Meet Bel Powley, This Summer's Indie It 'Girl'
Bel Powley plays such a convincing teenager in Diary of a Teenage Girl that it’s almost a shock to learn that she’s actually 23. In the movie, a Sundance Film Festival hit that’s become the buzziest indie of the summer, Powley is all wide eyes and gawky limbs, a girl teetering with fear and excitement on the edge of adulthood. Speaking with Yahoo Movies at the fabulously twee Crosby Street Hotel in downtown New York this week, the British actress is graceful, composed, and quick to laugh — with none of the weariness one might expect from an actress who’s been promoting the same film since January.
“I’m just really pleased with the response to the movie,” Powley says of her extended press tour. “Obviously it’s a daring film, it’s a risky subject, and people could have been really short-sighted in their view of it. And they haven’t been.”
Indeed, Diary of a Teenage Girl (opening in New York and Los Angeles today, and going wider over the next four weeks) is the highest-rated movie this week on review aggregation site Metacritic. Critics are calling the film “a rare gem” (The LA Times), “required viewing” (Time), “lushly bawdy and funny” (The Guardian), and “a revolutionary portrait of adolescent sexuality” (Flavorwire).
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Still, it’s no wonder Powley and the filmmakers were nervous about the response. Set in San Francisco in 1976, Diary tells the story of Minnie Goetz, a 16-year-old girl who begins to explore her sexuality when her mother’s boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgard) makes a pass at her. (Kristen Wiig plays Minnie’s hard-partying but well-meaning mother.) An elicit touch turns into a full-blown affair, which sends Minnie down a rabbit hole of sexual exploration — with all the joy, discovery, and self-loathing that can entail. Director Marielle Heller does not flinch in her commitment to honoring Minnie’s perspective: The sex and nudity are explicit, but the film makes no judgments on its protagonist’s journey. It’s the kind of sexual-coming-of-age story routinely told about young men (“We’ll make films about men having sex with pies!” Powley points out), but applied to a teenage girl, it’s a revelation.
That’s the reason Powley fought hard for the role, edging out other actresses with a videotaped audition that included a personal message for the filmmaker. “I’ve never related to a character so much,” she says of Minnie. “I related to the confusion that Minnie has between sex and love. I feel like when you first enter into being a sexual being, you get those feelings that Minnie has, when she’s like, ‘I feel like I need a man next to me to feel like I’m really here.’ And you know, someone touches your tit and then you’re immediately like, ‘I’m in love with them!’”
In order to play a California teen in the 1970s, Powley spent three months preparing for the role: having deep conversations with the director, reading the illustrated novel on which the film is based, listening endlessly to Janis Joplin, and crucially, learning to speak with an American accent. (“At the beginning I couldn’t say ‘San Francisco,’ which was a real problem,” she admits.) She also began channeling the hesitant voice and awkward posture of her own teenage years. “I just didn’t really know how to hold myself,” she recalls. “Mari [Heller] describes it like I was like a deer learning to walk! So I tried to bring that it into Minnie. And also, the way of speaking — when you’re a teenager, everything is such an effort, you speak so low and everything is so long and you sound like you’re moaning all the time.”
Thus far, critics and audiences resoundingly agree that the film captures a fundamental part of the teenage experience. Unfortunately, the ratings boards in the U.S. and England have decided that Diary of a Teenage Girl is strictly for adults. In the United States, the film is opening with an R rating, while in the U.K., it received an 18 certificate — essentially the British equivalent of an NC-17. In other words, teenage girls cannot legally see Diary of a Teenage Girl in theaters — and Powley, for one, is incensed.
“It makes me mad! So angry,” she says. “And I was so surprised… I remember saying to Mari, ‘Oh don’t worry, we’re so liberal in England, it’ll definitely get a 15’ — which is the equivalent of an R. And then this happened and apparently the board that decided [the rating] was all men. And I think it just goes to show that — this sounds really extreme — but the patriarchy is afraid of teenage girls.”
“It’s like, we want to see little girls who are completely nonsexual before they go through puberty, and then ignore everything in the middle, and then women who get married and have babies,” she continues. “And it’s quite sickening. Because having been a teenage girl, it makes you feel very ostracized and very alone in your sexual thoughts. Like Minnie says, it makes you think, ‘I’m some kind of freak.’”
Powley’s commitment to reaching teenage girls allowed her the courage to tackle some of the film’s more difficult moments — like the sex scenes, which she and Skarsgard shot in the very first week of filming. (At the time, Powley had never even had an onscreen kiss.) “I believed in them so much,” she says. “And I wanted to show this kind of sex and positive body image for teenage girls, and my wanting to help that cause kind of overrode my fear.”
Coming off her first major role in Diary of a Teenage Girl, Powley has already booked an ambitious slate of films. She’ll soon be seen alongside Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult in Drake Doremus’ sci-fi romance Equals, followed by the thriller Detour (with Tye Sheridan and Stephen Moyer); the drama Ashes in the Snow, set in Siberia during World War II; the Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley biopic A Storm in the Stars (with Elle Fanning and Douglas Booth); and the coming-of-age comedy Carrie Pilby, in which she plays the title role. “The only rule that I have is that I need to play strong female roles,” she explains. “And I don’t mean strong as in a superhero or even someone who comes out okay at the end — I just mean, a well-rounded, 3-D, fleshed-out human being that isn’t just in the movie because of the dude. Right? That’s all ask for, and after that, I’m so open to doing everything.”
