South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Unexpected path to rom-com stardom
Actor leads ‘Broken Hearts Gallery’ in genre where women of color are rarely the heroine
Some romantics keep old photos in a shoebox. Others collect trinkets from the past. For Geraldine Viswanathan, words are what she holds dear.
“Everything handwritten, I’ve kept,” said the Australian actor, who made a major leap from “Blockers” breakout to rom-com heroine in Sony’s “The Broken Hearts Gallery.” “Every single birthday card. I’ll even write down what people say sometimes because I’m a psycho. But any words that I want to remember, I hold on to forever.”
As a teenager she knew that memories can be ephemeral. So
Viswanathan, now 25 and living in the United States, had a ritual: She’d inscribe happy moments on sticky notes and keep them in a jar, and read them again at the end of the year. “Those little things that made your day, it’s easy to forget them,” she mused. “I should start doing that again. It was a good tradition.”
Lucy, the 20-something New York City gallery assistant Viswanathan plays in “The Broken Hearts Gallery,” needs something a little more concrete. An outgoing aspiring curator who wears her heart on her sleeve, she clings so hard to souvenirs from failed relationships that her apartment is cluttered with mundane mementos of her exes: plane tickets, bags of string, even an assemblage of emotionally vivid doorknobs.
“Doorknobs! I wonder where she gets all this stuff,” Viswanathan laughed. (Helmed by writer-director Natalie Krinsky and inspired by the filmmaker’s own bad breakups, the film’s production design, by Zazu Myers, creates impeccable chaos out of Lucy’s world and its chic, sleek NYC setting.)
Nursing a freshly broken heart, Lucy befriends the emotionally closed-off Nick (Dacre Montgomery of “Stranger Things”), who’s renovating his dream boutique hotel, and builds a gallery in his lobby enshrining tokens of loves lost. Artifacts pile up as strangers exorcise their romantic demons by donating to the collection, but nothing quite comes close to one item Viswanathan saw while researching the real museum in Croatia that inspired the story.
“I remember seeing a wound scab in the museum and that really affected me, because wow — that’s really intense,” she said with a laugh.
Just over a year ago, Viswanathan was filming “Broken Hearts Gallery,” which was executive produced by Selena Gomez and acquired by Sony in June. Initially set for a pre-“Tenet” theatrical opening in July, it moved to September when it was clear major chains would begin to reopen. It has arrived in theaters where local guidelines allow — Viswanathan plans on catching it at a drive-in, at least — marking a new chapter in her career.
With her playful charisma and quick comic timing, Viswanathan made a splash in the 2018 Universal comedy “Blockers” as one of three high schoolers trying to lose their v-cards on prom night. The next year, she flexed versatile chops, joining Daniel Radcliffe on the TBS comedy series “Miracle Workers” and drawing acclaim as a Muslim teen coming of age in the indie drama “Hala,” acquired by Apple TV+.
The range impressed Natalie Krinsky, who’d written “Broken Hearts Gallery” in her 20s and several years later made it her own directorial debut. Onscreen, Viswanathan exuded the screwball energy of a young Lucille Ball, but also showed she could mine more dramatic layers.
Viswanathan hadn’t racked up too many Lucylike breakups herself, other than a high school-era split. “It was very much growing pains of, where are you going to go in your life, and where am I going to go in my life?” she remembered. “Broken Hearts Gallery,” on the other hand, felt like an introduction to adult relationships and breakups, “how normal and inevitable they are, and the maturity that you have to have.”
Reading the script, she fell quickly for the openhearted Lucy. “She was so magnetic and had this infectious energy,” she said. “Then I met Natalie Krinsky, and I realized, oh — that’s why.”
“Sometimes scripts are like ex-boyfriends,” said Krinsky. “You put them on the shelf and think, ‘Maybe someday we’ll get back together.’ (‘Broken Hearts Gallery’) was like the longlost love that came back into my life at a point when I was ready to direct the film.”
Like Viswanathan, she still keeps meaningful notes and letters. And, like Lucy, she had a penchant for hanging on to unconventional objects — such as the partial tooth whitening tray she “collected” from a dental hygiene-obsessed ex.
“You can’t use half of a tooth whitening tray,” Krinsky said with a laugh, “so it was both sentimental and payback.”
In Viswanathan, she found a star who could embody the manic heights of her younger lovelorn self and the wisdom of a much older soul.
“Geraldine at 25 years old is wise very much beyond her years, and I think that’s partially because she’s a real observer of life and human behavior,” said Krinsky, who surrounded her with a supporting cast that includes Arturo Castro, Utkarsh Ambudkar and Bernadette Peters.
To the actor, who went toe-to-toe with Hugh Jackman this spring as a high school reporter in the Emmy-nominated HBO true crime dramedy “Bad Education,” “Broken
Hearts Gallery” opened a door she hadn’t thought possible in a genre in which women of color rarely get to play fully dimensional characters, let alone the heroine.
“Everyone dreams of being the lead in a romcom, right? It’s a genre that I never really thought that I would be the lead of,” she said. “I had accepted my fate as the ‘best friend.’ I mean, I love those ’90s rom-com movies but (the stars) are all stunningly beautiful, model-like blond women. It was always, ‘OK, those are the girls we see in romantic comedies.’ ”
Since breaking into Hollywood, she says, the whirlwind has finally settled. She stopped living out of suitcases and got an apartment in Brooklyn.
And when she needs to dip into her happiness jars and boxes of memories, they’ll be waiting for her in her childhood bedroom. “I think I’m at a point of more accepting that this is my life now, and just having deep eternal gratefulness and joy that I get to do this,” Viswanathan said. “To be a part of things that I feel bring light into the world.”