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Eliza scanlen facebook11/3/2023 “She wants to be alive and be playful, not to be defined by her illness or her family’s pain,” says Scanlen. Milla, for her part, wants to go out kicking and screaming. “She said, ‘Still waters run deep.’ It’s not that she wastes away it’s that, in getting sick at such a young age, Beth never loses what it’s like to be a kid. “Greta was very adamant about bringing more life to the character,” says Scanlen. She is truly present in her skin, soaking in every moment. ![]() Yet Scanlen brings a vitality to Beth we haven’t seen on screen before, as if she’s tapped into a type of existential acceptance the other sisters can’t yet fathom. I realised how easy it was to hide behind your hair. “Shaving my head disallowed me from feeling any vulnerability. Girls reading Little Women love to pick a favourite March with whom to identify, and it’s not going to be her. Destined to die young from complications from scarlet fever, Beth is tragic in that we know – and she knows – that this is it for her. “But I think Beth is a total 180, actually.” Let’s face it: It’s hard to want to be Beth. Like, the last three roles, I die,” says Scanlen with a laugh. “I am finding a pattern that my characters die. Instead, her quiet strength and grounded humour busts open all the stereotypes. Thematically, many of her roles could feel passive or predictable in less capable hands – girls who get sick, girls who accuse others of crimes they didn’t commit. It’s a killer spectrum of roles that would have taken many actors a decade to accomplish, but Scanlen moves fast – she’s even finished work on her own directorial debut, “Mukbang”. In a few short years, she’s shot from Sydney theatre performer to HBO regular ( Sharp Objects’ Amma), Broadway actress ( To Kill a Mockingbird’s Mayella) and Greta Gerwig muse, as Little Women’s shy sister Beth March opposite Saoirse Ronan and Laura Dern. Scanlen has been no stranger to uncomfortable roles, even before Babyteeth left its mark on the global indie circuit. ![]() “Doing my first romantic role terrified me,” she days. As with Milla, the very act of losing her hair helped Scanlen reveal new possibilities. Today, in Brooklyn, the 21-year-old still sports a short pixie crop, but it registers as cool minimalism. “It felt transformational on a very personal level.” People treated her differently in public – “they assumed I was sick”. “I felt like a new person when I shaved my head,” she says. With the fatalistic flair of antipodean films like Heavenly Creatures and The Year My Voice Broke, Babyteeth offers a tragic but often deeply funny portrait of adolescence, centred by actress-of-the-moment Eliza Scanlen.įor the role, the Sydney-born performer had to lose her own hair. ![]() This last look shows an unexpected romantic side, but then again, Milla is in love. There’s the blue bob on the movie poster, an upswept platinum look, and the long waves that caught her classmate’s eye. ![]() They rotate with her moods, or what she’d like her moods to be. In Australian director Shannon Murphy’s Babyteeth, 16-year-old Milla wears many wigs. The brunette places it over her own hair and primps in the mirror, while the former blonde – bare head exposed – averts her eyes in shame. The brunette asks: “Can I try on your wig?” A scribble of conflict momentarily darkens the blonde’s face, but she finally acquiesces, handing over the wig. The other, a pale girl with mist-hued eyes, sports a long, honey-blonde mane. One, a brunette, seems focused, as if trying to decode something within her appearance. Two girls stand in their high school bathroom, assessing themselves in the mirror.
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