“A similarity between the two of us would be humor,” Sofia told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. “We always manage to sometimes just say that one wrong thing in a situation.”
Mac is joined on the 1988 paper route by KJ (Fina Strazza), Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), and Tiffany (Camryn Jones). In the future, Erin meets her adult self (Ali Wong) and KJ learns that she has come out and is accepted by a girlfriend.
Fina called KJ’s story “incredibly special” because she represents “a child growing up in the ’80s and growing up being taught that being gay was not OK.”
Mac smokes cigarettes and lashes out against both adults and her fellow paper girls. Sofia said she first became nervous about the language Mac uses while she prepared an audition tape at her grandparents’ house. “My grandfather is not a huge fan of bad language, to put it lightly,” Sofia said. “I was trying to be as quiet as possible when approaching the F-word, where I would sometimes try to change it to ‘flipping.” Now 16, Sofia has been acting since she was 5. Her mother, K. Louise Middleton, studied with acting coach Sanford Meisner and introduced her daughter to his technique, which Sofia described as “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”
The Struggles She Goes Through Are Timeless
Camryn said- “I thought that anybody of any age can relate to it.”
Tiffany is worried that leaving 1988 will compromise her grades and prevent her from getting into college. Erin misses out on a lot of childhood because she is taking care of her elderly mother. “Being 12 is such a weird time in your life,” Riley said. “You’re not a teenager. You don’t feel like a little kid.”
“I didn’t necessarily have input in as much as these shorts are more comfortable than those,” Mantzoukas said. “Or they had a bunch of different shirts so I just was like, ‘I’d like to wear these over those.'”All eight episodes of Paper Girls are available Friday on Prime Video.
