It’s not just a story about a girl with cancer... people are not defined by their illness Actress Eliza Scanlen and director Shannon Murphy tell LAURA HARDING why new film Babyteeth is not your typical teenage weepie
Eliza Scanlen and Toby Wallace as Milla and Moses – a mis-matched but loving
couple facing tragedy
absolutely tell you I’m not going to bother reading it.
“But Rita always said it’s a story about a girl who has cancer as much as it is about a girl who plays the violin, those are not the elements that we focused on, because someone is not just defined by their illness.
“There is so much more to them than that, and young people who do have cancer don’t want to be defined by that, so it was important to honour that person’s experience.”
But that does not mean it was not an arduous and emotional experience for 21-year-old actress Eliza, who was most recently seen as another fatally ill teenager, the sickly Beth, in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women.
“It was a very emotional experience, the whole making of the film,” she admits.
“While we had a lot of fun and there was a lot of laughter on set, there were days where none of us could keep it together, and those who were sitting behind the monitor trying to be quiet really struggled to do so because some scenes were just so painful to watch and to act.”
Eliza says she found people treated her differently when she shaved her
head
Shaving her head was also a highly charged experience for Eliza, bringing with it anxiety about what her bare head might look like and awkward moments with strangers who thought she must be a real cancer patient.
“I was terrified at first,” she admits. “I’m a twin and it was kind of a running joke in my family that I had a big dent in my head from my sister kicking me in the womb, so I had no idea whether that had stayed as I grew older.
“It was a relief when we shaved it off and my head was perfectly round, so there was nothing to worry about. “But I realised after shaving it how much I hid behind my hair and it instilled in me a confidence that I didn’t have before and it sounds cheesy but I think it really did transform me.
“Looking back, the film itself was a very important turning point in my life in not only in what I want my career as an actor to be but also just who I am as a person and the sort of people I want to surround myself with.
“I think that Milla encouraged me to be less generic and shaving your hair off is a very good way of doing that to begin with.
“After shaving my head, being out in public felt different at first.
“It requires a lot of bravery to begin with to step out without any hair and I felt especially uncomfortable knowing that people were going to see me in a certain way and that I was going to receive a lot of undeserved sympathy for an illness that I didn’t have. “People did assume that I was ill and that was at times quite uncomfortable so it gave me a lot of perspective.
“I felt like every experience was teaching me something greater. “Milla takes risks and through the making of the film I learned how to take risks as Eliza as well.”