“In the Envelope: An Awards Podcast” features intimate interviews with award-winning actors and other creatives. Join host and Awards Editor Jack Smart for a front row seat to the industry’s most exciting awards races, and valuable acting and career advice from contenders!
Actor, writer, musician, model, and activist at only 20 years old, Amandla Stenberg is at an early stage of her inevitable world domination.
Getting her start in the biz as Rue in “The Hunger Games,” the Los Angeles–born Stenberg is part of a generation that resists labels or boxes. “Although I am an actor and I love it so much...I’m not really about the whole, ‘You’re one thing and that’s what you’re supposed to be only’ mentality. I always want to be doing several things at once and exploring different parts of myself and my creativity,” she tells Backstage’s “In the Envelope.” She’s also been hailed as a leading voice of a woke generation, using her rising platform to advocate for intersectional feminism, African Americans, the LGBTQ community, and other minorities (Time Magazine and Oprah Winfrey have listed her as one of today’s most prominent young influencers). Meanwhile, she’s recently starred in “Everything, Everything,” “The Darkest Minds,” and “Where Hands Touch,” and co-authored the “Niobe” comic book series.
In 20th Century Fox’s “The Hate U Give,” the big-screen adaptation of Angie Thomas’ bestselling young adult novel inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, Stenberg’s Starr Carter embodies—quite literally in her body, as she explains on the podcast—many of the social justice issues on our minds in America today. Directed by George Tillman Jr. and adapted by the late Audrey Wells, the film attached Stenberg long before co-stars Russell Hornsby, Regina Hall, K. J. Apa, Issa Rae, Anthony Mackie, and Common were cast. Stenberg found plenty of overlap between Starr’s life and her own, and considered it her responsibility to bring all the story’s rage, grief, and joy to the screen.
READ: ‘The Hate U Give’ Filmmaker Heralds the Rise of Amandla Stenberg
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