, recently tried to level with her manager.It’s a stunning line, delivered with delicious confidence by Marisa Abela, the 25-year-old who plays her. No one would accuse the English actress of—or of sharing her character’s radiating ruthlessness—but she is entirely in command, and certainly leaning in.
“You do these objectively humiliating exercises in both,” she says. “If you want it badly enough, you have to blindly trust that pretending to be a giraffe for 2 hours on a Monday morning is going to get you where you need to go. Not that it was a bad time—I had an amazing time at RADA—but, you’re crawling around like a dog… literally. You might becrawling around like a dog in finance, but you are actually doing that in acting school.
Her own youth informs the way she is able to view these structures so clearly, though Abela’s dedication to her craft is equally indebted to a very English workmanship. As someone born in the generationally nebulous 1996, she shrugs off over-emphasizing any one label. She says growing up with social media “must be the big delineation” between Millennials and Gen Z, but observes that the way the two groups react to outside stressors offers another way to understand them.