Laura Harrier Feels Seen

From Harper's BAZAAR

Like many of us during quarantine, Laura Harrier finally gave in and made banana bread. The actress hardly ever bakes, but in the time of social distancing, she went ahead and tried a new hobby. “Baking has always terrified me, because it’s so exact and scientific,” she says over the phone from her home in L.A., “and it’s very much, like, not how I work, like, as a human or as a cook.” The final product, which she posted on Instagram the day before, was “actually pretty good.” She even considered giving some to her neighbors. While sheltering in place, Harrier’s days felt long and endless at first, but promoting Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood, the new Netflix series on which she stars, gave her schedule some bustle and structure. “I get to talk to a person, which is very exciting these days,” she jokes. The next batch of banana bread will have to wait.

If the social distancing life is boring and mundane, Hollywood is anything but. The campy seven-episode drama reimagines 1940s La La Land as it tackles issues of representation still relevant in the industry. Harrier plays budding actress Camille Washington, who lands the lead role in a blockbuster directed by a filmmaker of Asian descent; written by a Black, openly gay screenwriter; and greenlit by a Jewish woman running the biggest film studio in town. The movie breaks box-office records, wins Oscars, and changes the landscape of the industry—protesters be damned. The ambitious alternate history did not sit well with some critics, who brushed it off as hollow and naïve, but Harrier stands by the project’s main sell: that if marginalized communities were better represented earlier in history, Hollywood would be much more inclusive now. “Hopefully, it’s just encouraging for people in this day and age to keep fighting for that and to keep fighting to see all types of faces on-screen and behind the screen,” she says.

The characters in Hollywood aren’t immune to the backlash of the time period. Protesters erect burning crosses at their homes and terrorize the studio. Screenwriter Archie Coleman and boyfriend Rock Hudson are booed on the red carpet. Camille is discouraged from auditioning for “white roles” and is barred from sitting front row at the Oscars. In modern days, that kind of resistance takes different forms.

“I mean, obviously, these days, those conversations are kind of more behind closed doors,” says Harrier. “I don’t think anyone would really come up to me and say, ‘No, that’s a white role, honey,’ right now. But it definitely doesn’t mean that that’s not implied, or that’s not been said privately by the powers that be.” She points to her casting as a Spider-Man love interest in 2017: “That would’ve never happened had that movie been made five years earlier.”

There’s also reminiscent pushback from studio executives who presume a film led by a Black woman won’t sell. “This was so recent, but you think about a movie like Black Panther, which had never been made because people would say, ‘Oh, you can’t have an all-Black superhero movie, and nobody will go see it. People won’t connect with the characters,’” Harrier recalls. “And then it was made for the first time, and it went and broke every single record. It was a billion-dollar movie. It’s just so crazy, because who made these rules? Who sat there and said this when it hadn’t actually been tested? And as soon as it is tested, those barriers and those stereotypes go out the window because they’re false.”

Harrier is familiar with the allure of Old Hollywood; she would watch Casablanca with her parents growing up, but couldn’t fully connect to the storylines, “because I didn’t see people who looked like me in aspirational roles.” Instead, she saw women of color play maids or servants, which is something her character, Camille, is pigeonholed into at the start of her career. Harrier didn’t even know about Dorothy Dandridge until she saw Halle Berry play her in the 1999 biopic. “I think had she been Ava Gardner or Marilyn Monroe or Katharine Hepburn, her career would have looked very, very different. But her being a Black woman, she just was never able to achieve the heights that I think she should have.” Dandridge and Lena Horne were big inspirations for Camille, according to Murphy, and Harrier wanted to honor them with her performance.

Research for the job entailed binge-watching old movies like Carmen Jones, Woman of the Year, Some Like It Hot, How to Marry a Millionaire. Harrier worked with a dialect coach to adapt a Mid-Atlantic accent. She changed her movements in front of a camera. (“It feels like the actors know that they’re in a movie.”) And, of course, the hair, makeup, and wardrobe—read: ringlets, red lip, and pencil skirts—completed the transformation.

Harrier didn’t even know what Hollywood was about when she auditioned. It was mysteriously called an “Old Hollywood project” with mock imagery from a nondescript ’40s movie. Four or five months passed without a response, so she forgot about the show or assumed it was dropped. But then, she got a call from her agent inviting her to a chemistry read with Darren Criss, who was already cast as director Raymond Ainsley, later Harrier’s on-screen beau.

“And it was funny, because I think he was more nervous than I was, which is really endearing and charming,” Harrier recalls of Criss. “And then also, he already had the part. He didn’t have a reason to be nervous, but it was supersweet, and it set me at ease, actually. But Ryan was there, sitting silently in the corner, and I was really intimidated.” The next morning, she got a phone call. She was cast as Camille.

Harrier also struck a note with executive producer, writer, and director Janet Mock, who incorporated her own life lessons into Camille’s character. She wanted to show Camille’s “quiet determination” and awareness that as a minority, she’d “have to be twice as good to get half as much,” which is something Mock’s grandmother and father used to tell her. Working with Harrier in that role was fulfilling. “The first time I felt a huge wind was in real life with Laura,” Mock previously told BAZAAR.com. “She was like, ‘I had never been directed by a Black woman before in my career as an actor.’ We had a kinship.”

Mock fondly recalls the day they filmed Camille’s screen test scene for Hollywood’s fictional film, Meg. “[Laura] showed up to do that perfect tear down her eyes in order [for Camille] to secure that role. The whole second half of the series is reliant upon her delivering this one scene. And she had to perform it so many times.” Harrier nailed it. “[Afterward], I screamed and said ‘cut.’ Then I ran and hugged her. I was like, ‘We got it, girl.’ Everything else was icing on the cake.”

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At 17, Harrier moved from her hometown of Evanston, Illinois, to New York to attend NYU but left a year later to focus on acting at the William Esper Studio (alumni include Tracee Ellis Ross and Kathy Bates). It will surprise no one to learn that Harrier—tall, thin, and beautiful—also had a stint in modeling, but she lost interest. “I was so bored as a model, and the only time it felt fun was when I got to speak and have a personality and create some sort of character and be myself,” she says. “It fell into place. Like, ‘Oh, maybe acting is what I should be doing.’”

In her final year at drama school, Steve McQueen cast her for his new HBO pilot, Codes of Conduct, shortly after 12 Years a Slave won big at the Oscars. The series was slashed, but that didn’t stop Harrier’s career from taking off. In 2017, she appeared opposite Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Homecoming. The year after, she played student activist Patrice Dumas in Spike Lee’s Academy Award–winning BlacKkKlansman. Less than two years later, she’s starring in a Ryan Murphy Netflix series.

Harrier sees parallels with her own journey and Camille’s. “I’ve definitely had sort of those ‘pinch me’ moments and feeling like, Oh, this is going to change my life in some way.” The biggest one was going to the Cannes Film Festival in 2018 for the BlacKkKlansman premiere—her first time attending the storied event, dressed by Louis Vuitton no less.

“Standing on that carpet, and then you’re walking up the steps that you’ve seen a million times … you’ve seen photos of Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn … and Dorothy Dandridge was there walking up those steps,” Harrier reminisces. “It was definitely a ‘whoa, Hollywood’ moment. I’m just the girl from the suburbs of Chicago, and to be in those situations always feels a little surreal.” She adds, “Maybe [that’s] what Camille is feeling a little bit when she steps into these spotlights as well.”

There was also a connection between Camille’s mentorship from Hattie McDaniel, the first Black actor to win an Oscar, and Harrier’s own experience sharing scenes with real-life idol Queen Latifah, who played McDaniel. “That line of ‘being in the room’ that Hattie says to [Camille], she repeated in the same sense to me, how important it is to just be there.”

Camille gets a true Hollywood ending in the finale when she wins the 1948 Best Actress Oscar for her role in Meg, a spin on Peg Entwistle’s tragic story, trumping the likes of Joan Crawford and Loretta Young. Trophy in hand, she acknowledges the significance of her win in her acceptance speech. “I kept waiting for someone on the screen who looked like me.” Of course, to prep for that moment, Harrier would replay the Oscars speech to end all Oscars speeches: Halle Berry, Best Actress, 2002. “I watched it over and over before I did that scene,” Harrier admits. “I cry every single time.”

She adds, “It’s so powerful and so beautiful, and it was such a celebration, and the emotion is so real. And it’s just really crazy that it took until 2002 for that to happen, and it felt really crazy that it hasn’t happened since.”

With that win, Berry became the first Black woman to win the Best Actress Oscar, 74 years into its history. “A door tonight has been opened,” she said at the time, through tears. But no other Black actress has won the title after her. Harrier likes to think that if someone like Camille had won decades prior, maybe the Oscars—and Hollywood as a whole—would look a lot more diverse today.

“I feel like [Halle Berry] and the world thought that this was going to be a huge shift. And in a way it was, because it happened, and her achievement is no less because of that. But it’s frustrating that even after that, we’re having these #OscarsSoWhite conversations.”

That’s another reason why Camille’s fictional win is so pointed; it arrives months after yet another wave of the #OscarsSoWhite backlash. “There’ll be this representation, and then it kind of goes back to the way that it was. Hopefully, that’s shifting,” Harrier says.

“And the thing is that actors of color aren’t given the same opportunities to have those types of Oscar-winning roles,” she adds. Her comment evokes another famous acceptance speech: Viola Davis winning at the 2015 Emmys, where she said, “The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.”

“Exactly,” Harrier says, her voice energized, when I bring up the quote. “It’s really just the opportunities and the types of goals that we’re presented with are very rarely Oscar worthy. And it’s nothing to do with talent, it’s just being considered for those types of roles.” In real life, only a handful of Black women have won acting Oscars, including Davis, Hattie McDaniel, Whoopi Goldberg, Octavia Spencer, and Lupita Nyong’o—all for supporting roles.

With that in mind, is Harrier still interested in an Academy Award? “I’m not going to lie. I’m an actor. Of course, I want to [win] an Oscar,” she laughs. But it’s not her defining goal. “Maybe there needs to be some other sort of barometer of success beyond what these gatekeepers, who have been the gatekeepers for years and years and years, deem to be worthy.”

Harrier was already at the ceremony last year for BlacKkKlansman, which won Best Adapted Screenplay. Will we see her there again in the years to come as a nominee? Until then, Harrier has other projects on the way, none of which she can talk about right now—which can only mean bigger things are coming.

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