The new Moana. The 20-year-old wunderkind filmmaker. The multi Tony Award winner. The “Saturday Night Live” comedians. The next generation of Emilys. And the Australians at the heart of one of Sundance’s biggest hits.
There’s more than a few up-and-coming talents to get excited about in the movies this summer. We spoke to 11 ones to watch.
Catherine Lagaʻaia, “Moana”
Catherine Lagaʻaia (“lung-uh-aye-uh”) found out she got “Moana” on a school day. It was around 8:15 a.m. and she’d just heard the best news of her life after a very stressful year of auditioning. But the celebration would have to wait: It was swimming carnival day and she was on deck for the 400-meter backstroke.
“I guess, like, the water vibes carried through,” said Lagaʻaia, 20, laughing.
Lagaʻaia, who is one of eight children, grew up around acting in Sydney, Australia. Her father played Captain Typho in the “Star Wars” prequels, she went to a performing arts high school and a lot of her siblings are in theater. Two of her sisters even auditioned for “Moana” alongside her, but she was just the right age at the right time, she said.
The animated film meant the world to Lagaʻaia, who is of Samoan heritage, and she’s acutely aware of the big expectations for the live action film (out July 10) — she has them for herself too.
“I felt a fair bit of impostor syndrome stepping into it,” she said. “I think we’ve made some great changes, and we’ve kept a lot of the stuff that holds the heart of the film the same.”
Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen, “Leviticus”
Teenage boys Ryan (Stacy Clausen, 21) and Naim (Joe Bird, 19) are drawn to one another in their backwater Australian community in “Leviticus,” the “conversion therapy” horror that broke out at the Sundance Film Festival. It hits theaters on June 19.
“It is about growing up queer and how the fear of growing up queer can block someone mentally from acting on their desires, and physically,” Clausen said. “But I think that there is something in it for everyone, like whether you’re LGBTQIA or not, it’s about love.”
They knew they had made something special, but it’s been affirming to see it resonate with audiences. When the trailer posted on YouTube, Bird noticed one commenter who wrote that they wished they’d had this film when they were younger.
“It just takes one person to be inspired, or you know say, ‘Oh, I wish I had a film like this’ to know that you’ve kind of done your job,” Bird said. “It’s all about connecting.”
Kara Young and Mallori Johnson, “Is God Is”
Aleshea Harris chose a two-time Tony-winner, Kara Young, and a relative newcomer, Mallori Johnson, to anchor the big screen adaptation of her Obie-winning play “Is God Is.” The story is centered on twin sisters searching for their abusive father, who burned and scarred them as babies.
Young plays Racine the Rough One; Johnson is Anaia the Quiet One. After fending for themselves their entire lives are set on an epic road trip and a journey of revenge and reckoning. It’s in theaters on May 15.
“Anaia depends a lot on Racine to protect her,” Johnson said. “I think that they’ve set up a dynamic since they were children … they have this kind of codependent relationship.”
And although both Young and Johnson are in different phases of their careers, their enthusiasm for the material, and getting to be part of it, is identical.
“Getting into the world of ‘Is God Is’ feels like an ancestral calling in some wild, beautiful, almost like indescribable way,” Young said. “It’s an epic road trip. It’s a Greek tragedy. It’s a love story between two sisters …. I lost my train of thought because I just got so hyped.”
Kane Parsons, “Backrooms”
Kane Parsons was a teenager when he was signed to direct his first feature, based on his viral YouTube series “Backrooms.”
The concept was inspired by an internet creepypasta that imagined never-ending expanse rooms and hallways full of fluorescent lights, old carpet and monotonous yellow paint; He took that idea and ran with it, creating unnerving videos from his bedroom with the help of the open-source 3D graphics software Blender. Soon both James Wan and Shawn Levy’s companies were interested in taking it to the next level.
In the film, out May 29, Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a struggling furniture store owner who seemingly slips out of reality. Renate Reinsve co-stars.
“I don’t think of this as inherently horror-driven; it’s definitely not a building full of monsters,” Parsons, 20, said. “I’ve always been more interested in the sort of man looking in the mirror version.”
The bachelors, “72 Hours”
“SNL” cast members Kam Patterson, 27, and Ben Marshall, 30, play a couple of Gen Z guys on a bachelor trip, with Marcello Hernández, groom-to-be Mason Gooding and a middle-aged ad exec (Kevin Hart) who was accidentally added to the group chat in the new Netflix comedy “72 Hours” (streaming July 24).
“It was the most fun you could possibly have shooting a movie,” Marshall said.
Between goofing around in a mansion in New Jersey and hanging in Miami with Hernández, it was, Patterson said, like summer camp. And Hart was their de facto counselor. They teased Gooding about never having his shirt on, Marshall for being so uniquely bad at jet skiing and Patterson for that time someone left him with one of the production assistant’s walkie talkies and for 5 minutes he had an open mic to the entire crew. That energy continued when the cameras were on too.
“I don’t think we said one word that’s actually in the script,” Marshall laughed.
Patterson chimed in: “Not at all. We take that script and threw it out the window.”
The new assistants in “The Devil Wears Prada 2”
Call them the new Emilys. Or, maybe don’t. But there’s a new batch of smart, young things manning the desks at “Runway” in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” (now in theaters).
Simone Ashley, of “Bridgerton” fame, is Miranda Priestly’s first assistant Amari, who screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna didn’t want to be Emily 2.0.
“With Amari the comedy comes from, like, flick of the wrist kind of sassiness and her quiet confidence,” Ashley, 31, said. “Me and Aline kind of had this inside joke that Amari is like secretly the next Miranda.”
Comedian Caleb Hearon, 31, is Miranda’s second assistant, Charlie, who is not allowed to leave his desk. Ever. But he’s not mad about it: This is literally the dream.
“I really thought a lot about a guy like Charlie and what it would mean to him to be in this office and why he wouldn’t mind staying at the desk all day,” Hearon said.
And finally, there is Helen J Shen, 26, who after breaking out on stage in “Maybe Happy Ending” makes her big screen debut as Andy’s assistant, Jin.
Shen said she “was excited to see that the dialogue was so silly to me, but Jin doesn’t find it silly.”
“I felt like that was a fresh take on someone who knows exactly what they’re trying to do,” Shen added. “She has a lot of wonderful things under her belts, intelligence wise, and she’s just trying to like, show that and be as helpful to Andy as possible.”
