Madison Davenport, the 19-year-old star of Robert Rodriguez’s TV series “From Dusk Till Dawn,” finds her funny bone as Tina Fey’s daughter in the buzzy comedy “Sisters.”
On her new film, “Sisters.”
“Tina Fey and Amy Poehler play sisters who are ‘Poehler’ opposites—did you get my pun? Amy is very put together. Tina is kind of the screwup. They’re helping their parents sell their childhood house, so they go and they pack up their old rooms and they end up having this last hurrah party, and madness ensues.”
On playing “mom” to Tina Fey.
“I play [Tina’s] daughter, and she’s struggling to raise me [and] struggling to hold down a steady job. I’m kind of like the mother in our relationship. When you meet my character, she’s saying, ‘Mom, get your shit together!’ She doesn’t really get to be the wild teenager. She’s the one saying, ‘We’re not financially stable, we don’t have a house. This is not a good environment for a child.’ ”
On learning from her famous co-stars.
“Getting to work with them was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It was so cool to watch them act and to watch them have this influence over the set. The advice they gave me was to always take risks. Sometimes things don’t work, so you’ve got to try something different. Maya Rudolph told me that if I don’t find any parts that I like—or the roles just aren’t coming or there’s no good female roles—to write it for myself.”
On deciding between Hollywood and school.
“I wanted to take this year off, [but] my mom always tells me to keep educating myself because the minute you stop learning, what’s the use? So I definitely want to keep educating myself, whether that’s going back to conventional school or taking courses like I did over the summer. I went to London for two months to study Shakespeare at LAMDA’s eight-week Shakespeare program. It was an experience that will definitely stick with me for the rest of my life.”
On tackling different genres.
“You’ve got the comedy and then you have the Robert Rodriguez world, which is basically a genre of its own. I’ve never really done comedy before. I walked in very green and I really soaked up what Amy and Tina had to offer. And then when I’m on set with Robert, it’s kind of the same thing. Robert has this very passionate aura around him. You can tell he really loves what he’s doing. It definitely influences the way you act and the way you are on set. I never want to be pigeonholed into just one genre of work. Sometimes you need to switch things up. It keeps me on my toes, and I want to keep doing that.”
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