If you see the incredibly prolific Kathryn Newton on the screen in the next couple of months, expect her to be traveling in a pack. First, she leads the surprise SXSW hit Blockers alongside her “two best friends” Geraldine Viswanathan and Gideon Adlon; together, they plan a post-prom sex pact, turning their respective parents apoplectic. Next, Newton headlines perhaps literature’s most famous story of sisterhood: the new Masterpiece production of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which hits PBS in May. Newton plays Amy, the most controversial of the March sisters.
Of course, Newton learned from the best when it comes to female super-teams: she got her big break on Big Little Lies as Abigail, the perpetually pissed-off daughter of Reese Witherspoon’s Madeline Martha Mackenzie.
“Reese really empowers me and everyone around her, and I really try to do that, too,” Newton says. She’ll be back on the set for the Meryl Streep-starring second season of the HBO drama right after she finishes filming a role in Detective Pikachu. Alas, there, she’s mostly playing opposite VFX Pokémon, one of whom is voiced by Ryan Reynolds. But even here, the 21-year-old sees an opportunity for gotta-catch-’em-all girl power: “I read my sides and I was like, this is the best role I have ever seen for someone my age,” she says. “She’s very passionate. She’s independent. She’s smart and she’s unforgivably goofy and is really going for what she wants and striving to be the best.”
But for now, the project at hand is Blockers—which Newton has just flown into New York to promote for a whirlwind weekend, before heading back to the U.K. and Pikachu. Is she as exhausted as her résumé might imply? No: “This is just too fun. I sleep on the plane. I don’t want to ever stop.”
When it premiered in Austin last month, Blockers surprised audiences with its unexpected focus on the female gaze and honest take on teenage desires. “It was the first time I read a script where I really felt like all three of these young leading characters, the three young high-school girls, were real characters that I wish that I had seen when I was in high school,” Newton says. There’s more to her character, Julie, than just her desire to lose her virginity—though she’s wonderfully unapologetic about that. She’s also a fierce champion of her pals, and extraordinarily close with her single mother (Leslie Mann), who worries about Julie’s wish to attend a faraway college. (Newton herself was considering U.S.C. or St. Andrews in Scotland, but chose the role on Big Little Lies instead. She’s still trying to teach herself Chinese during Detective Pikachu downtime.)
Newton recently posted a clip to her Instagram in which Julie describes her ideal scenario for sex, including “the scent from that candle that gets [her] horny every time.” Her followers were shocked that she actually said “horny” on-screen—and so was Newton, to an extent. “I was like, you know what? I can’t believe I said that either, but it is so relatable,” she says. “Like, it’s O.K. for girls to say that. It’s O.K. for a girl to say she wants to have sex.”
During production in Atlanta, Newton—who, by the way, was also in both Lady Bird and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri last year—would pop over to the set of Halt and Catch Fire to film yet another role. But that didn’t stop her from bonding with Viswanathan and Adlon. The trio solidified their connection the night before their first rehearsals, when they gathered to watch Superbad—a movie to which Blockers acts as a gender-swapped equivalent. (Superbad writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg were also producers on Blockers.)
Cut to a week and a half of night shoots involving a limo filled with Jamba Juice-scented fake vomit. “It’s also just experiences like that that make you love your co-stars even more,” she says. “Because at that point, you’re best friends, and it’s four or five in the morning, and you just are hysterically laughing because Gideon has puke coming out of her mouth, and you just can’t keep it together.”
That’s more raucous than anything the March girls get up to in Little Women, though the period piece does have peril and pickled limes. Newton and the rest of the cast were camped out in a “magical” town in Ireland during the shoot. “We hung out all day, every day,” she says. “That was a little ridiculous. That was like a fairyland.” In tackling Amy, Newton was assuming a character previously portrayed by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Kirsten Dunst, as well as one of the more frustrating figures in literature; Amy is most famous for intentionally burning the pages of her sister Jo’s novel. Amy, however, was always Newton’s favorite: “I love bows, and she loves bows.” She was so concerned with doing the “misunderstood” heroine justice that, for the first time in her career, she went on Twitter to see what people were saying when the limited series aired in Britain.
As challenging, as Amy was, Newton hadn’t yet gotten the scripts for Season 2 of Big Little Lies when she filmed the miniseries. “I thought Amy March in Little Women was the hardest role I’ve played—and now Abby’s really really pushing it,” she says. Which is saying a lot, since her character spent last season attempting to auction her virginity online as a protest statement. This year, she’s tackling “another kind of story line that is real and I’ve never seen before,” Newton says. “I can’t even research a movie or something, because I don’t even know what to watch. I just don’t know what to do. So we’re just going to have to figure it out together I guess.” She’s been e-mailing Reese Witherspoon, who has become sort of a mentor to her, to prepare.
When we bring up the parallels between Blockers and Big Little Lies—both of which tell nuanced, complicated “first time” stories—she agrees that she senses a trend. “I really found my niche,” Newton says. “It’s really like the angry teenage daughter or the virgin.”
