When Eliza Scanlen wrapped up her performance as the roller-skating teenage bad girl Amma Crellin in HBO’s Sharp Objects—who (spoiler alert) was revealed as the show’s murderer in its brutal final moments—her costar Amy Adams had a word of advice for the 20-year-old actress: “She told me, ‘You should go do a teen comedy now; go work with some people your own age!’” Scanlen recalls with a laugh, seated inside a cozy Australian café on New York’s Lower East Side.
Soon enough, Scanlen would do just that, or close to it, shifting from gritty crime-drama mode to play the timid Beth March in Greta Gerwig’s slumber-party-esque remake of Little Women, out December 25. “Beth is quite different from the three other sisters in that she possesses a quiet power,” Scanlen says, occasionally running her fingers through her blond pixie cut, a remnant of having shaved her head to play a gravely ill teen in the Australian indie film Babyteeth.
“Beth’s dreams aren’t as fantastic as the other sisters’, but they’re just as important to her.” Needless to say, Adams was thrilled: “I called my agent and said, ‘I think I’m more excited about Eliza getting cast in Little Women than for me to ever get cast in something!’ ”
Born and raised in Sydney, Scanlen says that performing in school plays as a child inspired her to pursue acting professionally. As a teenager, she begged her parents to let her take an acting course in L.A., during which she coolly booked an American manager on the spot. At 17, she got her first major part, playing a conniving mean girl in the Australian soap opera Home and Away, while also juggling a full high school courseload. By the time she landed the role of Amma in Sharp Objects, Scanlen says, she realized she was “good at playing psychopaths.”
If breakout roles in TV and film weren’t enough, Scanlen is now ready to rule Broadway. She’s currently honing her talent for playing complicated, cruel women with her portrayal of Mayella Ewell in the second-year cast of Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s a difficult task, she says, to play the young woman who falsely accuses Tom Robinson of rape in the classic Harper Lee novel, a character she adamantly disagrees with and one whose motives she knows many won’t even want to try to understand: “Mayella is a conduit for what abuse can do to young people, and what it can lead people to do when a town is so inherently sick and backward.”
The actress also has aspirations behind the scenes. Recently, she wrote and shot her first project, a short film titled Mukbang. Named after the South Korean phenomenon of webcasting oneself eating large amounts of food while interacting with an online audience, the film follows a high school junior named Annie who discovers the genre and arrives at a sexual awakening. One of Scanlen’s best friends played the lead, and the crew was mostly made up of people under the age of 25. “It’s sort of a microcosm of what we’re experiencing in the digital age, with this inability to connect to one another,” Scanlen says of the film, which she plans to submit to festivals. “Making it was an experience I don’t think I’ll ever forget.”