KATHERINE LANGFORD
She went from struggling student (juggling three jobs, no less) to the star of Netflix hit 13 Reasons Why in the space of a year. Now part of Hollywood’s new guard, the actress explains how a girl from Perth landed on her feet in La La Land
They say butterfly is the hardest swimming stroke to master. Fighting against your body’s natural urge to straighten up and fly right, as it were, the butterfly swimmer must propel their body forward in a sort of shuddering, stop-start motion – but with great speed – and, on top of that, achieve the near impossible: make it look good. So when I ask Katherine Langford, a former high-school champion swimmer, what her best stroke was, I’m not at all surprised to hear the answer. “Oh, butterfly,” she says. Of course. It makes sense that someone who possesses both Langford’s God-given talents and preternatural drive would excel at what is literally the hardest way to slice through water. Because Langford is as ambitious and determined to achieve as, well, a caterpillar emerging from a cocoon.
For those who aren’t familiar, a quick recap: rewind to 1996, when Langford is born in Perth to parents Elizabeth and Stephen. Liz is a paediatrician, Steve’s in the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Langford shows great promise in the arts at an early age, and is accepted to the prestigious Perth Modern School. Inspired by a Lady Gaga concert, she teaches herself to play piano at age 16. At 18, she’s ready to give acting a crack, though she has a back-up plan (heading to uni to study to be a music teacher). By 19, she’s filming what will become her breakout role, as Hannah Baker in Netflix’s
13 Reasons Why. Now 22, she’s been nominated for a Golden Globe and has starred in her first feature film, Love, Simon. In short: if you’re not familiar with Katherine Langford, where have you been?
It’s that year between finishing high school and landing the lead role in the Selena Gomez-produced adaptation of YA novel Thirteen Reasons Why that really gets me. How does a girl from Perth, with no connections to Hollywood, land the role of a lifetime in less than
12 months? By lying to her parents, of course. “I auditioned for drama school and didn’t get in,” she says. “So I enrolled in uni. But something hit me at the last second; I just knew it wasn’t the right thing for me. So... without telling my parents, I un-enrolled. Is that the word? Then I got a job, and another job, and another job, and I started auditioning.”
She’s well aware of the cliché, she says, of the struggling actor running from gig to gig (in Langford’s case, waitressing to bartending to theatre ushering as well as dressing up as characters for kids’ events on school holidays) to make ends meet. But she was determined to make it work. In her spare time, she took drama classes and literally did her homework. “I’d write a list of actors I loved – Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch, Carey Mulligan, Rose Byrne, Cate Blanchett – and try to figure out how they did it. How did they go from being another kid who wanted to be an actor to actually being an actor? I wanted to know the steps, but I also just wanted to know that what I was pursuing was actually possible.”
Later that year, after her parents figured out that Langford – who routinely came home smelling of beer, without a textbook to speak of – wasn’t at uni, and after she’d secured a place at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), she announced she was going to do “pilot season”. This is Hollywood speak for the process of auditioning for hundreds of shows against thousands of other actresses for a role in a pilot that might never even be made. Then, if it is produced, the show might not make it onto the air. It’s a huge gamble for everyone. It rarely pays off.
“I was in LA for a few months before I got 13 Reasons and, honestly... it was so tumultuous,” she says. But first, Langford auditioned for Will, a Uk-based series about the life of young William Shakespeare. Ironically, she lost out to fellow Perth actress Olivia Dejonge. “I was so in love with that role,” she says. “I gave up my place at WAAPA to audition, which I’d been trying to get into for three years. I remember calling the head of WAAPA and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got a job in London.’ And then I lost the role.” She went to the US next and lost another coveted gig. “It was hard,” she says. “I felt very lonely. I remember walking home from grocery shopping and crying. My fingers were killing because I had to wrap the fruit and vegetables I’d bought around my fingers, in their produce bags, because I couldn’t afford to pay another 25 cents for a plastic bag. I had no money, no job and no drama school.”
It was around that time, she says casually, that her roommate almost killed her. “Oh,” she says lightly, when I nearly have a heart attack. “Yeah, well, it wasn’t great. She would leave the gas on at night to heat the house – but just, like, the open flame, which can give you carbon monoxide poisoning. I left as soon as I could.”
Langford managed to leave when she landed 13 Reasons Why. After that, life changed forever: the show was a hit, and a second season will screen soon. Fans discovered the music Langford had uploaded to Youtube before she became famous and clamoured for more (she demurs politely when we chat, saying it’s something she might explore again later). She wore black in solidarity with the Time’s Up movement at the Golden Globes earlier this year, and acknowledged the surreal absurdity of being nominated alongside English actress Claire Foy just a year after watching The Crown star win in her category at home with her mum in Perth. She knows the power of her millennial fan base and is keen to campaign for change – for gun control, for equal treatment of women, for a better world for the LGBTQI community. But, for now, she’s taking it slow. Well, as slow as you take it when you’re a butterfly champ.
“I want to make sure the next project I’m a part of is something that I’m passionate about, something that I can sink my teeth into,” says Langford. “What I really want to do is take some time to work on my skills as an actor. I’ve still got so much to learn.”