Beanie Feldstein on Playing Teens, Besties, and Falling in Love

Beanie Feldstein is not a teenage girl — she’s just really good at playing them onscreen. You might remember her in Greta Gerwig’s Oscar-nominated Lady Bird as the scene-stealing Julie, the eponymous character’s fiercely loyal BFF. Beanie also played studious senior Molly in this summer’s ebullient and tender Booksmart, a last-gasp-of-high-school buddy movie directed by Olivia Wilde. And she stars as a 16-year-old rock-writer prodigy in her newest film, How to Build a Girl, an adaptation of Caitlin Moran’s novel that can be described as a British Almost Famous with a dash of Welcome to the Dollhouse, and which just scooped up an award at the Toronto Film Festival.

Beanie herself is bubbly, hyperbolic, down-to-earth, and confessional. She’s also an unapologetic, self-described “f*cking fangirl.” She says “literally” a lot, like when she informs me that actress “Sarah Paulson is…literally my queen.”

But above all else, Beanie is a grown woman. It’s been a full six years since she was in her teens. But in her short time in Hollywood, portraying raw, complex female characters on the cusp of self-actualization has become her calling card. And it’s made her wish she could be a teen again in all its confusing, hormonal, awkward glory — just so she could see movie characters like hers. “I just feel honored to be a part of stories that, had I been 15 when they came out, I would have been first in line at the movie theater," she tells Teen Vogue.

Over salad and crepes in a French cafe a few blocks from her Chelsea apartment in New York City, Beanie exalts teen girls as a “thoughtful, brilliant, clever section of society,” who have always been criminally underrepresented onscreen, at least “in a true way.” When she got nervous or intimidated on the set of How to Build a Girl — which required her to master an obscure British accent and tell off a bunch of dudes in a hot tub while wearing a makeshift swimsuit of plastic bags — she reassured herself: “Imagine if I had seen a girl with my body and my spirit on camera in a trash-bag bikini? That’s powerful stuff.”

The movie’s main character, Johanna, is a working-class girl from a hardscrabble English town called Wolverhampton. She transforms from an unpopular loner into a ruthless music writer, trying on new, sometimes off-putting personas, plunging headfirst into her intellectual and sexual awakening. Johanna is “a young woman in the middle of nowhere with no access, no money, no familial support, no friends — she’s really alone in the world,” Beanie says.

“So for her to, all of a sudden, have the power of the written word on her side?… I can imagine that being real intoxicating.”

Beanie shares Johanna’s formidable confidence and love of musicals, but the similarities pretty much end there. The character’s go-it-alone attitude is what makes Beanie’s first solo starring role the biggest stretch of all. For most of her career, Beanie has played the sidekick and famously relished it. One of the many challenges of How to Build a Girl was “not having another person to create energy with and bounce off of,” Beanie says. “I feel so much more comfortable being the supportive role.” Playing someone who has virtually no friends often meant being the only actor on set.

Beanie, on the other hand, has tons of besties, and effortlessly forges new connections while retaining old ones. Throughout our two-hour interview, she gushes about her many close friends, including actor Ben Platt, the roommate she shares an apartment with in Chelsea, her two BFFs from college (she had dinner with them the night before), and Booksmart costar Kaitlyn Dever, with whom she lived during filming. While Beanie was filming How to Build a Girl in England, Kaitlyn was in production on the Netflix series Unbelievable, another intense and highly solitary role. They’d text each other and say, “Where are you?! I’m alone out here and I miss looking at your face.”

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Beanie, born Elizabeth Greer Feldstein (her nickname was bestowed on her by a nanny), grew up in Los Angeles with showbiz-adjacent parents. Her father was an accountant for Guns ‘N Roses, and her mother was a costume designer and stylist. The latter came in handy when three-year-old Beanie, already a musical-theater lover and superfan of Funny Girl, demanded a Barbra Streisand-inspired leopard-print jacket for her themed birthday party. Her parents were fans of the theater, too. “They were so excited to be, like, at rehearsal rather than watching five-year-olds play soccer,” Beanie says, recalling that during her goalie days she’d splay her shorts to the sides and curtsy after she blocked the ball.

She grew up with two older brothers: Jordan, who died suddenly last year (Beanie has called the lens of grief “visceral” and “vibrant”), and actor Jonah Hill, who was featured on billboards for Superbad when Beanie was a young teen. Even after that, Beanie wasn’t particularly interested in movies. She had always assumed she would come to New York to do theater (though she wouldn’t score her first major role on the stage, as Minnie Faye in Hello, Dolly!, until she’d already appeared in Lady Bird). She struggled to excel academically at her “really, really, really rigorous” high school, L.A.'s Harvard-Westlake School, and figured she’d just go to a conservatory and drop out if her career took off. But in 11th grade “something subliminal clicked on” and she decided to flex her academic side. She got into Wesleyan University in Connecticut, two hours from New York City. She spent her freshman year shuttling back and forth to auditions, until finally, “hysterically crying on the train to my mom,” Beanie realized she had to focus on school or acting. She chose school.

It was at college, in an Intro to Sociology class, that her world truly broke open. She thinks of that class as “taking a pin and popping the bubble I’d grown up in,” she says. “It was literally like, PING!” In her first class, a young professor named Greg Goldberg asked the students to write down how they identified. “Nobody had ever asked me that,” Beanie says. She started reading about “gender, and sexuality, and race, and class, and all of these institutions that are layered on top of us at all times.” She became aware of the yawning education and income gap in Connecticut. “Middletown,” the struggling postindustrial city in Wesleyan’s backyard, “and Wolverhampton are not dissimilar,” she says.

During that first identity exercise, Beanie says she probably wrote down “female and Jewish.” She hadn’t yet explored her sexuality, which she’s just started to figure out in the past year and a half. She’s now dating producer Bonnie Chance Roberts, whom she met on the set of How to Build a Girl. Before “Bon,” as she calls her, she had always assumed she wasn’t the relationship type. Her brother Jonah would call her the “Dexter of relationships,” because she was the “most loving person in the literal world,” yet was icy when she spoke of her boyfriends. She didn’t prioritize that part of her life, even as most of her friends pined for romance. “It just wasn’t something I thought about or craved,” she says. Then she met Bonnie and thought, “Whoa! Now I get it…. I get why people write songs.”

The craziest part, she insists, was that she fell in love; the fact that she fell for a woman was an afterthought. “Not to sound flippant, but I was in love with her and all of her, and she’s a woman,” Beanie says. “That’s not scaring me or deterring me. And it wasn’t just women in general; it was her specifically.”

Though Beanie’s open about who she is, a big coming-out moment didn’t feel necessary to her, which she acknowledges is probably a result of the abundance of love and support she has in her life. In the few years since that first sociology class, the media has assigned her many labels — queer, feminist, “chubby” — but she’s not overly defined by any particular one. Still, she understands that proudly trumpeting one’s identity feels meaningful for many. A few days before our meeting, Sam Smith announced on Instagram that they were switching to “they/them” pronouns. “I was so moved by that,” Beanie says. “The more stories we have, both personal and fictionalized…it just adds to the effing conversation.”

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Beanie started auditioning again during her senior year of college, and within a year of graduation, she scored the part of Julie in Lady Bird. “I couldn’t even have conjured a situation or known the type of storytelling I wanted to be a part of until I got to be a part of it,” she says. Lady Bird was “so deeply in line with who I am.” The film immediately spurred adoration from young women for handling teen girls’ interior lives with such nuance and care. Beanie’s performance inspired a special devotion. Sweet Julie’s outburst of righteous anger — “It was the titular role!!!” — has since been immortalized on YouTube and in memes.

After that initial stroke of luck, Beanie thought, I’m not gonna settle. That’s what happens, she says, when you get your big break working alongside Greta Gerwig, Saiorse Ronan, and Laurie Metcalf. She suddenly had high expectations for her collaborators, many of whom have been women. Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart felt like “the most perfect next step,” because it was a “strong female story about friendship but with a completely different tone and energy” from Lady Bird. She was drawn to Caitlin Moran’s work because it “gives women permission to take big, bold swings.” She remembers meeting with Moran, director Coky Giedroyc, and How to Build a Girl’s two female producers, not knowing whether she’d gotten the part but feeling like she’d already won because these women were doing valuable work amid “all this mishegoss — this crazy industry.”

Having high standards doesn’t mean just working with female writers and directors. Beanie is currently working with director Richard Linklater on an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along, and she’s set to play Monica Lewinsky in season three of the Ryan Murphy-produced anthology series on FX, American Crime Story, which Beanie and Lewinsky are coproducing. “Ryan Murphy is a champion of women,” Beanie says. “As a 26-year-old woman who still feels new to the industry, the fact that he would say he wants me to do this and help produce it is deeply empowering.”

We agree the French cafe is a little too warm — “I’m always schvitzing,” Beanie confesses — so we take a stroll on the High Line, which is flooded with people despite it being a damp, dreary Saturday. We’re both jarred by the crowds as they seem to move at breakneck speed, automated-walkway style. “Why am I at the airport on a nice stroll?” Beanie wonders with a giggle. And then, amid the human stream, she encounters some of her own fangirls. “Beanie, I love you!” one young woman shouts, and her friend follows with “I love you, too!” Beanie throws out a gracious “Thank you!” Ever since the release of Booksmart, “if I see two girls running and holding hands towards me,” it feels like “becoming friends with someone in line at a concert. You know you love the same things.”

Credits:

Photographer: Jacqueline Harriet

Hair: Peter Butler

Makeup: Mary Wiles

Stylist: Erin Walsh

Director: Kelly Bales, DP: Ariel Pomerantz, Editor: Samuli Haavisto

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue