‘There is a realness to my character that I hadn’t seen in other movies’
Actress Eliza Scanlen tells Laura Harding why new film Babyteeth is not your typical teen cancer drama, thanks to its theatrical source
Teen cancers dramas have become familiar fare in recent years. The success of the 2014 adaptation of John Green’s book The Fault In Our Stars, starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, spawned a string of weepy successors.
There are even online rankings of “terminal romance movies”.
But the new Australian film Babyteeth, starring Sharp Objects actress Eliza Scanlen and helmed by theatre director Shannon Murphy, stands apart from the sentimental sob stories that have come before.
“It is really bizarre that it’s become its own genre,” Scanlen says over the phone. “But I think that Shannon reflected a lot on this kind of genre before making the film and how she can directly reject it.
“And I think because of her theatrical training she was able to do that in a really eloquent way. And I think Rita (Kalnejais, who wrote the script based on her own play) has a very irreverent unsentimental sense of humour.
“One would think it might not be that, a teen cancer movie, but that is what makes it so sincere to me.
“And there is a realness to my character that I hadn’t really seen in other movies about the same topic and it’s not weepie in any way.”
Scanlen plays Milla, a 15-year-old with terminal cancer, who falls for Moses (The Society star Toby Wallace), a small-time drug dealer who knocks her over at a railway station and then cradles her in his arms when she gets a nosebleed.
When he tells her he has been kicked out of his house, she invites him back to hers, to the horror of her wellmeaning but protective parents (Ben Mendelsohn and Essie Davis), who are struggling to come to terms with their only child’s diagnosis while juggling their own messy relationship.
But it’s not a straight forward, sentimental romance between a doomed cancer patient and a criminal with a heart of gold.
The film darts around their relationship as it is divided into chapters marked with enigmatic title cards.
On top of that, Moses is eight years older, feckless and unreliable, at one point leaving her alone on a roof all night.
He steals drugs from Milla’s parents, who suspect he is using her for access to pills but put up with his presence to keep their daughter happy.
Filming was an arduous and emotional experience for 21-year-old Scanlen, who was most recently seen as Beth, in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women.
“It was a very emotional experience, the whole making of the film,” she admits.
“Whilst we had a lot of fun and there was a lot of laughter on set, there were days on set 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.”
Shaving her head was also a highly charged experience, bringing with it anxiety about what her bare head might look like and awkward moments with strangers who thought she was a real cancer patient.
“I was terrified at first,” she says.
“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 just felt like every experience was teaching me something greater.
“I think Milla takes risks and through the making of the film I learned how to take risks as Eliza as well.”
“Every experience was teaching me something greater”
● Babyteeth is out now in UK cinemas.