Kyra Sedgwick stars in The Edge of Seventeen as the mom of Hailee Steinfeld’s Nadine. Sedgwick’s Mona loses her husband to a heart attack and does her best to raise her daughter and son Darian (Blake Jenner) in Kelly Fremon Craig’s richly layered and emotionally resonant dramedy that hits theaters November 18.
We caught up with Sedgwick at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills for an exclusive interview to chat up the brilliance of her director, the power of Steinfeld and how this film, in many ways, reminds us of a coming-of-age story that she once starred in, the one and only Singles.
The Movie Mensch: Starting with Kelly, is it really helpful that your director is also your writer?
Kyra Sedgwick: I think that a writer has an intimacy with a piece that a director can’t get as intimate with a script that they’ve just read. I just think there’s time spent with something that gives you a depth and an understanding and a perspective that I don’t think that you can get otherwise. I just directed my first movie, and it’s a book that I bought in 2007. The book is very similar to the script. I don’t know that I could have directed something that was just handed to me and I had a month or two of prep, or something, or three months of prep. I lived with this. I know it on a cellular level.
[Kelly] built this script and she built it on a cellular level and she spent all this time meeting with people and learning their stories and then siphoning down the most important, most fun, most juicy bits. I did it with Cameron Crowe (for Singles), and it was the same kind of thing, because he wrote the script. I think that’s incredible. Also you’ve got the writer there to tell you what they think is important to say verbatim and what might not be. Also it’s lovely when they can give you some room for interpretation and room for improv and stuff like that. That was incredible.
The Movie Mensch: What spoke to you the most in all this?
Kyra Sedgwick: I was a misfit teenager, and so I can completely relate to how torturous a process it is and just how painful it all is and how so few books, movies, films, music videos get it right. It’s just tortuously difficult to find your tribe and find your people and find what’s good about you. I think that so much of the world is set up in a way, and especially in America, to just feed off of your self-loathing.
The Movie Mensch: Totally.
Kyra Sedgwick: I just think that as a kid you feel like you’re all alone and no one’s like you and you feel uniquely special. Everyone’s trying to look cool and everyone’s trying to deny the fact that they’re suffering and that they’re feeling really insecure. I just think that very few teenagers, very few kids, have it easy. I think most of us have it really hard. As a kid growing up, I had things like ABC After School Specials that actually talked about how hard it was to be a teenager. It helped me so much to process my life. I know that sounds silly, but even movies like Kramer vs. Kramer and Ordinary People… Kramer vs. Kramer didn’t have any teenagers in it, but divorce. Ordinary People had death, and just that character (played by Timothy Hutton). He was such a teenager that I could relate to, even though I never wanted to commit suicide, but just the pain of what it’s like to be a teenager and to have guilt and shame. You don’t know what’s happening. Your parents don’t know how to help you process it. Some parents do, but most parents don’t.
The Movie Mensch: Most don’t.
Kyra Sedgwick: They didn’t really learn how to deal with their own feelings, so they don’t know how to help you hold a space for your feelings. I felt like, growing up as a teenager, books and movies and television held a space for me to have my feelings. I suddenly could witness someone else that was going through something I was going through, and I didn’t feel like an alien anymore. I think that there’s so much room for this kind of a movie now, so much. The reason I bought the book that I did the movie about, called Story of a Girl, was because it was about a young adult and it was about what it’s really like to be a teenager. When I saw this script — this was before I was able to get mine made — I was like, “Oh my God. This is so great.” Because this is like the best version of the After School Specials that I used to watch and the good movies that I used to watch that really reflected some teenagers. I think it’s important. There’s a need for this kind of thing.
The Movie Mensch: Were you attracted to how rich the characters were?
Kyra Sedgwick: Every single character was so authentically drawn and so detailed, and also so lovingly drawn. Mona is a wreck [laughs]. She’s an absolute basket case. But she’s lovingly drawn. I love her. I feel for her. I empathize completely with her. Being a parent is so hard. When you’re not inherently good at it, it’s really hard. Then when the better parent dies and you’re there trying to be a good parent and you stink at it, and then you’ve got this kid who reminds you so much of yourself and has all this self-loathing and you’ve got all this self-loathing, what do you do with it? They reflect each other back to each other in the worst way.
The Movie Mensch: It really struck me with this film that you hear so many people say, “That’s me and my mom,” or “That’s me and my daughter.” Of course, everybody’s situation is different. To you capture something that’s so important to so many people and to capture that honestly, so truly, what does that mean to you?
Kyra Sedgwick: It’s why I do what I do. It’s the reason I do what I do is because I want to exercise people’s compassion for each other, their innate ability to have compassion for themselves and each other. I think it’s what separates us from the animals. This empathetic, compassionate side of humanity is the one we need to cultivate more and more of. The way we sit in a room and we experience ourselves by watching other people reflect back to us who we are. It’s soothing and it’s celebrating humanity in a way that I want to, why I became an actor. I so desperately think that we need more compassion in the world right now.