"Stargirl" Star Grace VanderWaal on the Disney+ Movie and Why Teens Should Play Teens Onscreen
On the surface, the YA novel-turned-Disney+ movie Stargirl (featuring Grace VanderWaal as the title character) is a simple one: a confident, quirky, almost otherworldly teenage girl enters a small town high school and jumpstarts their stagnant ecosystem with her combination of generosity, limitless self-certainty, and a little bit of magic. The football team starts winning, the outcasts become popular, and shy boy protagonist Leo Borlock (played by Graham Verchere) learns how to embrace what makes him unique.
It’s a premise that can veer into the obvious, tropey, manic pixie dream girl fetishism — except that in the new film, out March 13 on the streaming service, star Grace VanderWaal (in her acting debut) forces Stargirl Caraway’s story front and center. She’s not simply a plot catalyst, she’s a fully-realized teenager whose sincerity, even in the midst of mistakes, comes into focus over the course of the film. Leo thinks she must be magic; turns out, that magic is called emotional intelligence.
“I like how humanized Stargirl is in the movie,” Grace tells Teen Vogue. “I think she's a little more fairytale feeling in the book, and the movie displays her mistakes and how she isn't perfect. Even if you're someone as cool and admirable as Stargirl, you're still going to make stupid mistakes and you're still going to have to learn from them.”
In the hands of Grace and director/co-writer Julia Hart, Stargirl transforms into a story about figuring out who you want to be and how to become that person in a way that doesn’t hurt people, but that doesn’t aim to please them either. Last year, Grace told Teen Vogue that one of the things that attracted her to the character Stargirl was that she was so “unapologetically herself.” Now, she elaborates that there’s another story lurking just below the “be yourself” narrative. “The movie also explains how everything in life has consequences,” she says, “even the things that you may think are good.”
Grace herself, of course, has undergone her own transformation, from America’s Got Talent ukulele wunderkind to major label musician slash actor slash style icon. When she hops on the phone to talk with Teen Vogue, she’s in Paris, fresh off attending Chanel’s Fall 2020 Ready-to-Wear show for Paris Fashion Week. She’s now four years on from the AGT video of her original song “I Don’t Know My Name” and has released a full-length album, 2017’s Just the Beginning, as well as multiple EPs and singles including the 2019 disco-pop groove “Waste My Time.”
In Stargirl, Grace returns to her uke roots with an original ballad called “Today and Tomorrow” that she wrote for the film. Musicality is a central part of the life she brings to Stargirl, a character who performs the Beach Boys’ hit “Be True to Your School” completely unironically at a football halftime show and inspires the long-losing team to victory. Stargirl and Leo bond over music, the love they have for old songs they learned from their parents — in particular, Big Star’s classic, “Thirteen.” Amid gorgeously-shot montages of the New Mexico landscape, she and Leo fall in first love. Even when it all falls apart, they still have the music.
Like many aspects of the film, that impassioned music obsession comes off as sincere and legitimate, not garish. One likely reason for that is the fact that in the world of Stargirl, teens are played by actual teens, not glamorous 20-somethings in pseudo-puberty disguise. Grace is 16 now and was actually 14/15 when filming; Graham Verchere is 18 and was 16 when playing Leo, an actual 16-year-old. The entire adolescent cast looks like they belong in a real high school.
“A lot of high school movies, it's like 20-year-olds playing [young],” Grace says. She understands why: there’s a convenience factor there in casting young adults as opposed to minors. “But I like that [Stargirl didn’t do that] because I think a lot of kids look at these 20-year-olds who are supposed to be 16 and then wonder why they don't look like that. And it's because you're not 20. I think it's really good for children to see someone their age who looks [their age]. Same for the [male actors] too, it’s not just girls. Boys are looking at these grown men who are fully developed. Leo is a little scrawny, he's a teenager.”
The one slightly annoying thing about the Stargirl film is the ending. After the characters come together and the conflict is resolved, Stargirl Caraway floats away, dropping out of school and moving away with her mom. Leo and his friends get to grow up, go off to college, and they soon begin to think about Stargirl as if she was a dream, or a mirage. She doesn’t get a concrete future.
But in real life, Grace’s future translates that openness into opportunity; right now, she’s focused on promoting Stargirl, but after, she teases, “maybe you'll see some music from me.” In one of Stargirl’s most pivotal speeches in the film, she stands firmly in front of an audience, a real girl with a little bit of magic who is learning from her mistakes. She’s Susan Caraway, the name she was born with, but she’s also Stargirl, the name she chose.
“It’s easy to get confused when we’re moving so fast, and to think we’re doing the right thing when we’re not,” Stargirl says in that climactic moment. “Just remember that part of what makes [a flower] beautiful is how long it took to grow.”
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue