The Bullying Kind

At age 21, Hunter King has already won a Daytime Emmy for her role as Summer Newman in The Young and the Restless. But if you’ve never experienced Genoa City or met its scandal-prone citizens, you may not be aware of King. If that’s the case, when you watch A Girl Like Her, she’ll take you by complete surprise. In the film, King plays your high school nightmare: the beautiful and popular bully, Avery Keller. She relentlessly torments her former-friend Jessica, eventually pushing Jessica to attempt suicide. The film follows Avery as she deals with the aftermath. It’s a heavy, serious role that demands a lot from King, but she’s up for the challenge.

Paste recently spoke with King about A Girl Like Her, why she was hesitant to play a bully, and the big things she hopes this film will achieve.

Paste: By Hollywood standards, this is a pretty tiny film. How did you get involved with the project?
Hunter King: I auditioned for the project and [the] big decision I had to make once I found out that I did get it [was] if I wanted to do it or not. Because I didn’t want to ever be typecast as the bully or have people look at me and see a bully. But I talked it over with my mom a lot, [and] we both decided that it would be a really good move for me—not just for a movie to do, it’s way bigger than that. It’s such a big, important issue that everybody knows something about today and everyone’s dealt with at some point themselves. I was just really excited at that point to be a part of it.

Paste: Obviously you’re no stranger to dramatic roles. In The Young and the Restless your character Summer Newman even had a plot line where she cyber-bullied another character. So I can understand why it may be a bit nerve-racking to take on another bully role. But is there something compelling about playing the “Mean Girl”?
King: It’s so difficult. It’s fun as an actor to challenge yourself and this role was one of the most challenging things I’d ever done, because most of this film was improvised. Our writer/director, Amy Weber, she gave us an outline script. There were a few scenes that she did plan outline-wise, but a lot it was all improvised. All the bullying scenes between Jessica and me [were] just us kind of coming up with it together, deciding what she wanted to see happen throughout the scene and what she’d want the audience to feel. From there we just went and kind of rolled with it, just “Let’s see what happens and we’ll go from there.” But it was so difficult. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, ever.

And I really like how it turned out, because we wanted to make it realistic and we wanted the audience to feel like it was a real situation happening. We wanted to put them right there with Jessica. So it just gave it a real authentic feel.

Paste: I was going to say, one of the things I most enjoyed about the film was how very high school it seemed. And that’s because you and your co-stars actually talk like high school students. This wasn’t like Dawson’s Creek, you know? The language was really believable. So it’s interesting to learn that most of this was improvised.
King: It was. That’s also why we didn’t want it to come off like a Mean Girls-type movie where it felt like a film. This feels like a documentary when you’re right there with the characters. I think by doing it the way—[filing it] like a documentary and also with all the ad-libbing—it just is going to make the audience walk away and feel something so much stronger than they would with a normal typical film.

Paste: A lot of this film is told from the bully’s perspective. The goal isn’t to make you feel sorry for Avery, but perhaps to understand her and her motives a bit better, and I think that’s something we don’t see in teen movies a lot.
King: Usually you do see it from the victim’s side of the story. We’re hoping [the film] will spark more of a conversation to get down to the bottom of why bullies are the way that they are. That’s what you truly see happen in this film. There is a reason why Avery is behaving the way that she is. And if we can stop just one bully from doing what they’re doing, it can have an affect on so many lives, even more than people think about. So rather than tell it from the victim’s side, we tell it from the bully’s side so that you can get an inside look at where she’s coming from, and get to know her more personally rather than just look at her as a mean, awful person—and as a monster. She truly is a monster throughout the film, but you begin to peel away the layers and begin to understand more about her and why she is that way.