Ariana Greenblatt Acts Her Age

Coming off a whirlwind year of all things Barbie, Ariana Greenblatt should be having a well-deserved chill summer, doing your typical teenage stuff: lazy days at the beach, summer reading lists, maybe a part-time job at the mall. Instead, she’s at magic school.

“I’ve been at the Magic Castle every other day, learning magic,” the actor says. “My magic teacher is so awesome; he is one of the best ones. So I get to know all the magician tea.” Bopping back and forth from inside her family’s backhouse and out into the backyard, I get a brief virtual look at the Greenblatt family home as the 16-year-old tries to find somewhere that is both quiet and Wi-Fi enabled. “I have no idea what my family’s doing in the house,” she says, landing inside where three novelty vigil candles sit to the side. “We have Jesus, RuPaul, and Leonardo DiCaprio.”

Settled in, she explains the new hobby: It’s preparation for her upcoming role in Now You See Me 3, the highly anticipated new installment of the franchise. A few days after we speak, she’ll bring her newly attained magic skills to Budapest, where they’ll be filming for the next few months, but for the time being, she’s trying to soak up as much summer as she can. “Weirdly, this past month, I felt more normal than I ever have, like a normal teenage girl, and I’ve been able to act like one,” she says, highlighting a recent girls trip to Hawaii. “It’s so easy to get used to the fact that I am treated like an adult and I work like an adult. My parents are the biggest factor because they are a constant reminder that, like, ‘You live under my roof, and you are a child, and you can’t even drive yet, so get your license and then talk to me.’ When I was younger — ‘younger,’ as in two years ago — I just wanted to be 18. I still crave freedom, but I’ve always wanted the teenage experience.”

Born in New York, Greenblatt has been acting steadily for nearly a decade, tracing all the way to 2016, when she was cast in a leading role opposite Jenna Ortega on the Disney Channel series Stuck in the Middle. After the show’s three-season run, she appeared in several small but prominent film roles, including a younger version of Zoe Saldaña’s Gamora in Avengers: Infinity War. It was last year’s role as Sasha in Barbie that provided a star-marking turn. “I look at my ‘one year ago today,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, I wish I could talk to her and tell her what’s going to happen,” she says. “It’s weird to think it’s only been a year.”

Her latest film, Borderlands, in theaters on Aug. 9, technically predates Barbie; the Eli Roth-directed film based on the popular video game was shot in early 2021. For co-stars like Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart, that’s nothing. For Greenblatt, that’s staring down yourself at 13 versus 16. “It feels like a different human being,” she says. “I’m like, ‘No, guys, I don’t act that way, I promise.’ But it was such a special time in my life, so I’m happy to have a time capsule in a movie.” In the film, Greenblatt stars as Tiny Tina, described as a “feral pre-teen demolitionist,” opposite Blanchett’s mysterious outlaw and a slew of other ragtag teammates that include Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Jack Black. “Cate was, and forever will be, such an icon,” Greenblatt says. “I just remember wanting all of her clothes and sunglasses. She’s such a boss, but she’s so professional. She’s light-hearted. She has a great sense of humor.” An unexpected perk of being 13? You’re not fully aware of the scope of Blanchett’s filmography. “Two years later, I realized ‘Oh, my f*cking God, she’s in everything.’ Ignorance was bliss in this specific moment, because I have so many questions for her now.”

To prepare for the role, Greenblatt tapped into her brother’s friends who were fans of the original game to help craft the character, who has a more supporting role in the video game. “I went in with a plan,” she says. “Then the second you’re on set with those people and Eli, it’s like everything’s out the window. Whatever happens happens; whatever is said is said. I feel like they could make a completely separate movie of all the stuff they didn’t use.” Greenblatt connected quickly with Roth; the two have since been working together on a script. Or rather, scripts. “One is in the horror realm, and if we have time, we’re doing it,” she says. “But there’s another one that’s definitely more me. I got the idea while watching a movie with my friend, and I literally wrote the whole pitch and characters and everything in one night. That has never happened to me before.”

She credits the behind-the-camera bug to her time working with Barbie director Greta Gerwig. “Watching Greta fully changed my perspective on directing because she did it so effortlessly and she was so happy every day,” she says. “Literally, I asked her midway through shooting, ‘How have you been so ecstatic every single day?’ My favorite joy of my life was filming Barbie and not watching the tape playback on the monitor, but watching her watch the take and just seeing how her face changes. She feels so much.” Through the process of promoting the film, she was also opened up to a whole new world of film luminaries, discovering the works of people like Yorgos Lanthimos and Emerald Fennell. It just so happened she was in the same rooms as them, too. “It’s big impostor syndrome,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Why the f*ck am I here? What am I doing? I'm the only underage human in this building. What is happening?’

She had — and still has — a support system in her fellow Barbie castmates (“I do still text all the girlies,” she notes), but that’s not quite the same. We talk about the Vanity Fair Oscars Party, where she was indeed one of, if not the, youngest people in the room. “I’m close with Madelyn Cline, so we went over together in a sprinter van,” she says. “I stuck with her, and we stayed for very little. We hung out with Sabrina Carpenter, saw Rachel Sennott… the girls.” Still, I point out, they are in their mid-20s. “There’s a lot of teen actors, but for some reason, I don’t know any of them,” she says. “I was watching some interview, I can’t remember who it was, but they were like, ‘It’s so crazy. All us kid actors know each other. And I’m like, ‘What about me?’" She’s left out of the proverbial teen chat. “Literally,” she says. “I’m in a different group chat alone with the adults. That’s just how it is. But it makes sense because I’ve never done a movie with other kids.”

It comes back to one of the main, and perhaps most pressing, projects on her to-do list: a timely, real-to-life portrait of young adulthood. “I need to really lock in and do it,” she says. “The emotions and feelings and experiences are so fresh and so new.” She points to films like The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Waves, and Gerwig’s Lady Bird as prime examples of the genre. Most others, she notes, while still good, feel like an adult who is reflecting on a different time. She wants to document it all at the moment. “It’s super daunting, but I think that’s also what’s comforting about it,” she says. “It's a feeling. Everything feels scary and big and crazy. I want to capture this time and these feelings.”

Top image credit: DSquared2 sweater

Photographs by Max Montgomery

Styling by Oliver Vaughn

Hair: Marc Mena

Makeup: Jen Tioseco

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