In Appreciation of Jessica Barden
The best actor you’ve probably never heard of
As a person born with a healthy degree of self-awareness, I’ve never been one to gush over anyone in public, much less a “celebrity”, no matter the depth of my admiration. That’s the type of embarrassing conduct I associate with teenagers, or people who I imagine spend the preponderance of their waking hours scrolling endless streams of TikTok videos. But after binging Netflix’s The End of the F***ing World for the second time last week (and shortly thereafter just about everything else Jessica Barden has starred in), I feel like the time has come for me to cast off my illusory cloak of moral superiority and join the cheerleading masses.
There are certain actors we recognize who just have “it” — that certain “je na sais quoi” that distinguishes them from their fellow thespians: Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, to name a few. Their presence fills the screen, radiates a warmth and charm that keeps your eyes glued to them when they’re on it, and — just as potently — leaves behind a palpable emptiness when they’re not. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing people like this in real life. They tend to become the life of whatever party they attend, usually by not trying to become the life of the party. It’s an effortless, Jedi-mind-trick sort of thing, one that can’t be faked because it’s innate, and Jessica Barden, in my humble opinion, has it in spades.
Watching TEFW recently, I found myself enthralled (dare I say smitten?) by her magnetic performance as Alyssa, the impulsive, foul-mouthed seventeen-year-old protagonist of the series. That rare thing happened to me while I was watching it — that thing when you become so absorbed in a performance you momentarily forget you’re watching a performance.
People often assume this kind of immersion is only possible with high-stakes, high-drama roles, but I believe, at its heart, it’s a result of authenticity. “Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” the legendary acting coach Sanford Meisner once said. It’s this straightforward sentiment I would venture best describes the appeal of Barden. To phrase it in the jargon of my younger contemporaries: the girl’s just real AF.
Watching Alyssa curse and misbehave her way through TEFW, I got the sense that there was a great deal of the actual Jessica Barden in the role. I know nothing about the actual Jessica Barden (apart from the fact that she’s British), but it’s a feeling one gets when witnessing a performance in which there is not a single false note struck throughout. Barden assumes the role with such confidence and ease that the impression becomes definite. She imbues the character of Alyssa with the kind of rawness that, as with most memorable performances, removes the imaginary barrier between fiction and reality, actor and viewer, and allows the story to breath with vivid, compelling life.
In all of her roles, from TEFW to her dramatic turn in Holler, where Barden plays an Ohio metal scrapper struggling to make ends meet, there is a quiet confidence in the characters she chooses to inhabit. Confidence is an attractive quality in both sexes, but its appeal is heightened when underpinned by vulnerability, by glimpses of the human frailty quivering behind the bravado. In Barden’s case, these glimpses happen through her eyes with the clarity of a prism. She has one of the most expressive faces of any actor I’ve seen, emoting sadness, anger, joy, playfulness, with a mercurial fluidity that renders speaking almost redundant.
Just watch the scene in Holler, where her character Ruth, an intelligent, fish-out-of-water bookworm stranded in a blue-collar Ohio town, is attending the party of Hark, her employer. Hark is in every way the embodiment of the type we associate with these hard scrabble, steel-belt locales: chain smoking, contemptuous of those with higher learning aspirations, susceptible to acts of violence with scant provocation. In an earlier scene the two have kissed, hinting at the possibility, despite their stark differences, of a budding romance. But at Hark’s party we see this romantic possibility evaporate without a single word uttered.
It happens all on Barden’s face, as she observes Hark from across the smoke filled room. He’s seated, girl astride one knee, ripping shots and drunkenly regaling his friends with a story he’s already told multiple times. We see in Ruth’s eyes a subtle sequence of emotions pass like quicksilver: interest, boredom, tints of jealousy, before ultimately arriving at something close to an amused pity — dawning realization of just how misplaced her budding feelings of intimacy for the man really were.
The scene is played with such delicacy and swiftness that it’s easy to miss, but it’s the kind of subtle, reactive performance only a highly intuitive actor can pull off (there is another scene at the end of the film, of Ruth offering a proverbial olive branch to her incarcerated mother, that is a similar accomplishment of understated pathos).
In Yorgos Lanthimos’s black comedy The Lobster, we also see that Barden’s just as capable of shutting off this visually expressive spigot when required. As “Nosebleed Woman”, one of many single hotel guests hoping to get paired with a compatible partner, she perfectly matches the eerily blank, deadpan tone of her costars. Her performance is at once endearing and frightening in its naiveté — in the unquestioning obedience she exhibits to the film’s absurd, violence-charged surroundings.
Given this remarkable skill set, and Barden’s striking, if slightly unconventional beauty, I’m disappointed, and a little surprised, at how few high profile projects she’s starred in. After watching TEFW, I had to do some online sleuthing in order to discover her other films (thankfully the age of streaming made this a relatively painless process); my efforts were duly rewarded upon discovering not only the quality, but the breadth of her body of work.
For the starkest illustration of her versatility, I recommend watching her small but impactful role in Jungleland — her bleakest role to date — against her turn in Pink Skies Ahead. The former is an achievement in the power of quietness, similar to her role in Holler but darker, more oblique, suffused with the kind of wounded, uneasy intensity that hints at an actor capable of deep emotional excavation. The latter is an exhibition of her lighter talents, a role permeated with teenage angst and touches of black comedy, executed with an effortlessness that’s testament to Barden’s range as an actor. Though in life comedy and drama are inextricably mixed, it is rare we find an actor able to perform both on screen with an equally easy grace.
I retain the belief, perhaps a naïve one, that in the arts, as in life, there is a rough meritocracy in place, and that those worthy of acknowledgment eventually get their dues. Part of this hope is selfish one — as an unpublished writer I must keep hold of the faith that, as long as the work remains good, recognition will follow, even if that recognition is prolonged in arriving.
Thankfully in Barden’s case she’s already halfway there. She’s not exactly an unknown entity, and if she continues down her current path as an actor — that is one of starring in high quality, though less widely seen films, there are far worse fates in life. But I hope, both for her sake and ours, that a broader recognition of her talents arrives sooner than later, that she’s offered the kind of high profile, leading roles of her better known contemporaries, because she’s no less deserving of them — and because I get the impression we’re just beginning to see the things she’s capable of.
