“I know what I’m capable of”: the 2016 movie Hailee Steinfeld called the turning point of her career
If there’s one actor working in Hollywood at the moment about whom you can say, ‘Yeah, they make consistently excellent career decisions’, then Hailee Steinfeld is probably going to be leading the pack.
It’s tough to think of anyone else who can so neatly jump from genre to genre, bringing in bucket loads of cash at the box office and garnering critical acclaim quite like she does, and before the age of 30, she’s shown she can do rom-coms, CGI blockbusters, vampire-musical-action-Oscar winners, lo-fi indie comedies, westerns, you name it. Total gross box office so far? Just shy of $2billion.
Not bad really, although a lot of that is down to some of the franchises she’s been involved in, like the brilliant superhero animation Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, plus a Transformers spin-off in 2018’s Bumblebee, but even her debut movie all the way back in 2010 proved to be a commercial and critical hit that earned almost $200million.
True Grit was the Coen brothers-directed remake starring Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon that won ten Oscar nominations, including one for Steinfeld at her first asking, as well as recognition for her work as the teenage farm girl trying to entice whiskey-soaked old lawman Bridges into hunting down the man who killed her father.
Steinfeld was just 13 at the time, and given her age, it’s probably not surprising that she spent the next few years flitting from project to project, including launching her music career and putting in appearances in the likes of the Harrison Ford sci-fi Ender’s Game and Keira Knightley’s weepy musical Begin Again.
Then, in 2016, she put in possibly a career-best performance in a movie that she felt marked a pivotal moment in her acting story, telling Collider, “Edge of Seventeen was a great time for me. It was a big turning point for me, I feel like, as a person, as an actor, I feel like something special happened there that – I don’t know what it was, but it was something.”
Steinfeld believes that the movie, a coming-of-age comedy co-starring Woody Harrelson in which she stars as an awkward teen losing the plot when her best friend starts to date her brother, was the point at which people on set stopped treating her as a former child star and respected her “as an actor, (and) as a producer”.
It proved to be a success at the box office, making a $10m profit, and it earned Steinfeld her second major awards nomination, receiving a Golden Globe nod for ‘Best Actress’. It was certainly the line in the sand after which her bankability skyrocketed, with Bumblebee, Pitch Perfect 3, two Spider-Man movies, Charlie’s Angels and a Marvel Cinematic Universe role with the Hawkeye series all following in a five-year period.
Aside from those, she showed her versatility with the biographical comedy-drama Dickinson, which ran for three seasons, and then last year, the all-conquering Sinners with Michael B Jordan, which became the most nominated movie in Academy Awards history. Steinfeld put in another fantastic performance as Jordan’s seductive, revenge-fuelled former girlfriend, Mary, in the movie, and coming up, she’ll be voicing the lead character in Disney’s upcoming animation Hexed, due in cinemas at the end of November.
