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Amandla Stenberg is all grown up in Bodies, Bodies, Bodies.
We first got familiar with her as young Rue in The Hunger Games, and she went on to star in a slew of other films like The Hate U Give and Dear Evan Hansen. In an interview with Complex ahead of the Bodies premiere, the 23-year-old actress says that playing Sophie in the slasher film is the start of her taking on more adult and serious roles that match where she’s at. “It’s just exciting to become older. I look quite young for my age, and so I’ve been playing teenage roles for a while, but this is one of my first roles where I’m playing my actual age,” Stenberg explains. “I have the freedom to explore with darker themes, with characters that are darker and more complex, and are living adult lives, which comes with a whole new set of circumstances.”
Sophie is in her early 20s and while we don’t know much about her going into Bodies, we learn through her strained friendships that she hasn’t always made the best choices. Sophie and her new girlfriend Bee (Maria Bakalova) show up unannounced to a hurricane party her best friend David (Pete Davidson) is throwing in his father’s lavish mansion. The group of rich and privileged friends react coldly to Sophie’s arrival, but then you get the impression that their reaction is historical-based on Stenberg’s character’s past.
Stenberg was the first to join the Halina Reijn film’s cast and she says they initially questioned whether she should play Bee or Sophie. Stenberg’s past roles have been more innocent and childlike, and they are incredibly easy to root for. Sophie, on the other hand, is struggling with drug addiction. She is cold and calculated, more audacious, alluring, and at times manipulative. “I came to the conclusion that Sophie would be the more challenging character for me. I’m a bit more introverted and a bit more awkward, and shy at times. Some of the characters I play have a tendency to have some of those elements of introvertedness or sweetness,” she says. “It was an exciting challenge for me to play someone who’s more chaotic and kind of sexy, but in a way that’s a bit rough around the edges, and someone who is not necessarily the kindest at all times as well. I got to tap into the parts of myself that are more expressive and more extroverted, and that was really fun.”
While the film feels like it’s going to be following a group of friends during a wild party weekend at first, it quickly switches when they all start playing a murder-mystery-style game called “Bodies, Bodies, Bodies.” Soon after, the game becomes reality when people start mysteriously dying in the house, and they all have to sort out who the killer is—ultimately bringing out the worst in all of them. The film gets gruesome and violent, and some scenes might be tough to watch for some viewers.
“It’s actually really wonderful to hear that the movie scares [people], and that it’s intense and hard to watch. When you are working on something this intensely for so long, you become desensitized to some of the elements,” Stenberg says. “We want to ensure that the movie was both sardonic and funny, and then also terrifying in equal measure. We, as the people who made the movie, think so much about are the jokes hitting? Or do you feel like you get a deep psychological understanding of these characters? Sometimes I forget the movie’s actually pretty brutal.”
Those types of scenes are also not easy for the performers to process. Stenberg says that she sometimes finds herself needing to separate from a role in order to keep herself sane. “People like to make films about death or that have elements of death in them. Quite often we use the medium of film to explore that. I’ve engaged with death a lot in different films that I’ve been a part of,” she says. “There have been moments with certain projects where I felt like maybe I took this a little too far and this became a little too real for me, and it took me some time once I finished with a shoot to decompress and let go of the trauma that my body thought it had experienced. Your body really cannot discern the difference between a fake memory and a real one.”
Image via A24 Films
Chase Sui Wonders, who plays Emma in Bodies, equipped her co-stars with a trick that helped their minds and bodies differentiate their acting in the film from real-life stress. “There were definitely moments where I had to do some closure tactics on set. This was actually something that our co-star Chase taught us, which is when you go into the day, you talk to yourself like a crazy person. ‘Hi, body. I’m about to go into this environment. It’s not real. Don’t worry. Nothing you’re about to experience actually is happening to you,’” Stenberg says. “At the end of the day, you go, ‘Hi, body, we’re back. It’s over. The fun is done, and now we’re turning back to ourselves. You can let go of everything that happened today.’ But there were definitely a couple of death scene moments that stuck with me for a little bit, and I kind of had to shake off.”
She adds: “When you say out loud, to your subconscious, ‘Hey, just so you know, this isn’t real,’ it actually can be really helpful.”
As chaotic and gruesome as the film can be at times, it does also have some strong comedic moments, as well as an honest examination of how Gen Z interacts with each other and the world around them. Bodies feels like one of the most honest portrayals of this generation that we have seen in film recently, while also giving insight into young women’s experiences the way 2004’s Mean Girls and 2009’s Jennifer’s Body did when they were released. “Movies like that, I actually do think were quite accurate to the reality of being a young person at that time. But the culture of young people has shifted a lot because of the amount of media that we grow up with, the amount of self-branding and self-awareness that is almost forced upon us from a very young age,” Stenberg explains. “Gen Z has a real razor-sharp and sardonic sense of humor, and a very sophisticated understanding of themselves, and a very sarcastic way of dealing with their emotions and feelings because we just process and ingest so much media and information all the time that I feel like that becomes one of the primary coping mechanisms.”
When watching TV shows or movies about Gen Z or younger generations, the characters can seem flat and the writing often feels performative, out of touch, and sometimes even forced. Bodies feels realistic, while also including mentions of social media and group chats without making it a major focus of the story. “What was really refreshing about this script was to feel like it was speaking a language that did feel authentic to Gen Z. It didn’t feel contrived, or was adults trying to speak or think like Gen Zers,” Stenberg says. “That’s because of our amazing playwright, Sarah DeLappe. She is so deeply witty and that was already present in the script. That’s why I fell in love with it and was so excited about it because it did feel like a rare opportunity of reading a movie about people within this age group that didn’t feel contrived.”
Image via A24 Films
DeLappe wrote the screenplay and the director also allowed the cast to add input to the script by integrating parts of themselves into their characters, and that elevated their performances. “What was so much fun about this movie, and what’s fun about comedy in general, is you just have the opportunity to make fun of yourself. We started incorporating stuff that was very personal to us into our dialogue, things about ourselves that we hated or wanted to make fun of, or our own behaviors that we knew were ridiculous or absurd,” the actress says. “We would fold them into our characters and into our dialogue, and some really rich, cool stuff came out of that, particularly with Rachel Sennott. She’s just so hilarious, she’s such a talented comedian. Most of Rachel’s improv actually made the final cut of the movie.”
Stenberg is right, Sennott is stellar as Alice in Bodies. The actress somehow made what could’ve been an insufferable rich podcaster into someone that was funny, relatable, and rather likable. The rest of the characters are similar in the sense that you can’t quite figure out if you want them to make it out alive or not. Is it their privilege or their selfishness and disregard for each other that makes you feel a bit of disdain for them? It’s hard to say. As a viewer, you can’t pinpoint right away why you don’t trust any of them from the start and why they don’t trust each other even after being longtime friends. But that uncertainty adds to the general message of the A24 film that everyone in the mansion is flawed in their own ways.
“It was such a rich piece to work from because it’s so much fun to dive into the really intricate interpersonal relationships between lifelong friends. When you have an ensemble cast, and everyone is so talented and knows their character so well, it just lent itself to an environment where the relationships just existed, and then we could just act them out,” Stenberg says. “We could lean into them and let them express themselves. I do love that it is this kind of, sort of dark-sided, almost femme fatale horror. That was one of my favorite elements from the jump. I was like, ‘OK, the dudes die immediately.’ Well, not to spoil everything, but most of this movie centers on these young girls, running around covered in blood and wielding swords at each other, it’s ridiculous. I am such a sucker for that. I loved the tone of it, and Halina did a fantastic job executing it.”
The men are not the most important part of the plot but Davidson’s role as David is central to the overall story since he’s the first to die. Stenberg and Davidson share one scene, in particular, that’s featured in the first trailer that was a highlight in the film. The way they both communicate with each other is one of the most honest and hilarious interactions in the entire movie. Part of that magic is Davidson’s appeal and his all-around nature. It almost feels like the comedian is not really acting, but instead, he’s playing an exaggerated version of himself, and that helped his co-stars.
“We all had a fantastic time working with him, and it didn’t feel difficult at all to get to know him and to establish that comfort where we could just kind of riff off of each other,” Stenberg says. Davidson opted out of doing press for the film, perhaps because of the heavy interest in his dating and personal life, but according to the actress, he is exactly how his famous ex-girlfriends have previously described him to be (Kate Beckinsale agreed that he has a “nice personality”). “Pete’s hilarious, obviously, and such a sweetheart. He has experienced such a bizarre degree of media exposure and scrutiny when he is really just this chill sweet dude from Staten Island, who still lives in Staten Island to this day,” Stenberg says about her co-star. “He really just cares about his home, his family, where he’s from. He’s really sweet and authentic, there’s not an inauthentic bone in his body. He can really only just be himself, and he is also really sensitive and kind.”
Aside from the SNL alum, Sennott, and Stenberg, the Bodies, Bodies, Bodies cast showcases strong performances from actresses that are bound to have a bright future in Hollywood.Industry’s Myha’la Herrold plays the hard-to-read Jordan, who has a romantic history with Sophie that threatens her relationship with Bee. Meanwhile, Maria Bakalova, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in 2020’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, excels in playing the naive Bee. Bodies is equal parts slasher film and comedy, and Reijn captured both genres particularly well, which is admirable since the A24 flick is the Dutch filmmakers’ English directorial debut. Casting Stenberg as the lead was Reijn’s first good choice for this project. The film and this role have allowed the actress—who will star in the Star Wars series The Acolyte next year—the opportunity to break free from the limitations of being a child star and set her on the path for more lead roles to come.
Bodies, Bodies, Bodies hits theaters everywhere on Friday (Aug. 12).