Drive-Away Dolls’s Geraldine Viswanathan wants to be your next romcom queen

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Geraldine Viswanathan is a minute or two late for our interview – she utterly misplaced her automotive. 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 within the entrance seat, laughing, holding her cellphone digicam at a form 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 sort of throwaway pithiness.

It’s absolutely an apt sufficient vantage level as any from which to talk about Drive-Away Dolls, a riotous and pinball-paced street film directed by half of the previous sibling crew behind Fargo and The Big Lebowski. In it, her character, Marian, is a bookish lesbian within the throes of a romantic dry spell. Pursued by bungling goons, she drives a rented Dodge Aries from Philadelphia to Tallahassee alongside her good friend Jamie, a promiscuous free spirit (and fellow lesbian) performed by Margaret Qualley. Today, not less than, the automotive Viswanathan is sitting in goes nowhere quick.

Drive-Away Dolls is one thing of a breakthrough for an actor whose star could be very a lot nonetheless rising; the deliriously pleasing 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 status throughout the business that she was solid at brief discover as a substitute within the Marvel blockbuster Thunderbolts, alongside Harrison Ford, Florence Pugh and Julia Louis-Dreyfus – what number of actors may probably fill the sneakers left by The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri, in spite of everything? But that’s next yr’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 direct sense of Drive-Away Dolls’s cheekily provocative sensibility, simply check out 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 by means of a listing of alliterative options that may be extra acceptable to put up on a marquee – Drive Away Dames? Drive Away Deals? – they ultimately settled on Dolls.

Coen could be the extra well-known identify, 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 screen, Viswanathan seldom will get to use her personal accent – a buoyant Australian twang fashioned in childhood, rising up in Newcastle, New South Wales. The daughter of an Indian physician and Swiss performing trainer, she moved to Los Angeles as a young person, 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 positively has this vitality about her, a sure sort of sun-beamed levity. It’s most likely what’s made her so suited to the virtually Looney Tunes-ian Drive-Away Dolls, in addition to the barmy teen comedies that preceded it, tasks equivalent to 2018’s Blockers – wherein she performs the daughter of John Cena, a clownish dad attempting to cease her shedding her virginity – or gross-out Netflix movie The Package that very same yr, wherein she performs one among 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, probably the most spectacular issues about Viswanathan is her tonal vary: in Drive-Away Dolls, she’s timid and brittle; as a pupil journalist within the Hugh Jackman college scandal drama Bad Education, she’s precocious and decided. In 2020’s underrated The Broken Hearts Gallery, she proved she may romcom with one of the 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, kind of, throughout the first summer time of the pandemic. One solely want take a look at 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, wherein Viswanathan performed the primary character’s finest good friend 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 standard approach that Marvel motion pictures have been made.” It is, in different phrases, a “different” form of Marvel challenge.

“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