Stars Of Sundance: Maia Mitchell
The rising actress is on her silver screen comeup, aiming big for roles that move beyond cliché.
The rising actress is on her silver screen comeup, aiming big for roles that move beyond cliché.
This spread appears in the pages of V113, The Music Issue, on newsstands now. Order your copy of the issue today at shop.vmagazine.com.
At some point during the filming of Never Goin’ Back, the indie buddy comedy in which Maia Mitchell plays one-half of a best friend duo struggling to get their act together, the 24-year-old found herself attached to a vomit rig—which is exactly what it sounds like.
“It’s this hose thing that the art department strapped underneath my clothes all the way to my face, and then these two guys would pump soup through,” Mitchell explains. “This might be too much information, but I think they used cream of corn. It was so disgusting that I actually ended up throwing up for real in one of the takes.” She pauses a beat. “I think that was the one we wound up actually using.”
Mitchell’s character, Angela, is a hot-mess high-school dropout who, along with her bestie Jessie, played by Camila Morrone, spends the entirety of the movie getting into trouble. Written and directed by Augustine Frizzell, the film is as much an ode to the wildness of youth as it is to the kind of attached-at-the-hip female friendship that’s only possible when you spend every waking moment together. The character and subject matter are a sharp departure from the role that Mitchell has played for the past six years on The Fosters, the Freeform network’s much-loved family drama, which is now in its final season. And that’s precisely the point, she says.
“I think it’s easy to put young women, and especially young women who are on TV and have played the same character for a long time, in a box,” she explains from Turks and Caicos, where she’s filming The Fosters finale. “And I’m doing everything I can to stay out of it.”
