How ‘Bones and All’ Changed Taylor Russell

One surreal element of awards season is the circles you start running in. Take Taylor Russell’s experience. The breakout star of Bones and All has experienced a whirlwind few months since her film premiered to raves at the Venice Film Festival—where she won the Marcello Mastroianni Award, which has recognized emerging stars ranging from Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna in 2001 to Jennifer Lawrence pre–Winter’s Bone. Since then, she’s taking the film around the world and finding plenty of attention in the process. Suddenly, A-listers become a kind of safe harbor in the madness. “I really enjoy seeing other films and meeting the filmmakers making those films while your film is out, just to have a friendly face in the room to run and hold a hand,” Russell says on this week’s Little Gold Men (listen below). “Cate is a great example. I saw her win her award in Venice, and I’ve seen her a few times since. It’s very lucky that I can say that I can go up to Cate and say hi now.” 

Evidently, when you’re on a first-name basis with Cate Blanchett.

It’s all especially gratifying for Russell given the movie fueling this media tour. In Bones and All, directed by Luca Guadagnino, Russell plays Maren Yearly, a cannibal who falls for another cannibal, played by Timothée Chalamet, and embarks with him on a road odyssey across Reagan’s America. Guadagnino doesn’t shy away from the gore of the characters’, erm, actions, but he fashions a surprisingly beautiful love story around them, with Russell’s tender, subtle, remarkably vulnerable performance anchoring his vision. (She’s now up for an Independent Spirit Award, for best lead performance.)

Spot Russell and Guadagnino on the trail and you’ll see that not only did the star and director hit it off, but that their bond has lasted long beyond production. Indeed, Russell found herself a natural fit for his unpredictable, spontaneous style of filmmaking. “Fernanda Perez, the makeup artist who’s been friends with Luca for 30 years—I asked her on the first day, if you have advice for me, what would it be?” Russell says. “She said, ‘Don’t try to do anything you’ve done before. Be wild and jump off the cliff.’ That felt very clear to me—and it’s pretty good advice for entering a Luca set. If anybody who listens to this is going to work with Luca, keep that in mind.”

Chalamet and Michael Stuhlbarg are among the past Guadagnino collaborators to reunite with him in Bones and All. Russell tells me she feels a great privilege in “knowing,” with some degree of certainty, that she too will work with the director again. “It’s the luckiest circle to be in—as an actor, it’s like the mecca in some way,” she says. “It really does feel like such a tight-knit family and you kind of can’t enter his world without being enmeshed with everyone in it. I have like, 15 new family members.”

And maybe a new way of looking at her career, and how to work—coming off of Bones and All, Russell feels her palate cleansed, her artistic spark reinvigorated. “I want to hear different perspectives and I’m more interested in maybe not understanding something and disagreeing with somebody, than feeling comfortable or that we’re all on the same page,” she says. “I think there’s some value to be found in that.”