Hailee Steinfeld Talks Importance Of Music in ‘The Edge of Seventeen’

The name Jake Steinfeld probably won’t register to most. But in the 1980s he was a personal trainer to the stars of Hollywood, including Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford. A cottage industry of health and fitness with “Body by Jake,” he later created FitTV, a 24-hour fitness lifestyle network.

But to Hailee Steinfeld, he’s just Uncle Jake.

That’s right. Haliee Steinfeld – the actress who was chosen out of 15,000 girls for the role of Mattie Ross in Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit (2010) when she was 13. Picking up numerous accolades and critical acclaim for her breakthrough role, Steinfeld, now 19, has seen her career take shape over the last six years, and not just an actress. She has become a multi-hyphenate star.

In Hollywood’s yesteryear women arrived in the City of Angeles off buses with dreams of stardom. Former beauty queens and debutantes, they would take their singing and dancing skills and, with acting aspirations in mind, become performers under studio contracts. In today’s Hollywood, those with acting ambitions don’t just serve coffee or lattes, or bus tables waiting for an audition; they use social media to help be discovered.

Hailee Steinfeld has Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts, all of which have been lit up like Christmas trees after her 2015 appearance in Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” music video as well as Pitch Perfect 2, both of which opened the doors for her to become a pop star.

With the release of her latest film, The Edge of Seventeen, a coming-of-age comedy where Steinfeld plays the socially-awkward Nadine, the actress embodies the life of a millennial teen.

Kelly Fremon Craig’s directing debut is “such an honest telling of being a teenager and growing up in today’s world, and going through high school,” said Steinfeld. “Trying to figure out who you are what life is all about.” Craig had written screenplays previously, including Post Grad starring Alexis Bledel, best remembered as Rory Gilmore on TV’s Gilmore Girls, but The Edge of Seventeen saw the writer be bullish in wanting her latest to be her ticket to the director’s chair.

As Steinfeld put it, “She went into Jim’s [James L. Brooks] office saying, ‘No one is going to work harder than I am.’ [Craig was] completely devoted in making this project work. She captured it so that anyone from any age can identify.”

Music is such an integral part to The Edge of Seventeen, including Spandau Ballet’s seminal classic “True” and Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right,” along with songs from Beck, The 1975, and the Pixies among others, that it’s easy to understand why the cast were given a playlist of songs to help shape the characters. “If there’s one way to get 100 people on the same page, it’s by playing a song. That just brings every emotion to the surface.”

Music plays a big part in Steinfeld’s preparation and process as an actor.

Navigating the halls of high school proves difficult for Nadine when her older brother Darian (Everybody Wants Some’s Blake Jenner) starts dating her best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson). Already a social outcast, she now feels more alone, despite an unexpected friendship with classmate Erwin (Hayden Szeto) and her history teacher, Mr. Bruner (Woody Harrelson). The put upon mentor and sounding board allows for some of the comedy’s best moments on account of Harrelson’s dead pan demeanor. Steinfeld recounted that sometimes she couldn’t help laughing in his presence. “Kelly [Craig] allowed us so much freedom to improvise and create moments after the scene had ended.”

Steinfeld’s relationship with Szeto was, much like her character Nadine, a little awkward at the start. Though she admitted that “it was so great getting to know him and have conversations with him on screen.” Szeto’s character is very reminiscent of Jon Cryer’s Duckie from Pretty in Pink. He gets tongue-tied when around Nadine and it allows for pregnant pauses between the two (moments where they “both try and figure out how to fill the silence,” said Steinfeld).

The Edge of Seventeen is very much a high school movie for the millennial age. It’s a comedy that will be a cultural touchstone of teenage life for the years to come. In recalling her favorite high school movies, Steinfeld couldn’t overlook the works of John Hughes, including The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Girls. There’s Clueless, of course, and Mean Girls, two comedies that define their perspective decades – the ‘90s and 2000s. More recently she cited Stephen Chbosky’s screen adaptation of his novel The Perks of Being Wallflower, another coming-of-age story, this one about an introverted teenage boy coming out of his shell thanks to two high school seniors.

Hailee Steinfeld’s love of music and her crossover success as a recording artist with “Flashlight,” “Rock Bottom,” and “Starving” has not stopped her from acting. If anything, the possibility of being able to do both in a singular platform, as in a musical, would be magical.

“Any time my two favorite things in the entire world would happen simultaneously is a dream,” said Steinfeld. “So if that ever happen…I would be over the moon.”

The Edge of Seventeen is now playing in theaters.