Hailee Steinfeld, 19, is the kind of girl who gets invitations to Tom Ford fashion shows. She’s a “Bad Blood” music-video-certified member of the #SwiftSquad. And she famously charmed on the red carpet at the Oscars when she was nominated for her role in True Grit at age 14.
But Steinfeld left her style instincts way, way off-screen for her filmThe Edge of Seventeen, a biting coming-of-age comedy from first-time feature director Kelly Fremon Craig that’s the closing gala of the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday, before opening wide Nov. 18.
She plays Nadine, an awkward and angsty teen whose world goes from bleak to unbearable when her best (OK, only) friend starts dating her golden child brother (Everybody Wants Some’s Blake Jenner).
“I’ve learned to love the idea of playing a character that is further and further away from me,” she said over the phone this week, having swung into Toronto for an under-24-hour TIFF appearance in the midst of her other gig, as a fledgling pop star on tour with Meghan Trainor. “She wears things that I wouldn’t necessarily wear to the places she is wearing them to.”
She cites a shag-mullet mess of a wig she wears for a flashback as one example. “Putting that wig on was insane,” she says. “I was like, I’m going to hate this. But I put it on and thought, ‘It’s kind of sad how I look right now, but at the same time, I kind of love it.’”
The Vancouver-shot film, which co-stars Woody Harrelson as Nadine’s teacher and irritably unsympathetic shoulder to cry on, revels in that kind of so-ghastly-it’s-glorious tension. Take Nadine’s crush on a school bad-boy who works at Petland and her misguided fantasies of seducing him in the tropical fish aisle.
Her role as Emily in Pitch Perfect 2 aside, Steinfeld has largely played dramas, including her previous TIFF appearance for the civil war drama The Keeping Room. Her approach to the comedy, in which she appears in almost every scene, wasn’t much different.
“A lot of the humour comes from how humiliating and dramatic and overreacting to every situation this character is,” she says. “The script was written so well you don’t necessarily read it as a comedy.
“It’s not necessarily funny. It’s dramatic and it’s humiliating and it’s torture.
“You read it and you feel for this person. That is more what I played to than the comedy necessarily, so it’s amazing its final result could be so comedic.”
A media screening of the film, a notoriously tough room, was filled with wild whoops of laughter, suggesting Steinfeld’s suffering for her art — in wig and out — was not in vain. Some of the biggest laughs come from her sparring with Harrelson, a teacher who wearily weathers Nadine’s perpetual crises.
“I had only seen a picture of him walking a red carpet in pyjamas when everyone else was in tuxes and gowns,” Steinfeld jokes about Harrelson before admitting she was a fan of his work, including his breakout role on Cheers, even though she was 11 years away from being born when he joined the sitcom in 1985.
“We would read the scene and then go off on these super random amazing tangents,” she says. “And then we’d start over in the same take and we’d just go through it again. So many amazing moments came out of that.”
Despite Steinfeld’s atypical life, Nadine’s awakening from her own awkwardness wasn’t a stretch for her, Oscar red carpet experience or not. “There’s something so timeless about this film,” she says.
“Falling in love for the first time or being betrayed by your best friend doesn’t change. There are so many universal themes that I connected to and other people will as well.”