How To Give A Stellar Performance
BAFTA-WINNER MIA MCKENNA-BRUCE ON HER BREAKOUT ROLE IN HOW TO HAVE SEX
BREAKOUT ROLES DON’T come much more challenging than that of Tara, the assertive, sparky teen played by Mia Mckenna-bruce in How To Have Sex. The directorial debut from Molly Manning Walker is at once a coming-ofage movie about a 16-year-old seeking escape and ecstasy on a cheap party holiday, and a bracing study of sex and consent that forces audiences to reckon with big problems caused by society’s treatment of young women. The film scooped up the Un Certain Regard award following its world premiere at Cannes, and recently Mckenna-bruce won the EE Rising Star BAFTA, in no small part due to her performance. Speaking with Empire, she breaks down how she approached a character that has come to mean so much to her.
TEEN MENTALITY
To prepare for the role, Mckenna-bruce, now in her mid-twenties, looked to her younger sisters. “They are my go-to when it comes to checking in and seeing what’s going on in the mind of that kind of age,” she says of the 16- and 21-year-old siblings, who were also a major motivation behind her taking on such a challenging film in the first place. Then, during rehearsals, Mckenna-bruce and her co-stars were asked to bring in photos of themselves at the age of their characters. She was fascinated by what she saw: “Even little things like my hair was bleached blonde, or I had painted on fake freckles really badly; seeing that shift and figuring out when those changes happened were really helpful.”
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
How To Have Sex was filmed in the party district of Malia, Crete. The shoot itself took place off-season, but the sun, sea and thoroughly orchestrated ragers that Tara and her pals attend still acted as a means of time travel for MckennaBruce and her co-stars. “I don’t know if it was the energy from being there or the energy of us all being together, but we would get together and this hyperness would take over like we were teenagers again,” she remembers. While playing
Tara, she came to the realisation that she held a lot of parallels with her character: “Trying to live up to these expectations that people have of you, I think a lot of teenagers have that.”
FIELD RESEARCH
Walker and the film’s producers staged workshops with teenagers across the UK ahead of shooting. Pages of the script were passed around, some with scenes involving the sexual assault of Tara by a boy she’s befriended, Paddy (Samuel Bottomley). “These workshops were a big reason why the film got made,” says Mckenna-bruce, referencing the teens’ responses to those pages. “A lot of girls in particular were standing up and saying, ‘There’s nothing wrong with it. She shouldn’t be drunk, she should be wearing more clothes,’ and trying to place the blame on Tara.” Conversations from those meet-ups were brought into the actors’ rehearsals and helped to make the characters as accessible as possible.
Even some of Tara’s mannerisms were informed by the workshops. While Walker was speaking with one teen about assault, she noticed them playing with the hairband on their wrist for — as Mckenna-bruce describes it — “a bit of release, that’s what we’d come to”. Her character consequently does the same when she feels anxious, along with picking her nails. This comes into play during a fraught night on the holiday where Tara and Paddy have sex on the beach, although the boundaries of consent during the encounter are blurred. “When she was particularly feeling that nervous energy, her go-to was to get rid of the sand from her nails or clothes,” says Mckenna-bruce.”it was like if she was getting rid of the sand, she was getting rid of the [memories].”
THE UNSEEN TARA
The film begins and ends with Tara’s holiday, with very little mention of her homelife. Instead, Walker and Mckenna-bruce crafted an intricate backstory for the character to help inform how she behaved onscreen, from her seemingly boundless confidence around strangers to her
complicated relationship with her best friend, Skye (Lara Peake). “We figured out that maybe Tara had a big brother, so had experience of being around older people, especially older boys,” Mckenna-bruce explains. “That’s something that Skye was envious of, because Tara could go into these groups and still be herself.”
It was important that the knotty, occasionally toxic dynamic between Tara, Skye, and their third friend Em (Enva Lewis) was determined early on in order to make it feel as lived-in as possible. The actor and director decided that Em and Tara had been childhood friends, with Skye a newer addition with higher social status. “She’s the cool girl at school, and the other two are trying to live up to her,” says Mckenna-bruce.
PULLING THREADS
When Tara’s not ensconsed in oversized hoodies and sweater shorts, she’s taking on the Malia strip in clubwear: dresses, skirts and tops in bright or neon colours, often borrowed from Skye, and always skin-tight. “When we had the costume fittings, they were intentionally made to be slightly ill-fitting,” Mckenna-bruce remembers, while also describing her constant urge to tug and pull down the uncomfortable clothes. After the beach scene, Tara’s Day-glo green dress is turned inside out, the clinging sand and disorder of her outfit adding to her distress. “Those bits are important,” the actor explains. “They’re not necessarily details you’d pick on straightaway, but they were really helpful for me when getting into where Tara is.”
The booze-soaked streets of Malia are Tara’s personal battlefield, with Mckennabruce, clad in Lycra armour, steering her through the trauma and triumphs of youth.
“She tries to get rid of sand from her nails, to get rid of memories.”
HOW TO HAVE SEX IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL