48 | Rolling Stone | July 2019
HIS YEAR, Beanie Feldstein became
immortal. First on FX’s vampire
comedy, What We Do in the Shadows,
when her character gets chomped.
“Wowie-zowie!” she gasps. “Is this like a Tony
Robbins unleash-the-power-within thing?” The
reaction is quintessentially Beanie: an innocent
thrilled by the flush of adventure.
Then it happened on the big screen, with her
star-making turn in May’s genre-upending high
school buddy comedy, Booksmart, where she
played a nerd-gone-bad the night before grad-
uation. How to Build a Girl, based on a novel
about a teenage music critic in Nineties Britain
and due later this year, should seal the deal.
It took Feldstein only three films to level up
from sidekick status, a feat for a 26-year-old
who “grew up deeply, embarrassingly obsessed
with musical theater,” she says at her favorite
diner in her hometown of L.A. After graduating
from Wesleyan University, she won a small part
in Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, as a hooligan
who cosplayed as Rosie the Riveter. Her second
flick was a whiff, but her third, Lady Bird, had
audiences Googling her name — “Beanie” was
bequeathed by a nanny who called her “Eliza-
beanie” — to learn about the girl playing best
pal to Saoirse Ronan’s title character.
“This is a dream I didn’t know I had coming
true,” says Feldstein. Broadway, not Hollywood,
was the plan. When Feldstein turned three, she
asked her costume designer mom and accoun-
tant dad for a Funny Girl-themed party. Soon
after, she joined community theater and sang
in three to five musicals a year from ages five to
22 — a first-grader rehearsing till 9 p.m. like a
gymnast prepping for the Olympics. TV produc-
ers would ask her to audition for pilots, but her
parents decided their daughter, a homework
geek who loved eating lunch with her teacher
(“It sounds sad, but my friends were there too”),
should stay off-camera at least until she finished
high school. Even after her older brother Jonah
Hill began to make movies, she never imagined
herself in Hollywood. “I always felt like I was
on the wrong coast,” Feldstein says. Ten years
after her vintage-New York-themed bat mitzvah
(vaudeville, top hats), she was singing alongside
Bette Midler in a Tony-winning Broadway run
of Hello, Dolly!
“Anyone who’s known us forever, in real life,
Beanie’s the star,” says Hill. “She’s known who
she was since she was 13, 14 years old.”
Now that audiences know her too, Feldstein
is psyched to maintain the same pace from
first grade: the perpetual motion of practice,
perform, repeat. As if to prove it, she blots her
mouth and stares at her napkin in horror, eyes
flooded with mock panic. “I forgot I was wear-
ing lipstick, and I was like, ‘What’s wrong with
me, I’m dying!’ ” Never fear. The indestructible
Beanie Feldstein is here for good. AMY NICHOLSON
IL MIQUELA is three years old, wears her hair in two buns, and is worth about $125 million. She’s also not
real. Miquela is a fully virtual creation, conceived by a secretive L.A. company called Brud to look eerily
human. Since her arrival in 2016, she has worked with Prada and Calvin Klein, and amassed 1.6 million
followers on Instagram, where she hangs out by pools, models jumpsuits, interviews stars like J Balvin,
and looks very much like a young L.A. influencer. Miquela is getting into music, having recently released
“Right Back,” a catchy, if uninspired, piece of R&B-leaning pop (Brud wouldn’t say who the actual vocalist is). And
she’s not alone: Brud has two other virtual influencers, and fashion house Balmain recently introduced CGI super-
models. “[Miquela] is cool, she’s a good story — it’s entertaining,” says Danika Laszuk, who runs a synthetic-
media accelerator for Betaworks, a tech-focused venture fund. “This is something new.” BRENDAN KLINKENBERGBEANIE FELDSTEINHot
Cyber Idol
Lil Miquela
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BRUD