{"id":25242,"date":"2024-12-16T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-16T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=25242"},"modified":"2024-12-15T17:55:29","modified_gmt":"2024-12-16T01:55:29","slug":"growing-up-onscreen-the-year-of-kiernan-shipka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/growing-up-onscreen-the-year-of-kiernan-shipka\/","title":{"rendered":"Growing Up Onscreen: The Year of Kiernan Shipka"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Making the transition from child star to adult actor is never easy. For every Jodie Foster or Kurt Russell, there are dozens of kids who gave up on acting when they hit puberty, or failed spectacularly when they attempted to take on more mature roles. When Kiernan Shipka showed up on Mad Men<\/em> at six years old playing Don Draper\u2019s sometimes alarmingly poised daughter Sally, she made an immediate impression, but that was no guarantee that she could sustain that over the course of Mad Men<\/em>\u2019s seven seasons, let alone into adulthood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shipka has worked steadily since Mad Men<\/em>, though, moving seamlessly into teen roles with movies like Let It Snow<\/em> and Totally Killer<\/em>, as well as the Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina<\/em>. While she\u2019s never entirely been out of the spotlight, her range of work in 2024 shows off just how accomplished she\u2019s become, even while continuing to exist in the liminal space between juvenile and adult parts. Shipka appeared in five movies in 2024, and added together, they demonstrate a thoughtful, savvy artistic strategy, mixing blockbusters with indie films and scene-stealing cameos with top-billed leads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shipka began her busy 2024 over the summer with her smallest roles, in Lee Isaac Chung\u2019s Twisters<\/em><\/a> and Osgood Perkins\u2019 Longlegs<\/em>. She\u2019s the least noticeable in Twisters<\/em>, in which she plays one of the storm-chasing students who serve as sacrificial plot devices to motivate troubled meteorologist Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones). But she\u2019s key to establishing Chung\u2019s approach, mixing personal drama with big action set pieces, as Kate and her friends are ambushed by a much stronger tornado than expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shipka\u2019s Addy whoops and sticks her head recklessly out the window of the team\u2019s vehicle as they race toward the storm, and later she fiddles with Dorothy, a device carried over from the original Twister<\/em>. Although she doesn\u2019t have a lot of lines, she gets to naively wonder \u201cWhat if there\u2019s no tornado?\u201d right before the winds pick up. She dies while dramatically reaching for Kate\u2019s hand, only to be slammed by debris and carried off into the abyss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wearing glasses with her hair pulled back, Shipka is deliberately unassuming in Twisters<\/em>, which is the exact opposite of her appearance in Longlegs<\/em>. With just five minutes of screen time, she generates nearly as much creepiness as Nicolas Cage does as the title character, a deranged and possibly mystical serial killer. His decades-long reign of terror has left just one survivor, Shipka\u2019s Carrie Anne Camera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) visits the previously catatonic Carrie Anne in a mental institution. With short-cropped hair, dead eyes, and a vacant half-smile, Shipka projects an eerie presence, and Carrie Anne speaks in disturbing folksy pronouncements. \u201cGosh, I don\u2019t ever wanna forget him,\u201d she says of Longlegs, adding that she\u2019d be \u201chappy as peaches\u201d if he ordered her to kill herself or to violently murder Lee. Shipka previously worked with Perkins on 2015\u2019s The Blackcoat\u2019s Daughter<\/em><\/a>, and he rewards her with a part nearly as indelible as Cage\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shipka is evil again in the Christmas action movie Red One<\/em>, albeit in a more conventional, cartoonish way. She gives the best performance in director Jake Kasdan\u2019s dismal attempt to apply Marvel Cinematic Universe tactics to holiday mythology, starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans as the mismatched cop and crook who must rescue a kidnapped Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons). Shipka\u2019s Christmas witch Gr\u00fdla doesn\u2019t show up for 45 minutes, and she spends most of the movie stomping around her lair, not interacting directly with the main characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, Shipka also seems to be the only person who understands what kind of movie this should be, channeling classic Disney villains like Maleficent and Ursula in her delivery of nonsensical threats. \u201cI\u2019m going to give them something to fear,\u201d she warns, with a mischievous, charming smile. She reaches full villainous power while clad in black leather, with glowing purple eyes, wielding a kinky-looking whip as she commandeers Santa\u2019s reindeer. Kasdan has no idea what to do with her as a character, though, and Shipka doesn\u2019t even get to participate in the cluttered finale, when Gr\u00fdla has been transformed into a giant CGI creature voiced by a different actor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shipka returns to reality in her final two movies of the year, the Las Vegas showbiz drama The Last Showgirl<\/em> and Max\u2019s original romantic comedy Sweethearts<\/em>. She has a medium-size supporting role in Gia Coppola\u2019s The Last Showgirl<\/em> as Jodie, one of the dancers in long-running stage show Razzle Dazzle<\/em>, the imminent closing of which sends veteran showgirl Shelly (Pamela Anderson) into crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Shipka\u2019s two big scenes handily demonstrate her range: Early on, Jodie tries to make peace between the distraught Shelly and cynical fellow dancer Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) by offering to perform the routine she was taught during an audition for a raunchier show that represents the vulgar side of Vegas. Jodie undulates through the sexualized number with a mix of seductiveness and mockery, then is stuck in an awkward pose after Shelly yells at her to stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later on, when Shelly is at her lowest emotional point, Jodie knocks on her door, now quiet and vulnerable as she begs to come in, to receive some comfort after her mother has rejected her choice of career. \u201cI didn\u2019t know that I could never go back,\u201d she pleads, but Shelly closes the door in her face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shipka\u2019s only lead role of 2024 has received the least attention, unceremoniously dumped on Max over the Thanksgiving weekend. Director and co-writer Jordan Weiss\u2019 Sweethearts<\/em> is a mediocre teen comedy with lopsided pacing and weak jokes, but the central chemistry between Shipka and Nico Hiraga carries the story of longtime best friends who may or may not be soulmates. Jamie (Shipka) and Ben (Hiraga) are so likable that it\u2019s easy to get past the contrived story and strained humor to just enjoy their hangout vibe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s also easy to imagine these people falling in love, while they work up the courage to break up with their respective significant others over the Thanksgiving break of their first year of college. This is the kind of role that a young actor who\u2019s been a reliable TV regular is expected to take, in a low-ambition comedy that people will probably stream while cooking dinner.Shipka is warm and funny as Jamie, and while Sweethearts<\/em> is forgettable, it makes a strong case for her as a future lead in higher-profile releases. Everything else she\u2019s been in this year makes an even stronger case for her as a versatile and intuitive actor, and that\u2019s what will serve her best as she continues the career she began when she was barely old enough to read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Making the transition from child star to adult actor is never easy. For every Jodie Foster or Kurt Russell, there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":539,"featured_media":25245,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[162],"class_list":["post-25242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/539"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25242"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25246,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25242\/revisions\/25246"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}