FROM HER DEBUT JUNO TO HER NEW HORROR-COMEDY LISA FRANKENSTEIN, DIABLO CODYHAS ALWAYS CREATED CHARACTERS WHO DON’T QUITE FIT IN. JUST LIKE THE SCREENWRITER HERSELF...

WORDS BETH WEBB

ILLUSTRATION RUSSELL MOORCROFT

IT STARTED WITH AN OSCAR.

The year was 2008, and the film was Juno, Diablo Cody’s debut screenplay, about a smalltown 16-year-old’s accidental pregnancy. Brimming with endlessly quotable dialogue and oddball charm, it had whipped Hollywood into a frenzy and beguiled audiences. As Cody took to the stage to accept her Academy Award, the world seemed set to open up before this bright new writer in a leopard-print dress. But it wasn’t that simple.

Cody’s career has been the kind that builds resilience, in an industry that at times has chewed her up and spat her out again. When Jennifer’s Body, her razor-sharp 2009 horror about aman-eating teen-demon, unceremoniously tanked at the box office, it was Cody and star Megan Fox who took the brunt of the criticism. “I really went underground because it was painful,” she reflects. “I thought, ‘Oh, I’m not likeable.’”

Yet, like the protagonists that she writes, Cody persevered. She’s still wearing leopard print —albeit in cardigan form over a Thrasher tee —when she speaks with Empire. She now has a body of enduring, emotionally charged indie triumphs under her belt, including tender parenthood drama Tully and spiky character study Young Adult, and a new movie, Lisa Frankenstein, on the way. The last, which stars Kathryn Newton as a wayward high-schooler who resurrects a dead bachelor after her mother’s murder, sees Cody once more return to the world of teen horror. In a candid conversation, she reflects on her jagged journey through Hollywood, from her early success to a brush with Barbie. Trajectories don’t come much more radical than this.

The lead characters that you write are always figuring things out. They’re works in progress. Why are you compelled to write about those kinds of people?

It’s funny, I really believed that when I reached a certain age, I would suddenly have a concrete sense of self. Maybe that does happen to some people, but for me I still feel like I’m in some kind of extended adolescence where I’m figuring things out and trying things on. I also grew up in the ’80s, when people had more of a tendency to categorise people. Schools were very cliquey.