“Growing up, the only young black female lead that I saw in a movie was in Crooklyn,” recalls Issa Rae. The 1994 film, directed and co-written by Spike Lee, starred Zelda Harris as nine-year old Troy Carmichael, growing up in New York’s Bed-Stuy neighbourhood with her four brothers. “That was the first time I saw a movie and thought: ‘Oh, that girl and her family is like mine,’” says Rae, herself one of five children, who was also nine when the movie came out.
“There was such a dearth of films like that,” she continues. “And the high-school teen movie is a genre that I love. Everything at that age is so heightened and dramatic, and high-school movies capture that so perfectly. But those films are all white, too; there’s no black teen movie genre that exists in the same way.”
Helping to correct that dearth was what drew Rae to Little, the new slapstick, body-swap comedy in which she stars alongside Regina Hall and Marsai Martin. Aimed firmly at the YA audience, the film is a reimagining of the 1988 Tom Hanks classic Big, updated for the digital generation with, notably, three non-white female leads; something that makes it “very different” to any other version of this movie, says its producer Will Packer, who also produced Girls Trip. The film also stands out thanks to 14-year-old Martin – best known for playing Diane Johnson in the sitcom Black-ish – who not only stars in Little, but conceived the idea and pitched it to Packer when she was just 10. She is an executive producer on the film, the youngest in Hollywood history.
Hall plays Jordan Sanders, the brittle, ruthless, self-made boss of a successful tech firm, who, thanks to some actual black girl magic, becomes her own 13-year-old self, played by Martin. Rae is April, Jordan’s overworked but underconfident assistant.
It is Saturday night when I meet the 34-year-old actor and writer, creator of the seminal HBO series Insecure, in a hotel in Los Angeles. “I’d just finished shooting Insecure season three and I was exhausted, and had to go straight to Atlanta to start Little the week after,” she recalls. “But I was like: ‘Ah, it’s cool, it’s only a minor role, I’ll only be working a couple of days.’ But then the role really grew.” Indeed, alongside its body-swap element, the film is also an intergenerational black female buddy movie. April – the only person who knows about the body-swap, stands in for Jordan at work as the 13-year-old, on the orders of social services, goes back to school.
“A lot of the workplace stuff really resonated with me,” says Rae. “The character that I play is so hesitant to speak up and just assumes that one day everyone’s just going to see her worth. She thinks that if she works hard enough, they’ll eventually recognise that she deserves that promotion or that pay bump. But Jordan teaches her that: no, you have to ask for it, you have to speak up and stand up for yourself.”
There’s a generous amount of the Issa she plays in Insecure – awkward, goofy, underachieving, empathetic – in April. “Oh, without a doubt,” she agrees. And that’s what the producers of the film were after. “The awkwardness, the self-deprecation that she does so well really resonates with audiences today, because it’s how a lot of them, especially the millennial generation, see themselves. They associate it with being imperfect, but saying: ‘That’s OK, this is who I am – what you see is what you get. I’m just going to take what I’ve got and live my best life.’”
The bullying that the young Jordan endures at school also resonated with Rae, she says. “I really remember that moment, of being 13, and thinking: ‘How do I become someone where this doesn’t happen to me again?’”
Although she was born in a middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, Rae’s parents – her father a doctor, her mother a teacher – moved the family to her father’s native Senegal when she was five years old. On their return to the US three years later, Rae attended a predominantly white private school in Maryland. When the family then moved back to Los Angeles again, she went to a largely black and Latino school. “I was trying to stand out, trying to be the class clown and be super-funny. But everybody thought I was lame and hated me,” she says. “I’ve experienced that real sense of feeling out of place plenty in my life.” But she found an ingenious solution to dealing with her detractors: she wrote a play and cast her bullies in it. “I wasn’t on their shit list any more then.
“By the time I turned 14, I was learning: ‘Oh girl, shut the fuck up, keep your head down and blend in,’” she says. “I thought: ‘OK, I can just focus on being smart, maybe get into a good school, and that’s what I can have control over.’”
The plan worked. She enrolled at Stanford University, where she created Dorm Diaries, a mock reality show with an all-black cast, which she has called her “epiphany moment”, the point when she realised her talent for portraying everyday black life. She developed that talent further with her web series Awkward Black Girl and the acclaimed Insecure.
The young Jordan, for her part, is targeted by the bullies for her interest and talent in science. “Young black women are not well represented in the tech and the Stem fields – it’s still seen as nerdy and that you should aspire to other things,” says Rae. “That’s also something that I appreciate within the film – just placing these young women of colour in these spaces and saying: ‘You belong here and you can succeed here.’”
I mention to Rae a comment that Winston Duke, one of the stars of Jordan Peele’s horror Us, made recently. “It’s been said that [Us is] not about race, but I think anything that includes people with black skin is, by extension, about race.” Race is not overtly discussed in Little – does she agree with Duke? “Yes, and I think it’s true for this film, too,” she nods. “I just don’t believe in things being raceless. By nature of the country that we live in, the world we live in, that just feels impossible.”
She recently worked on The Lovebirds, a romcom co-starring Kumail Nanjiani and directed by Michael Showalter. “The script was initially written for two white people, and Kumail and I rewrote it to fit our tones,” says Rae. “As it went through rewrites, there were certain lines that we couldn’t even say. There was a whole thing about the police and I was like: ‘No, my character, as a black person, would not say that.’ Some things just take on a different implication if I say them.”
The African-American community’s relationship with the police was the topic of a film Rae featured in last year, playing an activist in The Hate U Give, adapted from the YA novel by Angie Thomas. “That was very different to anything I’d done before but I want to challenge myself,” she says. “In saying yes to other roles and opportunities, I want to try and see what else I can do.” To that end, she is currently shooting The Photograph, a romantic drama with Atlanta’s LaKeith Stanfield.
Her fully fledged film career does, however, mean that fans of Insecure will have a while to wait for season four. “I haven’t even started writing four,” she confesses. “But we needed a break, after going back-to-back for three years. Making that show means nine months out of the year, you can’t do anything else, and nobody wants to feel like a hamster on a wheel. That’s not conducive to creativity at all,” she says. “So much of that show is about our own experiences, so we need to be able to live life.”
Little is in cinemas now
