What were you doing in your teens? Were you starring in major motion pictures? Were you writing books? Yeah…me neither. I was hanging out at the mall with my friends looking for cute boys to talk to. Meanwhile teens like Storm Reid and Rowan Blanchard, who plays Veronica Kiley in Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time is out here putting us to shame!
We got a chance to interview this dynamic young lady during our Wrinkle in Time press junket. Here are a excerpts from our time with her, proving why she is such an impressive starlet:
On playing a mean girl:
“I mean, it was definitely different for me. I felt like I was doing it in this way where it wouldn’t be, gosh, minimized to just a very stereotypical mean girl role. I really trusted Ava to make a character that felt complex and more than just a mean girl. I think there’s a lot of layers to Veronica that we get to see throughout the film.”
On representation in Wrinkle:
But I guess it’s just this film marks such an incredible and unique time in history where so many people who have never seen themselves on screen are able to go to a film and see themselves starring in a huge sci-fi movie. Like, that’s massive. I was just looking on Twitter, there’s a lot of organizations led by young teenage Black girls to buy movie tickets for a bunch of other young Black girls to go see this movie.
On her character in the film:
“…it definitely made me aware of how the bully is always the person who’s hurting so deeply inside, which is such a stereotypical thing to say but very true. And I think we see that in one scene with Veronica like the layers of her body insecurities and all of these things that are very, very real, that teenage girls sort of access every day.”
On Ava:
One thing that I definitely learned so much through filming this was Ava let me shadow her as a director…. I learned a lot just about kind of what I want to do later in my life through Ava. But seriously, you guys, she’s so–, it’s–, her magnitude as a person is so overwhelming. And just the idea that this woman has worked so hard and still remembers everybody’s name. Like, that was the one thing that I realized so much on working on the same side as her is she knows the entire crew by name and just being able to follow this woman who’s so loyal to everyone around her and so giving and wants to not only succeed but wants to bring people up with her, it’s just–, it was so incredible.
On writing a book of her own:
“I made this book called Still Here that just came out about a week and a half ago. And it was just really important to me I guess to have these concrete forms of how I view art, which I think is a lot more accessible than how we think of art in a museum or how we think of art as a big painting….I had 20 other contributors that helped me kind of compile this thing about teenage survival. And so, yeah, it’s cool that it’s sort of coming out during the time that this is. It feels like it’s a really cool time to be a teenager. It’s also a scary time. That’s cool. I don’t know. There’s a lot of feelings.
She then gushed about Oprah and even more about Ava. It was sweet watching her be a little girl and a young woman all at once. It made me think of what Kai will be like when she grows up.
Check out Rowan in A Wrinkle In Time!! It’s out in theaters now. Check the trailer here: Wrinkle in Time Review
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