From loving Scott Westerfeld book Uglies as an 11-year-old, Joey King navigated bringing the novel to the screen with the newly released film on Netflix. King stars in the movie, alongside Chase Stokes, Keith Powers, Brianne Tju and Laverne Cox, set in a dystopian, futuristic world.
Uglies brings us to a world hundreds of years after people became overly reliant on fossil fuels, squandering Earth’s natural resources, causing complete chaos. While some of the world’s top scientists developed a plan for a renewable energy source, human nature was “the world’s biggest problem.”
In order for people to see their “shared humanity,” when every human turns 16 they get a surgery to get transformed into their “perfect self.” The “Uglies” turn “Pretty,” with the Pretty people living together in a community where everyone is equally as beautiful, preventing any societal divisions.
Tally Youngblood (King) has been eagerly waiting for her surgery. Unfortunately her best friend Peris (Stokes) is a few months older than her, so he’ll undergo the surgery first.
In the months before her operation, living away from Peris, Tally meets Shay (Tju) who opens Tally’s mind to choice. Shay doesn’t want the surgery, she wants to find the infamous David (Powers) and live in the Smoke with others who reject the operation.
“Shay is, for how young she is, she’s someone that is very thoughtful, and she has such a deep passion for life,” Tju told Yahoo Canada. “That’s why she is so hesitant about the surgery, because she feels like it’ll stop her from growing, from learning, from living.”
“This female friendship [with Tally], it really inspires Shay to go with her gut and kind of challenge the norms in this dystopian society and make a decision for herself, even though it’s against what everyone else is doing. I think she’s so brave. … I think a lot of people could take something away from watching her.”
As Tally starts to question everything she’s been raised to believe, Dr. Cable (Cox), the leader of this society, tries to use Tally’s connection to Shay to stop David and the anarchists in the Smoke, while also making Peris the most menacing Pretty of them all.
“It was really appealing to me when I spoke with McG, who directed this, and he said, ‘Hey, we’re really going to layer this character and he’ll sort of be the through line of every sort of step in the process of the surgery,'” Stokes said. “He is the one character that we actually see where the surgery doesn’t work.”
“It was a fun departure from John B [in Outer Banks] and anytime you get to play with a cast like this, it’s just a dream.”
‘The absolute grind of all the people it took to get us here’
For King, seeing Uglies finally be released is a goal she’s had since childhood.
“It’s pretty amazing how long things take to get made sometimes,” King said. “I was really, really excited and brought this movie to Netflix when I was I think 18 or 17, and I didn’t get to make it and play Tally until I was 22, and it’s now coming out and I’m 25.”
“The absolute grind of all the people it took to get us here finally, but I’m really excited for my childhood self to really be able to see this dream realized.”
The rest of the cast also praised King’s leadership on set as such an advocate for this film, leading the charge for it to be released.
“I was just blown away by the entrepreneurial nature of this 22-year-old, and then she’s such a good actor. She’s so committed and so professional, and so down to earth and grounded,” Cox said. “I was just utterly impressed by that.”
“I’m blown away by her and all the young actors on this. It’s really wonderful and inspiring for me as an older actor, even though I feel like I’m just getting started, but to go on set and to see actors in their 20s who come prepared. Who are professional. Who behave well and treat people well, and have come to turn it out. These kids were not playing.”
“Joey is just such a gem of a human being and everything that she does, and through the span of her very beautiful career, she does it at the highest level,” Stokes said in a separate interview.
“I think when you have somebody at the helm like Joey, who’s bringing a childhood vision to life, it just makes you want to elevate your performance every day, because you want to not just do justice to all of the art that we do, but now somebody that I think we all consider family. … We wanted to make sure that we brought it, and hopefully we did, and hopefully she’s proud of the movie, and she’s a dear friend for life.”
“I think for someone who has been doing this basically her whole life, for her to be so wholesome and such a grounded person, and also just accept us into her space, where she was staying up in Atlanta with her now husband and her family, it just means a lot,” Powers added. “You like to meet people like that in this industry, where you know that you continue to build on friendships and be able to call people family.”
For King, at the core the story for Uglies is really about people having a choice about what to do with their bodies, and what their future can look like.
“If people choose to to use Facetune, have a certain plastic surgery, or have certain things that make them feel good about themselves, well good for them because they chose to do that,” King said. “As long as you have your free will and you can choose something, that’s where the power is, and … fighting against something that chooses for you.”
Cox highlighted that she hopes a film like this entices the audience to think more critically about the systems and messages that we’ve been told to believe.
“Tally has been told this story her whole life, that this is who she’s supposed to be, that this is what’s going to make her happy, and discovers that there’s another way, that there’s a resistance to that and there’s another way that she actually might even be happier,” Cox said.
“[The story] that we adapt in this film, [Scott Westerfeld] wrote this 19 years ago, this is before Instagram, and it feels so of the moment. And it’s a wonderful opportunity for us to think critically about our own relationship to beauty and to a system that tells us we have to be a certain way, or look a certain way.”
