BREAKOUT ROLES DON’T come much more challenging than that of Tara, the assertive, sparky teen played by Mia McKenna-Bruce in How To Have Sex. The directorial debut from Molly Manning Walker is at once a coming-of-age movie about a 16-year-old seeking escape and ecstasy on a cheap party holiday, and a bracing study of sex and consent that forces audiences to reckon with big problems caused by society’s treatment of young women. The film scooped up the Un Certain Regard award following its world premiere at Cannes, and recently McKenna-Bruce won the EE Rising Star BAFTA, in no small part due to her performance. Speaking with Empire, she breaks down how she approached a character that has come to mean so much to her.
TEEN MENTALITY
To prepare for the role, McKenna-Bruce, now in her mid-twenties, looked to her younger sisters. “They are my go-to when it comes to checking in and seeing what’s going on in the mind of that kind of age,” she says of the 16- and 21-year-old siblings, who were also a major motivation behind her taking on such a challenging film in the first place. Then, during rehearsals, McKenna-Bruce and her co-stars were asked to bring in photos of themselves at the age of their characters. She was fascinated by what she saw: “Even little things like my hair was bleached blonde, or I had painted on fake freckles really badly; seeing that shift and figuring out when those changes happened were really helpful.”