Beanie Feldstein stole hearts with her breakout supporting role in 2017’s “Lady Bird” and co-anchored “Booksmart,” one of the year’s funniest movies, with Kaitlyn Dever. Her latest film sees her taking center stage. The actress toplines Coky Giedroyc’s “How to Build a Girl,” a coming-of-age story about a 16-year-old British girl with big dreams. IFC rights snagged rights to the feature, which is based on Caitlin Moran’s novel of the same name. Deadline broke the news.
Determined to leave her small hometown behind, Johanna (Feldstein) reinvents herself as music critic Dolly Wilde. She’s simultaneously dealing with deadlines, raging hormones, body image issues, and family drama. The pic is set in ’90s England. Moran penned the script with John Niven (“Supervized”)
“How to Build a Girl” made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it took home the FIPRESCI Special Presentations award.
IFC will release the pic in 2020.
“We are overjoyed to release ‘How To Build A Girl’ and work with the impressive list of women in front of and behind the camera,” said Arianna Bocco of IFC Films. “Caitlin Moran is a supremely talented writer with such a unique and distinct voice and we can’t wait to share this film and Beanie’s performance with American audiences.”
Monumental Pictures’ Alison Owen and Debra Hayward produced the project.
When we asked Giedroyc what she’d like audiences to think about after watching the film, she said, “That you can fuck up multiple times in your teenage years, commit appalling fashion crimes, sleep with the wrong people, and behave like a total arse, but you can still pick yourself up, reinvent yourself, and everything will be OK. I wish someone had said that to me at 16.”
“Stella Does Tricks” and “Women Talking Dirty” are among Giedroyc’s previous features. Her TV directing credits include “Harlots,” “Seven Seconds,” and “The Killing.”
Feldstein is signed on to play Monica Lewinsky in “Impeachment,” the next installment of FX anthology series “American Crime Story.” Lewinsky is serving as a producer on the project.
