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To back up a little bit, this column is about getting to know you better as an actor. Did you always want to be one growing up? If not, how did you find your way to this career?
I grew up on Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies. That’s what I remember spending my weekends doing. My parents joke about how they would pass a room and hear me—at the age of like five or six—in my little voice talking and having very long, engaged conversations. They’d look inside the room and I’d be talking to a bookcase with a crayon in my hand, pretending I was smoking. Good on them for not sending me to a shrink and instead being like, “Oh, she has a very rich imagination.” I had a very rich play life when I was younger.
My sister and I played a lot. She’s five and a half years younger, and I’d be like, “Today, do you want to play prohibitionist times? Do you want to play Westward Ho? Do you want to play gambling at the horse track with Frank Sinatra?” So I’ve always loved the world of play and slipping into other worlds.
I went to college for art history. My parents are both artists, and my sister is a visual artist too. I thought maybe some proximity to the art world is where I would fit. But then I realized I was spending most of my time focusing on this one-woman show and doing plays and musicals. At the end of my senior year, I decided to go to grad school for theater. I did three years of intensive theater study and realized, Oh, turns out I can do this six days a week, 12 hours a day.
You have a movie with Rebel Wilson coming up called Senior Year. What can you tell me about that?
What was so fun about Senior Year is that I got to play a very unlikeable person who has a point of view on everything and is kind of unhinged. We get to see her fall apart, and that is just so fun. For that role, I was like, “She’s got to have talons. She’s got to have nails!” It was the first time I’ve ever had gel extensions, and so much of my character’s physicality was informed by having these very long nails for two months. They made my real life a pain. But on set…sometimes you have to say a certain phrase to get into the character, to find it again. All I had to do was look at my nails and try to pick something up or try to text and I’d be like, “Oh, she’s here. She’s with us.” That was really fun.
Have you played a villain before?
No, it was truly a dream of mine to play a really heinous human being. So I had a great couple of months.
You’ll also be starring in After Party. Tell me about that role.
