SAG-AFTRA members are at the moment on strike; as a part of the strike, union actors usually are not selling their movie and TV tasks. This interview was performed previous to the strike.
Amandla Stenberg’s eyes are coated in smudged black make-up. Her pores and skin is naked, dewy, and dare I say perhaps a bit of sweaty. The actor, who makes use of she/they pronouns, has bleach-blonde braids with bubblegum pink strands scattered all through and barely outgrown roots. This will learn like a harsh critique, but it surely’s all intentional — it’s the identical look she wears in her newest movie, My Animal, coming to theaters on September 8 and on digital beginning September 15. The hair shade, as she tells me, is her personal brainchild.
“I did my hair for My Animal,” Stenberg reveals. “The film exists in nearly a non-specific period of time, but it surely feels older so there’s one thing very campy and female concerning the character and her wardrobe.” With that got here Stenberg’s concept to go for “poorly-bleached, box-dye-colored hair with roots displaying” for her character, Jonny, a love-torn Canadian teen along with her coronary heart spiritually on her sleeve (however drawn on her face for dramatic impact) who falls for Heather, a hockey participant who moonlights as a werewolf. As she falls deeper in love with Heather all through the movie, Jonny’s hair transforms from brassy blonde to treasured bubblegum pink. “We labored the colour pink into her hair all through the storyline,” they clarify, “so the pink telegraphs a few of the metaphors of the movie.”
Whereas many actors vie for a spot within the producer’s or director’s seat of the movies wherein in addition they star, Stenberg will be discovered within the hair and make-up departments when she’s not filming. “Formulating the hair and make-up of the characters is one in all my favourite components of the method,” they are saying. “You get to make quite a lot of decisions about who this particular person is and the way they specific themselves on this planet.”
My Animal, an ‘80s-inspired queer horror flick that sits on the intersection of Twilight and Twin Peaks, wasn’t her first go at crafting magnificence concepts for her personal on-screen counterparts. Stenberg additionally ideated the reverse cat-eyes and smudged, streaky mascara from 2022’s Our bodies Our bodies Our bodies, a horror-comedy movie that cemented her as an A24 darling alongside the likes of Emma Roberts, Jenna Ortega, and Florence Pugh. “For Our bodies Our bodies Our bodies, we determined to do one thing rather less conventional and have eyeliner solely beneath the attention versus on high, and we additionally did acrylic nails,” they are saying. (The manicure du jour, by the best way, is lengthy and black with a neon inexperienced French tip and star accents.)
