Katherine Langfordhas already accomplished quite a bit since13 Reasons Whyarrived on Netflix in 2017, making her a household name and earning her a Golden Globe nomination. She starred in one of my personal favorites of 2018,Love, Simon,Rian Johnson’s smash hit,Knives Out, and also just headlined the new Netflix seriesCursed. Now she adds yet another wildly impressive title to her resume with the release ofSpontaneous.
The movie marksBrian Duffield’s feature directorial debut and stars Langford as Mara, a high school senior who manages to find love right when her classmates start exploding. Is the condition contained to a few students? Is it contagious? Will it affect the entire senior class? No one knows, forcing them to live as though every day could be their last.
WithSpontaneousarriving on VOD on October 6th, Langford joined us for a brand new episode ofCollider Ladies Nightto discuss her journey to this film. That journey did wind up including the opportunity to work with greats like Johnson,Daniel Craig,Robert Downey Jr.and more, but we’ve all got to start someone and for Langford, those early days included getting rejected from drama school.
“Every failure that you have, although it may feel really shitty, it’s something that propels you forward. And I’m really glad that drama school didn’t take me when I auditioned because I wasn’t ready, and not being ready and being rejected made me work harder to try and get in the next time, and then the next time I’d just try harder.”
After a few years of trying, Langford was accepted to drama school. But even then, it wasn’t so simple:
“And I got in probably a couple of days before I was asked to go and test for network. But that’s also the moment where I had auditioned for three years to try and get into drama school and then I was being offered the opportunity to go and audition overseas for this thing and I had to call the head of drama and say, ‘Look, I know I’ve tried to get in for three years, but I’m gonna go do this,’ and then basically just took the risk and then didn’t end up getting it. And that was like, the low, low point but from that point is where I got my first job opportunity and then from there I just kind of kept auditioning. But that was the low point and that was also the biggest learning curve.”
Given where Langford is now, that learning curve contributed to putting her on a very promising path. If you’d like to hear more about Langford’s earliest inspiration and what it’s been liking making her way fromKnives OuttoCursedand more, check out our full conversation in the Collider Ladies Night interview at the top of this article!
