Amandla Stenberg is all grown up in Bodies, Bodies, Bodies.
We first got familiar with her as young Rue in The Hunger Games, and she went on to star in a slew of other films like The Hate U Give and Dear Evan Hansen. In an interview with Complex ahead of the Bodies premiere, the 23-year-old actress says that playing Sophie in the slasher film is the start of her taking on more adult and serious roles that match where she’s at. “It’s just exciting to become older. I look quite young for my age, and so I’ve been playing teenage roles for a while, but this is one of my first roles where I’m playing my actual age,” Stenberg explains. “I have the freedom to explore with darker themes, with characters that are darker and more complex, and are living adult lives, which comes with a whole new set of circumstances.”
Sophie is in her early 20s and while we don’t know much about her going into Bodies, we learn through her strained friendships that she hasn’t always made the best choices. Sophie and her new girlfriend Bee (Maria Bakalova) show up unannounced to a hurricane party her best friend David (Pete Davidson) is throwing in his father’s lavish mansion. The group of rich and privileged friends react coldly to Sophie’s arrival, but then you get the impression that their reaction is historical-based on Stenberg’s character’s past.
Stenberg was the first to join the Halina Reijn film’s cast and she says they initially questioned whether she should play Bee or Sophie. Stenberg’s past roles have been more innocent and childlike, and they are incredibly easy to root for. Sophie, on the other hand, is struggling with drug addiction. She is cold and calculated, more audacious, alluring, and at times manipulative. “I came to the conclusion that Sophie would be the more challenging character for me. I’m a bit more introverted and a bit more awkward, and shy at times. Some of the characters I play have a tendency to have some of those elements of introvertedness or sweetness,” she says. “It was an exciting challenge for me to play someone who’s more chaotic and kind of sexy, but in a way that’s a bit rough around the edges, and someone who is not necessarily the kindest at all times as well. I got to tap into the parts of myself that are more expressive and more extroverted, and that was really fun.”
While the film feels like it’s going to be following a group of friends during a wild party weekend at first, it quickly switches when they all start playing a murder-mystery-style game called “Bodies, Bodies, Bodies.” Soon after, the game becomes reality when people start mysteriously dying in the house, and they all have to sort out who the killer is—ultimately bringing out the worst in all of them. The film gets gruesome and violent, and some scenes might be tough to watch for some viewers.
“It’s actually really wonderful to hear that the movie scares [people], and that it’s intense and hard to watch. When you are working on something this intensely for so long, you become desensitized to some of the elements,” Stenberg says. “We want to ensure that the movie was both sardonic and funny, and then also terrifying in equal measure. We, as the people who made the movie, think so much about are the jokes hitting? Or do you feel like you get a deep psychological understanding of these characters? Sometimes I forget the movie’s actually pretty brutal.”
Those types of scenes are also not easy for the performers to process. Stenberg says that she sometimes finds herself needing to separate from a role in order to keep herself sane. “People like to make films about death or that have elements of death in them. Quite often we use the medium of film to explore that. I’ve engaged with death a lot in different films that I’ve been a part of,” she says. “There have been moments with certain projects where I felt like maybe I took this a little too far and this became a little too real for me, and it took me some time once I finished with a shoot to decompress and let go of the trauma that my body thought it had experienced. Your body really cannot discern the difference between a fake memory and a real one.”
Chase Sui Wonders, who plays Emma in Bodies, equipped her co-stars with a trick that helped their minds and bodies differentiate their acting in the film from real-life stress. “There were definitely moments where I had to do some closure tactics on set. This was actually something that our co-star Chase taught us, which is when you go into the day, you talk to yourself like a crazy person. ‘Hi, body. I’m about to go into this environment. It’s not real. Don’t worry. Nothing you’re about to experience actually is happening to you,’” Stenberg says. “At the end of the day, you go, ‘Hi, body, we’re back. It’s over. The fun is done, and now we’re turning back to ourselves. You can let go of everything that happened today.’ But there were definitely a couple of death scene moments that stuck with me for a little bit, and I kind of had to shake off.”
She adds: “When you say out loud, to your subconscious, ‘Hey, just so you know, this isn’t real,’ it actually can be really helpful.”
As chaotic and gruesome as the film can be at times, it does also have some strong comedic moments, as well as an honest examination of how Gen Z interacts with each other and the world around them. Bodies feels like one of the most honest portrayals of this generation that we have seen in film recently, while also giving insight into young women’s experiences the way 2004’s Mean Girls and 2009’s Jennifer’s Body did when they were released. “Movies like that, I actually do think were quite accurate to the reality of being a young person at that time. But the culture of young people has shifted a lot because of the amount of media that we grow up with, the amount of self-branding and self-awareness that is almost forced upon us from a very young age,” Stenberg explains. “Gen Z has a real razor-sharp and sardonic sense of humor, and a very sophisticated understanding of themselves, and a very sarcastic way of dealing with their emotions and feelings because we just process and ingest so much media and information all the time that I feel like that becomes one of the primary coping mechanisms.”
When watching TV shows or movies about Gen Z or younger generations, the characters can seem flat and the writing often feels performative, out of touch, and sometimes even forced. Bodies feels realistic, while also including mentions of social media and group chats without making it a major focus of the story. “What was really refreshing about this script was to feel like it was speaking a language that did feel authentic to Gen Z. It didn’t feel contrived, or was adults trying to speak or think like Gen Zers,” Stenberg says. “That’s because of our amazing playwright, Sarah DeLappe. She is so deeply witty and that was already present in the script. That’s why I fell in love with it and was so excited about it because it did feel like a rare opportunity of reading a movie about people within this age group that didn’t feel contrived.”
DeLappe wrote the screenplay and the director also allowed the cast to add input to the script by integrating parts of themselves into their characters, and that elevated their performances. “What was so much fun about this movie, and what’s fun about comedy in general, is you just have the opportunity to make fun of yourself. We started incorporating stuff that was very personal to us into our dialogue, things about ourselves that we hated or wanted to make fun of, or our own behaviors that we knew were ridiculous or absurd,” the actress says. “We would fold them into our characters and into our dialogue, and some really rich, cool stuff came out of that, particularly with Rachel Sennott. She’s just so hilarious, she’s such a talented comedian. Most of Rachel’s improv actually made the final cut of the movie.”
