Over the years, A24 has worked with many actresses: indie darlings and A-listers included. From Saoirse Ronan, the misfit teenager in Lady Bird, to Toni Collette, the tortured mother in Hereditary, these women embody their painfully-human characters and make their idiosyncrasies their own. Equally, here are five actresses who could do just as good a job in an A24 movie.
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5 Zoë Kravitz
Actress and model Zoë Kravitz certainly looks the part of an A24 actress. A fashion icon, it’s not hard to imagine her amongst the trendy cast of A24’s hit show Euphoria. Or as one of Mills’ cool and punky 20th Century Women. Indeed, her role in High Fidelity proves she’s cut out for something similar.
Here, Kravitz plays protagonist Robyn Brooks, a record-store owner living in Brooklyn who recounts her past relationships through music. With her edgy fashion sense and detached coolness, Robyn is an A24 character through and through. And her music taste — which forms the show’s soundtrack — is also resolutely A24 (read: hipster). With praise flooding in for her performance in TheBatman, A24 would be wise to snap Kravitz up fast.
4 Eliza Scanlen
Given her close relation to A24’s beloved Greta Gerwig, Eliza Scanlen is an obvious pick. In 2019, Scanlen played kind and feeble Beth March in Gerwig’s second coming-of-age movie, Little Women. Though A24 didn’t produce this Louisa May Alcott adaptation, its artful cinematography, themes of family and feminism, and the reusing of Lady Bird actors Saoirse Ronan and Timothee Chalamet place it within close proximity to other A24 movies.
Released the same year, Babyteeth is another A24-esque movie starring Scanlen. Here, she plays the lead role of Milla Finlay, a teenager recently diagnosed with cancer. Very different in tone to Little Women — which is generally upbeat — Babyteeth bears a closer resemblance to A24’s The Florida Projector The Farewell: two bittersweet, character-driven dramas about dismal subjects (poverty and death, respectively). Light or dark, Scanlen is great at both.
3 Bel Powley
Bel Powley, known for her lead roles in The Diary of a Teenage Girl and Carrie Pilby, is another actress perfectly suited to an A24 coming-of-age movie. Again, it’s a surprise the former wasn’t produced by A24, being that it shares much in common with A24 dramas Eighth Grade and Lady Bird; namely, an awkward, fumbling protagonist, a focus on character over (unconventional) plot, and an indie soundtrack.
Like Lady Bird, The Diary of a Teenage Girl is also written and directed by a woman, Marielle Heller, and takes a refreshingly candid look at female adolescence. In particular, the movie explores female sexuality and blurred lines from the perspective of a young woman dating her stepfather: themes Powley masters and A24 is adept at addressing.
2 Lupita Nyong’o
Academy Award-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o needs to star in an Ari Aster horror. Having already worked with Jordan Peele on Us, it only makes sense that she works with modern horror’s other critically-acclaimed director: the director of Hereditary and Midsommar. Both A24 movies, Hereditary and Midsommar, are disturbing, psychological horrors bursting with carnal emotion.
Incidentally, Nyong’o’s career has prepared her for this exact kind of role. In Us, she terrified audiences with her portrayal of blade-wielding Red, and in 12 Years a Slave, she moved viewers to tears with her performance as the tortured, enslaved Patsey. An incredibly emotive, versatile actress, she deserves to join the ranks of scream queens Toni Collette and Florence Pugh.
1 Thomasin McKenzie
Thomasin McKenzie would also do well in an A24 horror or thriller. A star in the making, McKenzie was nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award for her work in Edgar Wright’s psychological horror Last Night in Soho. Starring alongside Anya Taylor Joy — who appears in A24’s horror The Witch — she plays whimsical Eloise, a young fashion student who has murderous visions of the past after moving to London.
A trippy, stylistic movie with retro music, Last Night in Soho is characteristically A24, and McKenzie’s performance in it rivals that of Scarlett Johansson (Under the Skin) and Morfydd Clark (Saint Maud). Her work in Old is also impressive, even if the movie itself isn’t. And she’s incredibly quirky, which helps as far as A24 is concerned.
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