HOW TO TOP YOUR PERSONAL BEST
What Bel Powley did to win us over completely.
Bel Powley experienced a rocket-fast ascent to fame with her first-ever major film, The Diary Of A Teenage Girl – her portrayal of 15-year-old Minnie’s coming of age saw her nominated for more than a dozen awards (several of which she won) and named “female revelation of the year” at Cannes. So how do you back that up? For Powley, it was by sticking to her guns with a considered choice of meaningful, complex and feminist characters. The latest? As drug addict Dawn Wershe – opposite Matthew Mcconnaughey – in White
Boy Rick, based on the real-life case of the FBI’S youngest-ever informant. Consider this your how-to for the ultimate in personal reinventions.
DON’T FEAR THE UNKNOWN
“It was weird that my first film [The Diary
Of A Teenage Girl] was such a success, because afterward it was like, “What happens now? Is it all downhill from here?” It was a hell of a starting place – I loved working with the director [Marielle Heller] and I related to the character of Minnie so much because I’d never truly seen a teenage girl portrayed like that – and so coming off the film and its press tour and going back to the grind was an adjustment. The challenge was in finding projects that excited me in the same way, but I eventually did.”
GET OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE
“Theatre and film feel like two completely different jobs, because it’s like I’m exercising completely different muscles, but I really couldn’t do one without the other. I learnt most of what I know from being on stage; it’s kind of the basis from where I work. I love the immediacy and rawness of theatre. When you do a movie, you can change your performance 10 times in 10 different takes, but with theatre you only get one shot on that particular night. But then you do the same play every night and it’s interesting the way your character develops really slowly – by the 70th night it’s morphed and changed but you haven’t even noticed it happening.”
NEVER DO THINGS BY HALVES
“I watched a lot of Youtube videos of people smoking crack to prepare [for the role of Dawn]. It sounds ridiculous, but I found out that’s what Naomie Harris did when she played a crackhead in Moonlight. It was really the only way to add that to my repertoire – it’s not like I could draw on my own experience. Matthew and I were also very in-character on set. Our characters’ [father-daughter] relationship is quite strained, so we had to stay in that space to make it truthful. We weren’t fully ‘method’ but we did keep our distance. I think it would have been weird for us to play those characters and then go and have a beer afterwards.”
AVOID REINVENTING THE WHEEL
“A role doesn’t have to be completely new to be interesting; I much prefer seeing new takes on existing people or narratives. I recently did an independent film directed by Haifaa Al-mansour called Mary Shelley – Elle Fanning played Mary and I played her stepsister Claire. Mary was famous for writing
Frankenstein, which is a story we all know and love, but the director Haifaa wanted to show Mary and Claire as people had never seen them before – as the young feminists they were. It’s important to go back in history and pluck out female figures and get to the bottom of who they were, because often we think of them as quite one-dimensional. Any female character that is multifaceted will do for me right now!” E
White Boy Rick is out February 7