On her second day on a film set, Jo Ellen Pellman came face to face with angry Meryl Streep.
“You owe me a house!” Three-time Oscar winner Streep growled, her eyes shining, as she tore her blazer and pounced on the 24-year-old ingenuous.
Pellman’s eyes widened. “I am really sorry!” she said, raising her hand to apologize.
“And cut!”
Pellman played Emma Nolan, a high school student in a closed-minded Indiana town who wants to take her girlfriend to the ball in the Netflix adaptation of the musical “The Prom.” Like Emma, Pellman is a Midwestern who identifies as queer. But unlike her character, the young actress grew up in a supportive environment which affected the way she sees the film’s potential.
“For young people who identify as LGBTQ, I hope this can be a two hour break from everything that is going on in the world,” she said. “Like, ‘It’s gonna be OK, my people are over there.'”
Still, this is her first movie role, it turns out to be the lead role, and her co-stars – including Streep, James Corden and Nicole Kidman as narcissistic Broadway actors who parachute to help her. character – are names she admired for a long time.
Pellman projected complete confidence in the stars’ presence, said Ryan Murphy, the film’s director. “She was not afraid”, even though her experience until then had consisted of roles like girl number 2 in an episode of “The wonderful Mrs. Maisel”.
Murphy, on the other hand, whose credits include “American Horror Story” and “Pose,” said, “I was so nervous the first time I did Meryl Streep – I think I did four. taken. I was shaking.
Pellman said she was hardly immune to Streep’s star power. “I love that this is how it turned out,” she said, smiling in an interview with Zoom last month from her home in Cincinnati, where she has lived with her mother since March. “Inside, I was like ‘OMG, it’s Meryl Streep!'”
It took only one meeting for Murphy to decide that Pellman was his Emma.
“I watched his tape, and I knew,” he says. “She had this mixture of soul, courage and spirit – and this incredible smile.
Pellman, a recent University of Michigan graduate, had three jobs while going to open calls in New York City, when she heard about the national search for the role. “It was like a long shot,” she says. But Pellman, as a queer woman herself, connected to Emma’s optimism and determination when she saw the Broadway play with Caitlin Kinnunen in the role.
She didn’t know until shortly before she met Murphy that Ariana DeBose, who plays Emma’s girlfriend, Alyssa Green, would be the only other actress there. “I saw Ariana’s name on the call sheet, and I panicked because she’s someone I’ve admired my entire career,” she said.
But Murphy said if Pellman was nervous, she didn’t let him know. “As soon as Jo Ellen talked about her life, she didn’t even need to read,” he said. “She spoke very movingly about being a queer woman and having a single gay mother who raised her. I remember she came out and I was like, ‘Thank God it’s over – we’ve found our daughter.’ “
Pellman was less sure. But she had a clue during her interview. “He kissed us at the end of the audition,” she said. “When does this happen? A hug from Ryan Murphy? It’s huge!”
When Murphy called the next day to tell Pellman that she had landed the role of her dreams, she was browsing coats at a thrift store in Bushwick. The first person she called was her mother. Or, rather, tried.
Monica Pellman didn’t pick up.
It was a rare absence for the woman Pellman credits for raising her in an LGBTQ-friendly household – an experience she’s grateful to diverge from Emma’s. “When I got out of my last year of high school, it wasn’t a big deal,” she says. “I just let go one evening while watching TV: ‘Mom, I think I’m weird. And she said, ‘That’s absolutely fine.’ She just wanted me to be happy.
Pellman’s mother, whom she calls “pretty much the coolest person ever,” declined to be interviewed for this article. But she was an unseen presence during our November conversation, laughing at her daughter’s confession that she could speak Ubbi Dubbi fluently, the gibberish language popularized by the PBS program “Zoom,” and handing handkerchiefs to Pellman when she spoke. choked on talking about an emotional moment in the movie where Emma states that she has never felt so lonely in her life.
Unlike Emma, Pellman was not a growing outcast in Cincinnati, which is far from Edgewater, Indiana, the fictional setting of the film. She describes her high school as “rather progressive”. Most of her close friends were gay, she said, adding, “I’m lucky because I’ve never been bullied.”
It’s that claim she pulled from her portrayal of Emma as an energetic – albeit reluctant – leader that comes to life throughout the film. “It’s the best feeling in the world knowing that I can bring my authentic self to the role,” Pellman said. “And not just be accepted, but celebrated.”
“When she called to tell me she got the part, there was a certain rightness in the world,” said Brent Wagner, who recently retired as chairman of the musical theater department of the University of Michigan. “Because if she hadn’t understood it, she would fight for the Emmas of the world.”
She and DeBose, another queer woman Pellman calls “the one person who always knows exactly what I’m going through,” co-founded the Unruly Hearts Initiative to connect LGBTQ youth with organizations that help provide housing, mental health services and mentoring.
It’s not the only time she shares her talents. In 2017, she traveled to India, conducting theater workshops in Mumbai with incarcerated women and victims of human trafficking.
Pellman proudly points out that this is not her first New York Times appearance – she was featured in a 2019 article about a struggle to get back the $ 1,200 she and her roommate had paid in application fees. ‘dubious apartment.
“And I won!” she says.
Despite recent praise – Kidman, in an email, referred to her “1940s movie star face” – Pellman has Selina Meyer’s mouth. “During the scene where I had all these dodge bullets thrown at me by crew members, I was punched real hard in the face,” she said, and shouted reflexively an epithet. “It was very funny. Everyone laughed.”
DeBose, 29, said Pellman was the person on set who brought people together – and that they spoke regularly on FaceTime. “She is Emma 2.0,” she said. “She’s good at cultivating community and she’s the one who rallied the troops.”
For her part, Pellman said she hopes the film is aimed directly at young people who identify as LGBTQ. “I hope they’re like, ‘I’m worthy of a happy ending,’ ‘she said.
