he book’s cover is simple: a stick figure of a girl with a star over her head. Stargirl, by
Jerry Spinelli, follows a pretty well-worn YA story line, as a ukulele-strumming manic
pixie teenage dream girl teaches a male hero the joys of breaking the mold. The book was
a best seller following its 2000 publication because it demonstrated the repercussions of
uniqueness. That is to say (spoiler alert), Stargirl is bullied and ultimately leaves school.
Grace VanderWaal was born four years after the book’s release, but it seems that a film
adaptation has been waiting for her all this time. The teenager—whose ukulele-centered
America’s Got Talent audition was exactly the kind of weepy viral moment that talent
shows aim for—stars in the Disney+ version of Stargirl, out March 13, updated slightly
with a more 2020 take on bullying. “I was like, please, please Jesus, don’t let them make
this a classic bullying movie, because I feel like that’s so hard to relate to these days,”
VanderWaal says. She makes a sage distinction: “The message is not to be true to yourself
but to be strong with yourself.” And in the process of celebrating your special self, “be
prepared to go through really, really challenging struggles.”
Since her discovery and eventual win on AGT (on the finale episode, Stevie Nicks noted
that she saw a lot of herself in the then-12-year-old: “We like to be quirky, and we like to
be a little weird and different and not exactly like everybody else”), VanderWaal has
released an EP and an album and headlined two tours, in addition to opening for Imagine
Dragons and Florence and the Machine. Another tour is in the works. Even with her excit-
ing Disney+ debut, she doesn’t see a future in Hollywood. “I don’t want to be an actress,”
she admits, “but when this was brought to me, I just kind of thought, I’ve never done this
before and here it is in front of me. So what the hell?”
Her heart remains in music, and she visibly cringes when asked about the songs she
released right after her big TV moment. “I got on the show, everything happened, and
then they threw me into a studio. I heard sounds, but I had no idea how to explain them
or express them,” she says. “I was like 12, 13, in probably the most awkward phase of my
life, and ...” She pauses to choose her words carefully. “It was an uncomfortable experi-
ence. It was an unfamiliar place, unfamiliar people, most commonly unfamiliar men, and
I was kind of embarrassed to say anything.”
The music on her EP Letters Vol. 1, from late 2019, is breathtakingly grown-up, from
her Joni Mitchell meets Demi Lovato folksy-pop rasp to the indie-pop syncopations to the
lyrical meditations on ego. “Wasted my college funds just to look cute / Forty minutes to
look like I did it in two / Maybe I am vain, so are you,” VanderWaal sings on the opening
track. “I wanted to focus on flex culture and, like, kind of poke fun at it,” she explains. “But
also, as someone falling into it, what am I doing? Why do I even care about any of this?”
She’s particularly proud of that song, “Intro (Gucci Shoes),” not just for the lyrics but
because of her firm hand in the production. “I wanted to emulate anxiety into sound, so
that’s when the drums come in, and there’s a siren,” she says, getting excited as she ex-
plains. “Now, I’m just much more fearless. It’s easier to say, ‘No, that does not sound good.
Let’s do this,’ ” she says, imitating the wah, wah, wah beat she wanted with her hands.
“Then they’ll be like, ‘Blah, blah, blah,’ and I’m like, ‘No. Wah, wah, wah.’ ” She shrugs.
“Before, I would get embarrassed and just kind of take it.”
The high school sophomore (she attends an online school) is credited as the sole song-
writer on the EP but says she’s “definitely not” carrying around a notebook to jot down
daily drama. Instead, “in the studio, we start working, and then, all of a sudden, I start
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