American Idol
HOW TO BUILD A GIRL I Director Coky Giedroyc on Beanie Feldstein’s bold casting.
It’s an unusual script because it’s set in a very, very specific place, the Badlands of Wolverhampton, and it’s about a girl of a certain age, 16, and a certain size,” says the director of How To Build A Girl, Coky Giedroyc. “Our protagonist is not a size 8, or a 2 in America, or whatever. She’s voluptuous. So that is a very, very small pool of actors you can find. And also, she’s in every scene, bar three, and she’s got to be really funny and very lovable.”
Making her first movie since Stella Does Tricks and Women Talking Dirty, back in the ’90s – she’s since concentrated on raising her children and making high-end telly such as The Virgin Queen, Penny Dreadful and The Killing – Giedroyc is discussing how she came to cast Californian-Jewish actress Beanie Feldstein as Irish-Wolverhampton lass Johanna Morrigan in How To Build A Girl.
The movie is a rambunctious coming-of-age story based on Caitlin Moran’s same-titled semiautobiographical novel about how Johanna, who lives with her large family on a council estate, transforms herself into Dolly Wilde, a music journalist who breaks into the London-centric, maledominated industry.
“We started in Wolverhampton, and took the net wider and wider,” continues Giedroyc. “We broadened it to the Midlands, and then it was the North, and then it was the UK! And then Alison [Owen, producer] was watching Lady Bird and she rang and said, ‘We’ve found her; this is it.’ I immediately went to a screening of it, and she just lights up the screen. She’s a movie star. So suddenly there she was, this luminous, very talented person who actually ticked all our boxes.”
Well, not quite. As brilliant as Beanie undoubtedly is in Lady Bird and then Booksmart, which didn’t come out until a full year after she was cast in Girl in May 2018, she had her work cut out to master the accent.
“Yes, the only box she didn’t tick was the accent,” laughs Giedroyc. “So we immediately Skyped, and the first thing I said to her was, ‘Bean, how are you going to take this on? It’s a big journey.’ And she said very calmly, ‘Unless they come from Wolverhampton, any actress is going to have to do this. So why shouldn’t it be me?’ So we cast her, and then we got her a job in Wolverhampton for three weeks, in a gift shop. And I lived with her in a flat, in Wolverhampton, for a month. She had a dialect coach the whole time. She went into this gift shop in the middle of Wolverhampton on the first day, really scared! She wasn’t allowed to speak in Californian! So that’s how we did it.” JG
ETA | TBC / HOW TO BUILD A GIRL WILL BE RELEASED THIS SUMMER.