“Sierra Burgess Is A Loser” will mark Lindsey Beer’s first screenwriting credit. Set to debut on Netflix in September, the teen comedy stars “Strangers Things'” Shannon Purser as a social pariah who falls for her most popular classmate after he sends her a text intended for someone else. Consider the modern retelling of the Cyrano de Bergerac story Beer’s introduction to the masses. It’s just one of over 10 projects she has in the pipeline — and that’s only the films listed on her IMDb page. She very may have more films in the works that haven’t been announced yet.
Beer’s upcoming projects include “Chaos Walking,” a dystopian sci-fi about a world without women starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley, a “Masters of the Universe” reboot, and an adaptation of fantasy novel “The Kingkiller Chronicle.” Also on deck is “Empress,” a pic about the wife of a galactic dictator who decides to leave her husband.
While women are underrepresented onscreen and behind the scenes across genres, this is especially true for sci-fi and fantasy, which Beer seems to gravitate toward. Her trajectory in Hollywood may have been inspired by her time at school: She studied neuroscience and the intersection of technology and society at Stanford, according to Deadline.
“With female characters, I always get the note that they need to be ‘likable,'” Beer told The Hollywood Reporter last year. “They will say she seems like a … well, they won’t say the B-word, but they imply the B-word. A female character can’t have a chip on her shoulder the way a man can. We have so many lovable male protagonists that are the grumpy antihero, but that character as a woman is hard to push through,” she explained.
All too familiar with lazy and uninspired depictions of women, Beer emphasized, “Female characters … need to have motivations that aren’t just a man or children. I know a male screenwriter who said he could think of 300 motivations for his male character, but all he could think about for his female character was that she had kids to go save,” she revealed. “It’s just a subconscious bias. I fall into the same thing.”
Moving forward, Beer said “in general, studios need to be less risk-averse. You give a female a chance, and you get ‘Wonder Woman.’ You give diverse voices a chance, and you get ‘Get Out.'”
The writer also emphasized the need to give women more opportunities onscreen. “You can only get your movie made if you get one of three or four actresses attached to it because there are only so many female stars who are considered bankable. There would be a lot more if we made more female content,” she observed.
“Sierra Burgess Is A Loser” hits Netflix September 7.
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