Schoenbrun also has the added bonus this time of having two prestigious and well-known leading actors, with two great muses of the petite screen from
Schoenbrun also has the added bonus this time of having two prestigious and well-known leading actors, with two great muses of the petite screen from different generations: Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder, the latter currently approaching the end of the HBO series Hacks.
Einbinder plays the youthful and enthusiastic filmmaker. Anderson, whom Schoenbrun got to know as teenager surfing X-Files online forums, as she told A Rabbit’s Foot, plays the aging actor, a sort of postmodern Norma Desmond, eccentric with a very sturdy Southern accent.
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It is certainly a brave role for a 57-year-old actor who made her film debut back in 1992. (The Turning was released a year before the series that made her famed.) Perhaps, though, it is a role like this that is required to garner the recognition that Anderson has been denied so far on the large screen, especially in terms of awards.
It’s been a while since the large TV awards have been given to Anderson—she has a couple of Emmys and Golden Globes for giving life to Dana Scully in The X-Files and Margaret Thatcher in The Crown—but she hasn’t won or been nominated for a major film award.
Perhaps the closest she came was her performance as Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (2000), an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel by the tardy Terence Davies. She won a British Independent Film Award for best actress, but was not considered for other major awards, although she received great reviews for her role.
The role she plays in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma does not seem specifically designed for Oscar aspirations, but the Academy Awards are not what they used to be, and they seem to be open in recent years to more radical and/or genre proposals.
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