Macdonald is becoming a star as fast as she can
‘Patti Cake$’ actress finds a meaty role as an aspiring rapper
Danielle Macdonald is coming for you, Hollywood.
The 26-year-old Australian star of Patti Cake$, the Sundance Film Festival hit that arrives in theaters Friday, is currently weighing the merits of a meatless Impossible burger sitting before her at one of West Hollywood’s chicest veggie joints.
“It’s good,” the vegetarian declares. “I think my favorite is still the Beyond burger, though.”
It’s two weeks before Patti Cake$ comes out, the art-house movie that has altered her course inside Hollywood. The film is a largely female 8 Mile, told from the perspective of Macdonald’s blue-collar New Jersey teen character who works as a bartender to make ends meet while spitting aggressive raps in an abandoned park-shack-turned-studio in her spare time.
Home is a minefield, where she treads carefully around her alcoholic hairdresser mother (Bridget Everett), while clinging to her ailing Nana (Cathy Moriarty).
Patti Cake$ represents something industry types told Macdonald was impossible when she first moved to Los Angeles seven years ago — that the curvy star would ever be a leading lady.
Instead it was the usual shop talk: Macdonald would have to take “character” roles and be happy about it. And she was.
“It was like, you’ll be the best friend (or) you’ll be the character (actor). And I was like ‘OK, cool. I accept that,’ ” she says. “I like working. Honestly, a lot of the time the character roles are the best roles.”
But that’s not quite what’s happening.
This week, Macdonald heads to Atlanta to start shooting Dumplin’, playing Jennifer Aniston’s pageant queen daughter in the book-to-movie tale.
And Lionsgate announced they’ve cast Macdonald as the lead in White Girl Problems (produced by Elizabeth Banks), in which she’ll play a manicured shopaholic.
“She does a little bit of everything,” says Patti Cake$ director Geremy Jasper, who did shots with Macdonald in Park City, Utah, after their film sold for a whopping $10.5 million to Fox Searchlight after a bidding war. “She’s able to handle comedy, she’s vulnerable, she has incredible charisma, she can be sexy. She can look like a classic Hollywood star or the girl next door.”
In Sydney, Macdonald’s mom is an accountant and her dad is a manager of a shipping company. When she got to Hollywood at 18, “I didn’t even know how to pay bills and stuff like that,” Macdonald says.
Her first audition landed her the lead on ABC Family’s Huge (which she later lost over visa issues) and she got her SAG card with a role on Fox’s Glee.
But becoming Patti meant learning not just how to rap, but how slay at it.
“I’m not musical in any way,” says the actress, who calls the character “ballsy in a way I’ve never been able to be.”
To get the beats down she’d practice raps from the likes of Nicki Minaj and Kendrick Lamar. “I did Control by Kendrick — that was hard,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, buddy, you do not breathe!’ ”
The actress is still getting adulting down. “I spent more than $2,000 on a cat bill recently,” she laughs. “But he’s alive, and that’s the most important thing. I need to look into this pet insurance thing.”
“I did ‘Control’ by Kendrick (Lamar), THAT was hard. I was like, ‘Oh my God, buddy, you do not breathe!’ ” Patti Cake$ star Danielle Macdonald on learning to rap