‘There were times when I didn’t know how to speak up...’
Amandla Stenberg on her new role:
AMANDLA STENBERG is a wise old soul. So much so that you have to constantly remind yourself that she has only just left her teens. She sits with the quiet confidence of an actor more than twice her age. Perhaps it’s because she feels the heavy weight of responsibility that rests on her shoulders with the release of her new film, The Hate U Give, which tells the story of a schoolgirl who witnesses the police shooting of an unarmed black man.
“We wanted to honour those who have gone through things like this,” she says earnestly.
“We wanted to honour black communities and postulate it in a way that wasn’t exclusionary in any way.
“We still want to have everyone able to watch the movie and feel like they can relate to something, even if they aren’t a person of colour, so they feel included in the conversations.”
Based on the hit novel of the same name by Angie Thomas, Amandla plays Starr Carter, a girl from a poor, mostly black neighbourhood, who has to adopt a completely different persona at the rich, mostly white, school she attends.
At home in Garden Heights Starr uses slang, listens to hip hop and wears a hoodie, but is worried she is seen as “too white”.
At Williamson Prep, which is 45 minutes away, she refrains from speaking slang, even if the white kids do, for fear of seeming “hood”.
That delicate balance of her life falls apart when her childhood best friend Khalil is gunned down by a white policeman and she is the lone witness.
The scene in the film is gut- wrenching, mainly because it looks so familiar to an audience which has seen numerous similar videos filmed on mobile phones, showing black men being shot and killed by armed police.
The officer instructs Khalil to pull his car over and makes him get out. When the young man reaches through the window for his hairbrush, the officer mistakes it for a gun and shoots him.
“It made the process of filming really traumatic and heavy,” Stenberg admits, “but also really fulfilling because it felt like there was greater purpose beyond just trying to make a movie.
“It felt like it was an exercise in confrontation of the pain that we experience in the black community and with thinking deeply about institutional racism and the legacy of slavery.
“That was tough at times but to be able to portray that and then move through it also with moments of joy and all while being surrounded by such a loving community just made it so rewarding and special.
“It’s so hard, especially in times that we are living in now that are so politically charged, you can’t move through it and continue the good fight if you don’t have moments to revel in the good.
“In the book, there are those moments of joy and humour and there is also pain and it’s just an accurate reflection of what it feels like to be a human being, you have all of those emotions at once.”
Born in Los Angeles, Amandla, who turned 20 in October, also went to a school where most of the pupils were white – and she still acutely remembers what school felt like.
“There were various scenes that I read and I thought, ‘God, I wish I had this in high school’, both so I could feel validated and affirmed but also so that the kids that I went to school with could see what it felt like from my perspective.
“I went to a school that was primarily white and affluent, like Starr, and there were certain micro-aggressions that I would come across with my peers where I didn’t really know how to speak up and I didn’t really know how to fight it. “I thought, ‘This feels like more energy to try, so I’m just going to stay quiet and keep it to myself’ but with Starr you see her go on the journey of not doing that.
“She actually actively makes a decision to call out her peers to not be tolerant of racism or microaggressions because she doesn’t have time for it.”
Witnessing the shooting changes everything for Starr.
“It challenges her whole life,” Amandla says, “It challenges her whole perspective, it challenges her identity, as she has to figure out if she has the strength to speak up for him and what she believes in.
“It takes time for her to reach a place of strength where she feels comfortable to use her voice.”
It seems impossible that Amandla, who got her big break playing the tragic Rue opposite Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games, hasn’t always been comfortable speaking up, but it took her years to find that power.
“I am now definitely so much less interested in entertaining energy that I don’t really need around me, especially if it’s forces that make me smaller than who I am, or that polices me or makes me feel not understood or not listened to.
“I’m pretty much done with that. I think I started having that transition at the same time Starr did, senior year of high school maybe.
“Even then I was still in an environment that wasn’t completely conducive to me being my fullest self.
“But definitely in the past few years I’ve been able to step into my authenticity and let go of all that.”
■ The Hate U Give is in cinemas now.