Returning as Gwen Stacy in ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,’ the actress-singer sees parallels between her career and the character’s sense of self-understanding
June 1, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
“She came out of it going, ‘Okay, here’s 12 lines that I think I can do better,’” says Christopher Miller, a screenwriter and producer on the film. “It was really inspiring to be like, ‘Fantastic. Let’s do it. Let’s get to the booth again.’”
So Steinfeld went back to the studio and gave the “Spider-Verse” team a host of fresh options. For a 26-year-old performer who has spent half her life immersed in Hollywood — she delivered her Oscar-nominated performance in 2010’s “True Grit” when she was 13 — Steinfeld brings both an ingenue energy and savvy wisdom to her genre-hopping projects.
“What’s fun about working with Hailee as a filmmaking partner is for someone so young she’s so experienced,” says Phil Lord, Miller’s collaborator who also co-wrote and produced the movie. “But she also has a sense of authorial ownership over the role and her career. You really see the emergence of someone who’s taking command of her work.”
Lately, that has meant embracing serialized storytelling. When “Across the Spider-Verse” hits theaters Friday as the middle chapter of a trilogy that began with 2018’s “Into the Spider-Verse” and culminates with next year’s “Beyond the Spider-Verse,” it will be Steinfeld’s latest franchise foray.
She voyaged into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with her leading role in the 2021 Disney Plus series “Hawkeye.” A popular recording artist in her own right, Steinfeld moseyed into musicals via two Pitch Perfect movies. Steinfeld also joined the Transformers saga with 2018’s “Bumblebee.” After starring in three seasons of the anachronistic period piece “Dickinson” on Apple TV Plus, she’s set to return for Season 2 of Netflix’s dystopian video game adaptation “Arcane.”
“I feel so lucky that I’ve been given the opportunity to come back to several characters that I’ve played, for the sake of the work and growing with that character,” Steinfeld says during a recent video chat from Los Angeles, still exuding a grounded earnestness while glammed up for her film’s media tour. After pausing, she gets to the heart of those choices: “I have a family in all of those projects.”
Raised in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, Steinfeld recalls trying any and every hobby she could imagine while searching for that sense of belonging. For her parents, that made for a dizzying stretch zipping Steinfeld to basketball courts, ballet studios and football fields (she was a cheerleader for her older brother’s team).
“I had a hard time sticking to one thing,” Steinfeld recalls. “My poor parents — I would go running into their room and I will have just seen, I don’t know, a picture of a young girl playing tennis in a magazine and then suddenly I wanted to be a tennis player. Then I would see a horse and I wanted to horseback ride.”
Steinfeld was 8 when she spotted her cousin in a commercial and a neighbor in a school play and decided on acting as her next endeavor. That one stuck: After Steinfeld took a year of acting classes, her mother photographed headshots in the backyard and started booking auditions for her daughter.
Once Joel and Ethan Coen cast Steinfeld as cocksure teen Mattie Ross in the Western remake “True Grit,” varied roles followed — the Shakespearean adaptation “Romeo and Juliet,” the space epic “Ender’s Game” and the coming-of-age drama “The Edge of Seventeen” among them. Her appearance in 2015’s “Pitch Perfect 2,” meanwhile, sparked a pop music career that was launched later that year with the release of her hit single “Love Myself.” With palpable pluck and wit, plus the range to dabble in darkness, she developed from well-adjusted child actor to bankable box office commodity.
“As an audience, we’ve been able to watch her grow up in front of us and mature,” says Elizabeth Banks, who directed Steinfeld in “Pitch Perfect 2.” “Yes, our job can be glamorous and fun, but it also takes real commitment and an authenticity, in that you have to love it. She authentically enjoys entertaining people.”
When Lord, Miller and their “Into the Spider-Verse” collaborators cast the role of Gwen — a quippy teen with the Spider-Man mantle from a parallel universe — they laid audio of Steinfeld from other films over designs for the character and quickly decided she was right for the role. (“In animation,” Lord points out, “you get to quietly audition people without them knowing.”)
Steinfeld says she put her faith in the creative team — Lord and Miller had already gained acclaim for “The Lego Movie” and “21 Jump Street” — but didn’t grasp the idiosyncratic vision until she saw an early cut. Fusing hand-drawn images with vibrant computer animation, loading the frenetic script with Marvel metahumor and finding time for heart amid the bedlam, “Into the Spider-Verse” racked up nearly $400 million at the global box office and won the Oscar for animated feature. And Steinfeld helped turn “Spider-Gwen,” with her cool composure, stylish undercut and highflying heroics, into a breakout character.
“She just has this wonderful combination of confidence and command that Gwen needed to have,” Lord says. “You’re always on her side. You’re always hoping to impress her, but strangely, I think there is a benevolence to Hailee as a person that comes through [in the performance].”
Although “Across the Spider-Verse” centers on the Miles Morales version of Spider-Man (played by Shameik Moore), Gwen’s arc bookends the second installment by exploring her fraught relationship with her police captain father (Shea Whigham). As a fed-up Gwen bails on her rock band, she reflects on her futile search for a found family and mutters, “In this line of work, you always end up a solo act.” When an interdimensional group of spider-heroes promptly recruits Gwen to their multiverse-saving cause, she seizes the opportunity.
“She’s going through that time in her life that we all go through at one point where we learn how to be who we are, unapologetically,” Steinfeld says. “Where the first one may have been about finding who you are, this one is about understanding who you are, breaking away from your foundation and writing your own story. I feel like there will always be a part of me that is further understanding that in my life.”
For Steinfeld, that idea has manifested itself as an affinity for genre-driven fare — even if she wasn’t a hardcore comic book reader or gamer as a child. As the arrow-flinging Kate Bishop in “Hawkeye,” she made the leap to all-out action star. Her role as freedom fighter Vi in “Arcane,” an animated riff on the “League of Legends” video game, similarly blends outward assurance with underlying anxiety. She also continues to express herself musically — she released her latest track, the sensual bop “SunKissing,” in March — and remains open to exploring more grounded narratives on-screen.
As Banks observes, “I don’t think she ever wants to be bored.”
“It seems a little bit unfair to the rest of the world,” Miller adds. “The fact that she can do these little indie things and these big blockbuster movies, and that she can have a massive singing career, and that basically anything that she wants to do she can accomplish, it’s exciting to see.”
For all of the personal and professional growth Steinfeld has gone through while compiling that eclectic résumé, she also recognizes that the variety represents a return to her roots. Even today, Steinfeld acknowledges, she’s still channeling “that 7-year-old in me that could never stick to one thing.”
“I don’t know that my young self, bopping around from tennis to ballet to basketball and cheerleading, would have ever thought we’d be here, but here we are,” she says. “The first movie I ever made was a Western. Before that, I didn’t really know what a Western was — I had never seen one. I went from that to then doing some Shakespeare to then sci-fi. I could have never in a million years thought that up, dreamt that up, planned for it.
“So while I think about [my future] often, I know that there’s just a world of possibility that I haven’t even discovered yet.”