t know why I wasn’t here! I’m sorry! You can’t leave me here by myself! Don’t leave me, please!” Maybe it’d be cheesy in the hands of a lesser actor, but Parker’s raw, emotional pain is nothing but authentic.

If you’re not crying at this point, you will be by the time Parker finishes her tearful monologue. Still sobbing, she pulls back the sheet covering her brother’s dead body and forces herself to look at his eerily still face. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. I was so awful to you. I should have made you brownies, I know you love them, and I never made them for you. I should have let you watch skateboarding videos all day. I should have given you the remote.”

At this point, Doris’s mother comes to comfort her daughter. Linney, too, will break your heart, with her broken delivery of, “Oh, Doris, you were so good to him. He knows. He knows you love him.”

It’s a heavy, dramatic, emotional scene for an actor who was only 18 when Suncoast was filmed in the summer of 2023. But Parker more than rises to the occasion, and holds her own with the great, three-time Oscar-nominated Linney. Perhaps it does help that Parker grew up in the industry. Her mother, Thandiwe Newton, shot to fame in 2004, for her critically acclaimed performance in Crash, and then again in 2016 as the star of HBO’s Westworld. Her father, meanwhile, has been a working screenwriter and director in Hollywood for over twenty years. He penned the script for 2011′s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and wrote and directed the 2018 Mamma Mia sequel. It’s not the younger Parker’s first time on screen—The Last of Us fans may remember her as Joel’s daughter, Sarah—but it’s her first big starring role.

Suncoast director Laura Chinn said in an interview for the film production notes that Parker was on here “very short list of young actresses even back in 2018 when I started writing the script.” Chin added she saw something in Parker before they even met in person. “I met her over Zoom, she was in London and I was in LA and before she even read any dialogue, just being around her essence, I knew she was perfect. Then she read some scenes and I learned that she is a wunderkind genius, and I knew it had to be her.”