WIGGING OUT
Actor Eliza Scanlen has cause for excitement. Barely out of her teens and she’s already starring opposite local film legends and Hollywood heavyweights.
Actor Eliza Scanlen has cause for excitement. Barely out of her teens and she’s already starring opposite local film legends and Hollywood heavyweights, both on Broadway and in the highly anticipated adaptation of Little Women. By Natalie Reilly. Styled by Kate Darvill. Photographed by Jake Terrey.
Am I going to be wearing wigs?” Eliza Scanlen asks. The actor has just arrived for Vogue’s photo shoot in her native Sydney, and it takes a minute to recognise her. Wearing jeans and an oversized puffy black jacket with white slip-on Vans, the 20-year-old, who is currently starring in Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway, has snuck in without anyone noticing. Scanlen introduces herself to everyone then spies the wigs (some blonde, some brunette, some long, some short). Her doll-like face – fresh, open and totally devoid of make-up, twinkling green eyes – beams at the thought of playing dress-ups. Her hair, which was shaved last year to play a terminally ill teenager in the Australian film Babyteeth (which just premiered to rave reviews at the Venice International Film Festival), has grown into a boyish pixie cut. “My mum was worried at first, but it felt liberating to shave it all off,” she says. “I felt like a new person.”
Later, as she tries each hairstyle on, there is fierce debate about which suits her best. But Scanlen, who has played both a psychotic Southern teen, in the critically acclaimed Sharp Objects, and the introverted Beth March in the upcoming Little Women, has a way of making each one look like it belongs on her. She eventually settles into an old velvet couch that would not be out of place in 19th-century Massachusetts, where Little Women is set.
Around 130 years before Sex and the City, there was a semi-autobiographical serial about four sisters – Meg,
Jo, Beth and Amy – who were also each other’s soul mates. Each character had her own distinct personality, and the serial chronicled their experiences of love, friendships and wrenching break-ups in intimate detail.
Written by Louisa May Alcott, a self-identified feminist who had to be convinced by her publisher to marry off her lead character, Jo March, Little Women is one of those seminal rite-of-passage classics that every bookish woman likes to lay claim to as the novel that changed her life as a teenager.
That it will change Scanlen’s is a given. But for the girl who at 15 begged her parents to let her attend a three-week acting course in the US by herself, the culmination of which was landing the American manager she still has today, it was really only a matter of time.
“I really wanted to pursue acting from a very young age,” Scanlen reveals. “The first time I ever acted, I felt right. It felt natural. I knew if I was going to die trying to do it, then that’s what I was going to do.” But she is modest about her meteoric rise. “Hard work is an important part of any actor’s trajectory, but a lot of it is down to luck, too.”
At 16 Scanlen was already on Home and Away, as Tabitha Ford, a role she played for 15 episodes. Like many actors who made the transition from Summer Bay to Los Angeles (including Isla Fisher, Chris Hemsworth and, most recently, Samara Weaving), Scanlen says she’s grateful for the experience. “Home and Away involved a lot of lines and long shoots – it taught me how to be organised. I made some great friends, too. Tessa de Josselin [who played Billie Ashford] is starring in the short film I’m working on.”
Despite having no shortage of offers following this stint, Scanlen retreated from acting to focus on her HSC the following year and graduated with an ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank) of 98.26 out of a possible 99.95. But even with such a high mark, there was never any question of what she’d do next. “I wanted to test myself, to prove that I could finish school before doing any more acting,” Scanlen says, revealing that after her final exam she sent a tape of herself to the casting director of the HBO limited series Sharp Objects. Scanlen had barely made it back from schoolies week (“I was recovering from laryngitis”) when she got the call with news she had the part.
Based on the novel by Gillian Flynn, the best-selling author of Gone Girl, the eight-episode series was a similarly dark, psychological thriller examining the secrets women keep from themselves. Scanlen played Amma, the lascivious sister of Amy Adams, who has secrets of her own.
Adams loved working with the young Australian and can’t wait to see how her career develops. “She has an instinct and spontaneity that is so exciting,” she tells Vogue. “Her openness made it fun and fulfilling to form a deep on-screen relationship with her.”
Sharp Objects was, in the parlance of Hollywood, Scanlen’s ‘breakthrough role’ and everyone quickly took notice, including Greta Gerwig, the awardwinning director of the hit 2017 coming-of-age film Ladybird, who was in the process of casting Little Women.
“I liked her face right away,” Gerwig says of their first meeting together. “It’s open and available but it keeps changing: she can look innocent and then evil and then old-fashioned and then modern and then seductive and back again in an instant. And then, of course, she’s also just a knock-out as an actress.”
Scanlen’s bewitching versatility was also the first thing Ben Mendelsohn, who plays her father in Babyteeth, noticed about her. “Eliza is something of an anomaly,” he agrees. “Like, you kinda feel like she’s always been here. There’s a timelessness about her. And at the same time you realise she’s completely fresh and original and brand new.”
Maybe it’s the haircut, but it’s tempting to pop a sword in her hand, just to see how skilfully she’d wield it as, say, Joan of Arc. But she could just as easily play a schoolboy – which she did, earlier this year, in the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Lord of the Flies.
It’s difficult to find anyone as young as Scanlen with the same versatility. Yet she is the first to point out the similarity between all three characters she’s played recently: “They all get sick!” she says with a laugh. “I think that I do come across as perhaps a bit quirky and weird and odd … especially Beth, because Greta and I were intent on making her personality as distinct as the other sisters.”
Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, the eighth film adaptation of the book, is a swirling, vibrant and distinctly feminist take on the novel. It’s also stuffed with award-winning stars, a fact, Scanlen says, that made filming nerve-racking to begin with. “My first scenes
“I really wanted to pursue acting from a very young age. The first time I ever acted, I felt right. It felt natural”
were terrifying, but nerves are a great tool for actors: you can channel them into a good performance.”
“We had this very small house in which all the actors would hang out, because it was so cold outside. I remember looking around one day at the people in this room – Laura Dern, Bob Odenkirk, Chris Cooper, Meryl Streep, Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson – just looking around and seeing so many iconic, gifted, hard-working performers. It was surreal.”
While Scanlen says she pinched herself that she was working with Streep, who plays Aunt March (“It’s every actor’s dream to work with Meryl, and to have met her, and talked with her – it was inspiring”), it was the bond she developed with Saoirse Ronan, who plays Jo, she treasured the most. “I’m grateful to be able to call her a friend,” she says of “Sersh”.
“She’s been a really important part of my life this past year,” Scanlen continues. “She’s one of the most generous people I’ve ever met and she has this ‘no bullshit’ radar that’s very strong, which I really relate to.” In fact, she developed deep friendships – and open admiration – with all of her on-screen sisters. She says Emma Watson really was like an older sibling, and gave great advice, while Florence Pugh, who plays Amy, is a spitfire “and I absolutely adore her for it”.
While Gerwig’s movie is utterly faithful to the novel, highlighting just how limiting it was for women to gain social mobility and generate their own wealth a century and a half ago, she has also imbued many of the iconic characters with a depth previously unseen on screen, including Beth.
“Greta wanted me to be as weird as possible, instead of this meek and mild little thing who just gets sick,” says Scanlen. “I didn’t want Beth to seem somehow marked for death, and Eliza never played her that way,” adds Gerwig. “She has a serene sense of self which shines through. And Eliza brought her own sister with her to the audition, so it felt like a sign.”
Scanlen’s sister, Annabel, an artist, is also her fraternal twin. The two are incredibly close, as is the whole family, which includes older brother Nick, 23, and parents Susan and David, who co-founded Storage King, a successful storage facility business. “They [her parents] are both very talented at what they do,” Scanlen says. “What people don’t realise is that acting is 80 per cent business, 20 per cent art, and negotiating contracts, and tax returns and going from the States to Australia, the paperwork is diabolical.”
Aside from this lifeadmin headache, Scanlen is also tired at present. She’s been up all night putting the finishing touches on her first short film, Mukbang, named after a South Korean YouTube phenomenon where people eat large amounts of food, which she also wrote. “Every single person working on it is 30 and under,” she says proudly. “It’s got a phenomenal cast. My best friend, Nadia Zwecker, and, of course, Tessa. It’s about the language of connection, and the detached intimacy of the internet,” she explains of her pet project, which simultaneously chronicles a high school girl’s exploration of her own sexuality. “But it’s wearing me out!”
Scanlen will have to conserve her energy. As well as Mukbang, slated for release next year, she will star in another psychological drama, The Devil All the Time, alongside Riley Keough, Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson, to be released on Netflix in 2020. But if Scanlen seems daunted, she’s not showing it. It might be the thoughtful way she speaks, or her steely determination to dive into every new situation (including filmmaking) with gusto, but it’s impossible not to imagine a long, successful career ahead.
She describes her idol, Meryl Streep, as being in possession of a deep sense of who exactly she is. “But I don’t think it comes from her work,” she says. “It comes from an inner confidence.” She could just as easily be talking about herself.
“Greta [Gerwig, the director of Little Women] wanted me to be as weird as possible, instead of this meek and mild little thing who just gets sick”