As a child, Beanie Feldstein fell in love with the movie musical Funny Girl. So enamoured was she with its vivacious Jewish protagonist, Fanny Brice, and the film’s sparkling retelling of her real-life rise from Vaudeville bit-player to Broadway star, that she asked her mother to make her third birthday party Funny Girl themed.
“In my head,” she tells me by phone from New York, “just like you could go to the party store and buy Beauty and the Beast balloons or The Little Mermaid balloons, I figured there must have also been Funny Girl balloons, because it was my favourite movie and everyone else got to have theirs as their birthday. So truly, my first dream was to be her, in some capacity.”
Twenty-six years later, that dream is about to come true. In a way that feels “otherworldly and surreal” to her, the exuberant younger sister of actor Jonah Hill (Superbad, Wolf of Wall Street) will play Brice, in a Broadway revival of the show that first starred Barbra Streisand in the role in 1964, before going on to headline the movie that later captivated Feldstein. Rehearsals for the new production, which will open at the August Wilson Theatre, in Midtown Manhattan, in April, Covid permitting, are yet to begin.
“I’m in what I like to call pre-season,” says Feldstein, whose Broadway debut in Hello Dolly! in 2017 led some critics to dub her the next Bette Midler, who happened to be her co-star. “I’m in my own little boot camp currently, getting myself ready for rehearsals, because you have to be, like, physically and vocally ready to even start rehearsing the show as we’re going to perform it.”
Meanwhile, she has been garnering rave reviews for her portrayal of Monica Lewinsky in Impeachment: American Crime Story, currently available on the BBC iPlayer, and from this week can be seen as part of a fantastic ensemble in The Humans, Stephen Karam’s intense screen adaptation of his 2016 Tony-winning one-act play of the same name.
The Humans ( Photo: A 24)
Together, these projects mark a startling change in direction from the hit coming-of-age comedies Lady Bird and Booksmart, in which Feldstein gave memorably funny, warm and sincere performances as high school students on the verge of moving up to college, and the engagingly quirky Wolverhampton-set comedy How to Build a Girl, based on Caitlin Moran’s semi-autobiographical novel.
For the latter, she convincingly pulled off a Black Country accent and a character who, being just 16, was considerably younger than herself. But time moves on, “and eventually you get older”, giggles Feldstein.
“I feel so lucky, and I will forever feel lucky, to have been part of so many incredible High School, you know, adolescent films. But The Humans, for me, felt like this shift in maturity in myself.”
Two years ago, when they shot Karam’s raw, and occasionally darkly funny, post-9/11 drama, Feldstein was around the same age as her 25-year-old character, Brigid. An aspiring composer drowning in student debt, she is the youngest member of the Blake family, who gather for a Thanksgiving dinner at the shabby New York apartment she recently moved into with her boyfriend. The writer-director places us claustrophobically among the group, astutely revealing their interpersonal dynamics while peeling away their emotional and psychological layers.
That the film is unlike anything Feldstein has done before isn’t entirely accidental. “I’m always looking for a challenge, for work opportunities that feel fresh and new,” she says. At the start of her career, moving from theatre to acting on camera “felt like a challenge, and new in every way”. Once she got used to working in a different medium, the emphasis shifted to genre and storytelling. Having established herself in comedies, the subject matter of Impeachment (the first time she has ever appeared in an entire season of television) and The Humans has now taken her to “a much more dramatic place”.
As Monica Lewinsky in Impeachment
The film’s dread-filled atmosphere is coloured by the memory of the 9/11 attacks, but it’s the effect of the pandemic, which was yet to consume us when The Humans was shot, that most viewers are likely to feel in their bones. The moment when Brigid jokingly asks her sister, Amy (Amy Schumer), if a care package, given to her by their parents, contains surgical masks, seems particularly prescient, I observe. Feldstein agrees,when the cast got together in person for the first time in two years last month, they “were all baffled by how profound the film feels under these circumstance.”
“It is all about getting six people under one roof and feeling like the walls are closing in on you, and that is a feeling that, unfortunately, all of us have felt at some point in the last year and a half, of claustrophobia and loneliness, and all the feelings that come with isolation. Because even if you’re with the people that you love, it can feel lonely and isolating in moments, and I think the film really explores that.”
As Brigid and Amy, Feldstein and Schumer have a lovely, natural onscreen chemistry. Feldstein grew up with two brothers, and is very close to Jonah, who proudly tattooed her name on his arm in celebration of her casting in Hello Dolly!. However, I wonder if she ever missed having a sister to confide in.
Again, she counts herself “really lucky”. “The mother of my nephews [Joshua and Charlie],” she says, referring to Dana, the first ex-wife of her eldest sibling, Jordan, who died from a rare pulmonary thromboembolism in 2017, aged 40, “feels like my sister. They met when I was three years old, because of my big age gap with my oldest brother, so my sister-in-law has always felt like my sister. So I feel that I have had as close to that sister experience as I can have without actually having, technically, a sister.”
Whereas Brigid is Catholic, Lewinsky, as she points out in episode five of Impeachment, is an “LA Jew”. Feldstein is one too. But what is the difference between a Jew from LA and, say, a Jew from New York? The question makes Feldstein squeal with glee.
“I have to say, I was really excited to talk to you,” she says unexpectedly, “because my partner [Bonnie-Chance Roberts] is a Scouser. She’s a Jew from Liverpool. So her extended family and her friends’ families all read the Jewish Chronicle, and I was like, ‘Oh, they’re gonna be so proud of me.’ So it was exciting for me,” she recalls, laughing. “I texted her and I was like, ‘I’m talking to the Jewish Chronicle!’ And we were like, ‘The Schiffmans are gonna be so proud! And the Rosenblatts are gonna be so proud!’”
Although she was raised in California, Feldstein’s parents, Sharon Lyn, a costume designer, and Richard, a tour accountant for Guns N’ Roses, both come from New York — “My mum very much still has her New York accent” — so her home had an East Coast vibe. What she appears to remember most, and it is true of Jewish life on both coasts, she says, is “seeing a lot of other Jewish people”, and therefore not feeling alienated.
“I think the unique perspective of both LA and New York is just the sheer number of people in your life, in your school, in your after-school activities, and your teachers and your mentors, that are Jewish,” she says. It was only in her “late childhood” that she realised how “rare” and “privileged” this was. “I had to learn that versus feeling like a part of a small community I felt I was part of a large community, and then I had to situate that within the context of that that is not typical, if that makes sense.”
The US Jewish news organisation The Forward recently ran an article about the ways in which antisemitism informed the media’s characterisation of Lewinsky. Feldstein says it wasn’t something she “necessarily spoke about” with Lewinsky, who served as a producer on Impeachment, but “something that was just blatantly obvious. Like the misogyny and the sexism aimed at her, it’s just clear as day.”
As they both hailed from LA, she could understand Lewinsky’s perspective of coming from somewhere being Jewish doesn’t feel unusual, and then “all of a sudden people are being incredibly antisemitic towards you when you become a public person. That must have been extremely devastating and, perhaps, jarring. We have never spoken at length about it but we have both acknowledged it was part of her story.”
Given the recent discussion around gentiles playing some Jewish characters in the BBC drama Ridley Road, I ask if it was important to her that a Jewish actress was playing Lewinsky. She hesitates. As a former sociology major, Feldstein says she could write a dissertation on the subject, and doesn’t want to open “that can of worms” with a few soundbites.
“It’s a conversation that’s worth having and one day, I’m sure, I’ll have much more to say. But I will say this: it was extremely important to me to play this Jewish woman. And it’s also extremely profound for me to get to play Fanny Brice, because I feel no Jewish actress working today, specifically Jewish comedic actress, would be able to be where we are if it wasn’t for her. That lineage feels really beautiful and very profound to me. I’ll start there.”
And end as well, as our time is up. Before she goes, Feldstein says she hopes that people, “if they feel safe”, will come to see her in Funny Girl.
“Because it’s my dream coming true,” she says, sweetly channeling the excitement of the toddler that fell in love with the musical, “which is a very rare and special thing.”
The Humans is available on Curzon Home Cinema from December 24, and in cinemas December 26
Read more: Television review Impeachment
Read more: Film Review How to Build a Girl
