Get ready to know Greta Gerwig!
The actress, 28, costarred with Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher in No Strings Attached and Ben Stiller in Greenberg, but is more familiar with art house indie crowds for her bevy of roles in low-budget “mumblecore” flicks.
But Gerwig definitely worked on her crisp diction to work with acclaimed director Whit Stillman on Damsels in Distress, an articulate, high-vocabulary comedy about young, well-heeled women besieged by men on the campus of an elite East Coast college.
“If you said a bad word on the open mike he’d look at you and shake his head,” Gerwig tells the new issue of Town and Country of Whitman. “And at the end of each day it felt perfectly natural to express myself in a many-claused sentence that had lots of commas and caveats.”
Damsels in Distress is Last Days of Disco helmer Whitman’s first film in 13 years following a creative crisis and a messy divorce. Already acclaimed at film fests, Damsels (costarring Aubry Plaza, Caitlin Fitzgerald, Analeigh Tipton, Carrie MacLemore and Adam Brody) isn’t totally high-brow, the Harvard-educated, Manhattan-bred Whitman promises.
“I love Will Ferrell films like Old School,” he says. “I really love dumb American college humor. I went to Harvard, but I can assure you there were plenty of stupid people, including myself.”