Drive-Away Dolls’ Geraldine Viswanathan: ‘I want to watch people falling in love who don’t look like Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell’

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Geraldine Viswanathan is a minute or two late for our interview – she utterly misplaced her automobile. When the 28-year-old star of Cat Person and Ethan Coen’s new movie Drive-Away Dolls does seem on our video name, she’s sat in the entrance seat, laughing, holding her telephone digicam at a kind of Dutch angle to her face. “I’m in LA so it’s very, you know… A car is a second home,” she says, with a type of throwaway pithiness.

It’s absolutely an apt sufficient vantage level as any from which to focus on Drive-Away Dolls, a riotous and pinball-paced street film directed by half of the previous sibling staff behind Fargo and The Big Lebowski. In it, her character, Marian, is a bookish lesbian in the throes of a romantic dry spell. Pursued by bungling goons, she drives a rented Dodge Aries from Philadelphia to Tallahassee alongside her buddy Jamie, a promiscuous free spirit (and fellow lesbian) performed by Margaret Qualley. Today, a minimum of, the automobile Viswanathan is sitting in goes nowhere quick.

Drive-Away Dolls is one thing of a breakthrough for an actor whose star may be very a lot nonetheless rising; the deliriously satisfying 84-minute caper sees her steal focus from such honored names as Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, and Colman Domingo. It’s an indication of her formidable popularity inside the business that she was forged at brief discover as a alternative in the Marvel blockbuster Thunderbolts, alongside Harrison Ford, Florence Pugh and Julia Louis-Dreyfus – what number of actors may probably fill the footwear left by The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri, in any case? But that’s subsequent 12 months’s enterprise. For now, all eyes are on Drive-Away Dolls.

“I think I feel pretty starved for short and fun movies that are also good,” she says. “It’s being sold as a comedy-crime caper with a stacked cast and a legendary filmmaker at the helm. My dream is that people are tricked into it – and then end up coming along on this very queer journey.”

To get a right away sense of Drive-Away Dolls’s cheekily provocative sensibility, simply take a look on the movie’s actual title. A puckish title card earlier than the closing credit wafts away the phrase “Dolls” to reveal the popular sobriquet: Drive-Away Dy**s (censorship ours). “It was kind of an ongoing conversation while we were making the movie – because we knew it was Drive-Away Dy**s!” Viswanathan says. “And it was sort of this slow realisation that we wouldn’t be allowed to do that.” After biking via a listing of alliterative alternate options that might be extra acceptable to put up on a marquee – Drive Away Dames? Drive Away Deals? – they finally settled on Dolls.

Coen often is the extra well-known title, however the movie is simply as a lot the product of Tricia Cooke, Coen’s spouse and artistic collaborator of three a long time. Cooke, who labored as an editor on a number of Coen brothers movies and co-wrote Drive-Away Dolls, is a queer girl. (Their marriage is described as “non-traditional” and each produce other companions.) The script itself is each darkly zany and extremely frank when it comes to intercourse; dildos litter the movie like tweed jackets in a Wes Anderson film.

“The way sex is depicted in the movie… it’s really kind of silly and out there,” Viswanathan says. When it wants to be, although, the intercourse is honest – and, as is now commonplace in Hollywood, concerned a specialised intimacy co-ordinator to shoot. “I definitely was nervous,” Viswanathan admits. “I hadn’t really done it before.”

She’s filled with reward, although, for the intimacy co-ordinator, who “would talk about the details, what kind of orgasm I would do. Because bless Ethan, I think he was pretty uncomfortable. When we filmed the sex scene, he played music so that I didn’t have to actually make the sounds, which meant I had to do the sounds in ADR – it was just delaying the humiliation!”

On display, Viswanathan seldom will get to use her personal accent – a buoyant Australian twang shaped in childhood, rising up in Newcastle, New South Wales. The daughter of an Indian physician and Swiss performing instructor, she moved to Los Angeles as a teen, after getting narrowly rejected by Neighbours – a near-miss that nonetheless satisfied her performing was a viable profession possibility. Why is it, I ask, that so many Aussies appear to make so successful of Hollywood? “I think… we’re just chillers,” she replies. “Australians just like a good time.”

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Viswanathan undoubtedly has this power about her, a sure type of sun-beamed levity. It’s in all probability what’s made her so suited to the just about Looney Tunes-ian Drive-Away Dolls, in addition to the barmy teen comedies that preceded it, tasks resembling 2018’s Blockers – in which she performs the daughter of John Cena, a clownish dad making an attempt to cease her dropping her virginity – or gross-out Netflix movie The Package that very same 12 months, in which she performs one in every of a bunch of teenagers who should transport a severed penis again to its host.

“I have such a baby face,” admits Viswanathan. “You can dress me up, dress me down, do whatever you want. I just played a college student [in 2023’s Cat Person]. I guess I haven’t played a mother yet. That’ll be scary – especially if it’s before I actually become a mother in real life. But I hope that I can play a teen forever.”

On digicam, one of the spectacular issues about Viswanathan is her tonal vary: in Drive-Away Dolls, she’s timid and brittle; as a scholar journalist in the Hugh Jackman faculty scandal drama Bad Education, she’s precocious and decided. In 2020’s underrated The Broken Hearts Gallery, she proved she may romcom with the very best of ’em, delivering a humorous flip with a soufflé-light contact reverse Stranger Things’s Dacre Montgomery.

It’s a disgrace that Broken Hearts was buried – dropped right into a void, roughly, throughout the first summer season of the pandemic. One solely want look on the current field workplace success of the Sydney Sweeney/Glen Powell romcom Anyone But You to see that there’s clearly nonetheless a mass demand for romantic comedies. “I’m here for the romcom resurgence,” Viswanathan says. “From the outside looking in, I do think it’s a bit more unusual to see a woman of colour in that role. I just finished watching [the Netflix miniseries] One Day. So I’m like, ‘Go off!’

“I definitely have an appetite for romcoms, and, you know” – she speaks extra slowly, a hint of rebuke creeping into her voice – “an appetite for watching people who don’t necessarily look like Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell falling in love. I want to revamp that and just see more diversity in these stories.

“I think in many ways it does feel like a page is turned,” she provides. “But it still doesn’t feel equal. It still feels like a specific experience to be a woman of colour in this business.”

One of Viswanathan’s higher-profile tasks was Cat Person, the 2023 movie tailored from the viral New Yorker brief story a couple of sexual fling that operated in a gray space of consent. Critics took a dim view of the movie, in which Viswanathan performed the principle character’s finest buddy and confidante; once I deliver it up, she appears bemused by the response. “I guess I expected everyone to be on the same page as me,” she says. “But it makes sense that a movie tackling that subject would be so polarising.

“I think that’s now something I understand is sort of inherent to movies that take on big subjects like Cat Person – not everyone’s going to agree. Personally, I was obsessed with the story… it’s the kind of movie that I like to watch.”

For Viswanathan, her biggest problem now almost seems to be rescaling her expectations. Thunderbolts is likely to raise her profile. Of the film itself, she says: “It’s all gonna be fairly sensible. I’m not anticipating the normal approach that Marvel motion pictures have been made.” It is, in different phrases, a “different” kind of Marvel undertaking.

“I’m pushing myself to do more conceptualising, more bigger-picture thinking,” Viswanathan provides. “Up until now it’s been like, ‘What? I got a job! Cool, let’s do it!’ Now I’m trying to force myself to dream bigger. Even [working with] Ethan Coen, that’s so obviously a dream, but I kind of didn’t even dare to dream it. It felt so reserved for the greats.

“Now that that’s sort of been smashed open, it’s like, ‘OK, the world’s your oyster. What are we thinking?’” That is, I assume, the million-dollar query.

‘Drive-Away Dolls’ is out in UK cinemas now