“I’m literally the most awkward person ever,” Hailee Steinfeld admits. But she doesn’t seem that awkward. Today she’s sitting on a couch at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, about to start a full day of press for her latest film The Edge of Seventeen (out on November 18). It’s a genuine, layered, coming-of-age film about Nadine, a high school teen who doesn’t quite fit in.
She does have at least one advantage over the freaked-out Nadine. “I’m a little better at masking it than my character is,” the 19-year-old actress says. Plus, unlike her Edge of Seventeen character, Steinfeld didn’t have to forlornly traverse high-school hallways, because she was home-schooled after sixth grade. Her formative years were spent on the sets of movies like True Grit, Begin Again, Romeo & Juliet, and Ender’s Game. But neither does she think she got off scot-free just because she skipped the traditional high school experience: “That’s just growing up….the whole growing-up part, I think we all got.”
Her aversion to high-school trappings even extended to her graduation; she could have attended a graduation with other home-schooled kids, but Steinfeld felt too weird about it. “I don’t like social gatherings like that, so I begged my parents and my teacher to let me skip out on it,” she says. In retrospect, Steinfeld thinks she “probably would have liked to have the photo.” But still, there was no way she was going to get involved with all the traditional pageantry: “The whole cap and gown thing stresses me out. I was not about it.”
After doing Pitch Perfect 2 last year, in which Steinfeld played a college freshman, and after releasing her debut EP Haiz in November of 2015, the actress felt ready to move away from those uncomfortable high-school years. So when she was approached about The Edge of Seventeen, Steinfeld initially resisted.
“I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to be 20 in a couple years, I don’t really want to be playing teenagers anymore,'” she explains. “Even though I was a teenager, and was going to be for a couple more years. Then, she took a look at the script. “I was pleasantly surprised,” she says. “I realized it doesn’t get more complex than this story and this character.”
In fact, taking on the role of outsider Nadine, who struggles with the news that her best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson) is dating her seemingly perfect brother (Blake Jenner), taught Steinfeld more than she was expecting. For one thing, she got to unleash all that pent-up high school angst in Nadine’s shoes.
“I really do feel like without this role I would not have had the opportunity to take that step from being a teenager to a young woman,” says Steinfeld. “It gave me the opportunity to discover so much about myself. It gave me the feeling of graduating from being that person and letting all of that built-up teen angst and emotion and bitterness and excitement and happiness and nervousness and everything go. I put all those emotions into one person and one moment.”
The Edge of Seventeen is a coming-of-age flick that doesn’t look down on its characters simply because they are in high school. For Steinfeld, it’s reminiscent of some of her favorite movies: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Nadine is smart and complicated, and she is also flawed.
“It’s an honest telling of what it’s like being a teenager growing up right now,” the actress reflects. “Nadine’s a good person and she’s cool at heart…She is who she is. I wouldn’t even say she’s actually different—she’s just herself.”
In the end, becoming Nadine taught Steinfeld something important that applies beyond being an actress. “Playing a character in a contemporary world has always been a challenge for me,” she admits. But the role pushed her in the best possible way: “I learned the incredible lesson of doing as much research as you could possibly do and then just forgetting about it, and just living and doing it. I’ve never had an experience like that, where I’ve felt so confident in going to set and knowing what I’m there to do.”
It’s a wise sentiment from someone who claims to be the world’s most awkward human. But Steinfeld, who will next shoot Pitch Perfect 3 and also unveil her debut album in the coming months, knows how to keep it together on the outside. She’s been in the spotlight throughout all her most difficult years, through the fashion misfires and bad hair and skin we all faceduring adolescence. And she knows now that you just have to fake it.
“I figured out how to play it cool,” Steinfeld laughs. “Inside I am so not cool. Like, ‘Everything is falling apart in front of my eyes.’ But no one knows it.”