Page 67 - Flaunt 171 - Summer of Our Discontent - St-John

i am not having a glass of wine because it is tuesday,” says bel
Powley, from her kitchen in London, where it is early evening. “I mean, I would be, but at the beginning of lockdown—when we were in severe lockdown—there was nothing to do. So, I would be like, ‘Cool. Better open up a bottle of wine!’ Then, I was like, ‘OK, I am definitely drinking too much.’ So, now, I am trying to just not drink. At least until, like, Thursday.”
You might recognize Powley’s kitchen. When making the rounds to promote her most-recent film—the Judd Apatow- directed The King of Staten Island, based on her co-star (and film’s co-writer) Pete Davidson’s troubled upbringing—Powley perched herself at the head of her kitchen table, with black cabinetry and stainless steel appliances as her backdrop, to transmit rapid-fire answers across the Atlantic Ocean into the living rooms of people who still stay up to watch such things as Late Night with Seth Meyers.
“I probably tell the same stories 400 times a day,” she says, admitting that she is simultaneously thrilled to be talking about a film she loved doing, where she plays Davidson’s friend with benefits / girlfriend [preferring the latter, of course], while also admitting to a hatred of Zoom that has become a common complaint from professionals of all stripes. “The King of Staten Island was an amazing experience. I love the people I worked with, so the only forgiving thing about enduring the usual press junkets is that afterward, I would be able to hang out with Pete and Maude [Apatow], eat dinner together, and celebrate the movie we made.
“Now, there is the Virtual Junket Man and that whole element is taken out of it,” she continues. “The Junket Man pulls you out of one virtual room and puts you into another one and
I am just sitting there staring at my screen for, like, eight-hour days. I was sitting at my kitchen table for four hours at a time, staring at this fucking screen, answering the same questions over and over again. It was really weird.”
If you are familiar with Powley’s work, you likely found her by way of 2015’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl. She was universally praised for her performance as a 15-year-old artist whose aspirations to become a cartoonist are nearly as fevered as her wish to lose her virginity. The awkward and inappropriate ‘70s love triangle that ensues between Minnie (played by Powley) and her mother’s boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård) made her the topic of conversation at every independent film festival at which it screened.
“I was a child,” she says now, at the ripe old age of 28. “But when I read that script, for Diary, I was floored by how rich and how real and how many parts of that character resonated with me. Thankfully, I read scripts like that a lot more. All the time. Progress has been made [in terms more complex roles being written for women] and still needs to be made. It might be more common now for women’s stories to be told, but there are still not enough women directing them.”
From February to early March of this year, Powley had moved into a rented home in Los Angeles to begin shooting the second season of AppleTV+’s The Morning Show. Set
to reprise her role as Claire Conway—alongside a cast
that includes Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carrell, and Reese Witherspoon—Powley’s plans were upended, of course, along with the rest of world’s, and anyone who had planned on doing anything at all in 2020.
“It was mad,” she recalls, as word of the pandemic and the possibility of lockdowns emerged during filming of the first episode. “I had been in L.A. for about six weeks. We had just settled in. Then the fucking pandemic hit. At the beginning,
I was a bit of a corona denier. Back in January, I had thought, ‘Oh, this is just like the flu and we will get through it like we do every year.’ But every week, it just got exponentially worse and worse. It wasn’t gradual. We started to do social distancing on set, and I thought there was no way that we would close down entirely. Then shit got real, very quickly.
“Family and friends in London were going into a panic,
so one day my boyfriend and I [actor Douglas Booth, who photographed Powley for this feature] looked at each other
and we were like, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’ We felt weird not being at home. We got to LAX [Los Angeles International Airport] and it was completely empty. We were freaking out
and drowning ourselves in hand sanitizer. All the people on the plane were drinking champagne and crying. It was the strangest experience. As soon as we got back, the next day, Boris Johnson made the announcement of a full lockdown.”
Powley has no idea when filming will resume on The Morning Show, let alone any of the other projects she has lined up for the near future—a future that continues to extend its delay into an even farther future, inching even the most sturdy among us closer to the edge of exasperated lunacy.
“Everyone is desperate to get back to work as soon as possible,” she says, about returning to Los Angeles. “I am actually starting to feel more antsy and anxious now than before, when we were in full lockdown. I think I respond really well to just being shut in my own house with no one to talk
to. I am quite good at being kind of quiet and in the corner, reading a book or watching a movie. Actually, the beginning felt quite nice. My screen time on my phone actually went down. I felt happy and content that I actually had the time to sit there and see all the films I had never seen, and do stupid things like art that I can’t do.
“Everything is so up in the air,” she continues. “There is nothing you can really anchor yourself to. That’s how it feels like now. When everyone in the world was in lockdown and no one left their house, you didn’t feel guilty for not having the urge to do something. Do you know what I mean? Now, I feel like I want to take that step, but I don’t really know how or when it is going to happen.”
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PHOTOGRAPHER: DOUGLAS BOOTH. STYLIST: CHER COULTER.