Actors John Early (My Trip to Spain), Donald Elise Watkins (EMERGENCY) and Lily McInerny (Palm Trees and Power Lines) assembled for the Cinema Cafe Fresh Faces panel at the Sundance Film Festival.  Hosted by writer/director Joey Soloway, who set the tone perfectly for a loose, casual and entertaining interaction while they tackle some heady subjects.

Beginning with McInerny, who stars in Jamie Dack’s directorial debut playing 17-year-old Lea, a disconnected teenage girl who embarks on a relationship with a man twice her age, played by Jonathan Tucker. Palm Trees and Power Lines marks McInerny’s acting debut (whose performance has been compared to Licorice Pizza’s Alana Haim) and stars Gretchen Mol, who plays her mother.  

McInerny explains, “It’s a semi-autobiographical film with pieces borrowed from Jamie’s life and other pieces borrowed from other women’s stories.  When I realized all the different generations of women’s stories converging, be it Jamie’s experiences or Gretchen’s or my own, all combining in this fictional explosion, it’s hard to describe but it felt like something much greater than any of us,” she says.  “And to share that with Gretchen too, was like, ‘Wow.  This is just spectacular!’”

Writer-director and star of My Trip to Spain, Theda Hamel who stars as a trans woman, Alexis, chose John Early to play opposite her.  Early, known for 30 Rock and Search Party, plays Charlie, whom Alexis has asked to house-sit her place while she goes to Spain for cosmetic surgery.  But Charlie is disapproving of Alexis’ decision to undergo surgery and tries his best to convince her to cancel.  All the while, Charlie is in hot pursuit of her gardener/handyman, Bruno (Gordon Landenberger). 

“I’m deeply proud that it doesn’t lead with any political intention, and I think that’s really rare,” Early says.  “There’s a lot of pressure when you are making something with a trans person, especially for it to reflect what have become so largely corporate checklists of ‘We have a trans creator, we have a trans star, and it’s about trans liberation.’ And I think it was really thrilling for Theda, to just make a short about FFS  [facial feminization surgery].” 

The subject matter of the film has been widely considered as controversial.  “Well, I’m talking Alexis out of getting the surgery and there are a lot of people who have responded to that scene or have interpreted that scene as this indictment of the cis person’s ignorance in talking to a trans person about FFS,” he explains. “And Theda and I were so shocked by that because we see it as an intimate, very loving scene about two people who have been friends for a very long time. And they actually are so close that they feel safe to have a conversation about FFS that is completely removed from the online discourse about FFS.”

And finally, Watkins’ film, Emergency, directed by Carey Williams, who expanded it from his 2018 short film of the same name, is controversial in a completely different way.  The film is about two black college students, Sean who is played by RJ Cyler (Me, Earl and the Dying Girl) and Watkins’ straight A student, Kunle, ready for a night of wild partying but must weigh the pros and cons of calling the police when a white girl is passed out on their living room floor. 

The optics don’t look good for Sean and Kunle, and they enlist the help of their Latino roommate, Carlos, performed by Sebastian Chacon (Pose, Narcos).

Says Watkins, “Culturally, this was a very personal thing to me.  There are people who’ve gone through this situation that did not make it out of this situation. And that’s a fact.”  He pauses.  “There are people who will go through this situation and won’t make it out of this situation, even after this film. So, it was important to really embody that and to be as truthful as possible. 

“Hopefully, it changes the conversation and hopefully it changes someone’s perspective,” he says.  “And if you can sit down and have a conversation with someone who doesn’t look like you, and maybe you don’t agree with what we did, but you can still see the why, as long as you can see the why then we can start.

At Soloway’s prompting, the actors discussed what goes through their mind the first day on set.  Early offers, “I developed a technique way too late in the game. We just did the fifth and final season of Search Party, and the recent technique that I came up with that I’m going to copyright here today on Fresh Faces,” he jokes, “is to look at something in the room before the scene that’s not a camera or a crew member. Just look at the sky if you’re outside or look at a candle and just be like, ‘I’m in a real room. This is a real object in a real room.’ And that really, really helps me. It takes away some of just the overwhelming feeling of the fakeness of it all.”

Watkins weighs in.  “Well, I get on everybody’s nerves, honestly, because I’m always nervous. Always. The first day, before we do the first take, I’m always playing around with my cast-mates.  I know they probably get tired of me, especially if we’re supposed to be good friends.  So, we play rock paper scissors, and if you lose, then you have to die dramatically. And doing little things like that, catching people off guard just keeps everything light and airy. And it gets you out of your own way.  It gets me out of my own head because I am an Olympian of overthinkers.”

As for McInerny, the newbie in this trio of actors, it remains to be seen how she will continue to tackle first day nerves.   “This is my very first film and I got to work with Gretchen.  We shot lots of vignettes with very little dialogue to I was able to get acclimated in front of the camera,” she says.  “I was very lucky,” she said.