Ariana Greenblatt Is No Newbie
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At 15, before even getting her driver’s permit, Ariana Greenblatt has starred in a Disney Channel show and an Avengers movie, braved the freezing cold onscreen with Adam Driver, and landed a role in one of the biggest films of the year: Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.
“That’s definitely surreal and really crazy,” Greenblatt says of her career so far.
But right now, as she Zooms from her home in Los Angeles, she’s a regular high school sophomore, chilling in a gray hoodie and delicate layered necklaces. Some of her classmates might recognize her work, but they keep her grounded. “Let me tell you,” she confesses, “teenage kids do not give a poop about what I’m doing. …They definitely keep me humble in the nicest way.”
Despite being in class all day, she’s bubbly, animated, and energetic with the stage presence of a veteran performer. In fact, if Greenblatt ever does get nervous about roles, she looks to her younger, and even more fearless, self for guidance. “What would six-year-old Ariana do in this moment?” she says, referencing the age she started acting. “She wouldn’t care. And she would do what she does best and just be yourself.” The method has worked so far. “I’ve gotten to work with my dream actors that I would’ve never expected to even meet in my life.”
That includes Gerwig and Margot Robbie, who’s producing and starring in Barbie, and whom Greenblatt has idolized ever since seeing Suicide Squad. During the audition process, she was just happy to be on Zoom with them both. “My only thought in my head was like, Look, however this goes, just cherish this moment forever [and] the fact that you get to meet these two beautiful, inspiring women just at least once. That’s all I wanted.” When she was cast, Greenblatt’s mom and brother broke the news by surprising her with a Barbie cake and afternoon tea (because she’d be filming in London) while playing the song “Barbie Girl.”
The plot of the film remains a hot-pink mystery, but the trailer released in April offers a hint: The kaleidoscopic Barbie Land is home to several Barbies (like Robbie, Issa Rae, Hari Nef, and Dua Lipa) and Kens (like Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu, and Ncuti Gatwa), but Robbie’s doll wants to venture into the Real World. Perhaps that’s where the humans come in, like Greenblatt, America Ferrera, and Will Ferrell, whose roles were recently confirmed via character posters. All Greenblatt can say is, “Everyone had such a great time making it, and it really shows on camera.” A professional response, but also apparently true: During production, the cast would watch movies relating to Barbie every Sunday at Electric Cinema in Notting Hill, she says.
Greenblatt also gushes over the “core memory” she shared with Robbie on set: During one lunch break, Robbie treated her to sushi and matcha lattes as they chatted about Frank Ocean and Lana Del Rey and played music for each other. “That was just such a special moment for me that I’ll never forget because, keep in mind, we were doing this, but she was also watching trailers for movies that haven’t even come out yet…and then giving notes, and then she’s doing six things at once,” Greenblatt recalls, awestruck.
Originally from Florida, Greenblatt was a dancer “since I was literally born” before she tried acting. The journey started with her and her family flying to L.A. for vacation and a few “meetings,” which she would later realize were auditions. She ended up booking three roles, including a guest spot on Disney Channel’s Liv and Maddie starring Dove Cameron. The whole process was just starting to click for her. “I was six years old thinking all the stuff I was watching was still real life.” But she was falling in love with it.
After that, she was cast as a series regular on Disney’s Stuck in the Middle, in which she played the youngest, and most mischievous, of Jenna Ortega’s onscreen siblings. The two still keep in touch with “happy birthday” texts and support from afar. “We definitely have congratulated each other for our successes,” Greenblatt says. Like Ortega and other child stars before her, Greenblatt is in that transition out of the Disney Channel limelight and into the next stages of her career. Though she’s still playing teens, most of her castmates are much older, and usually quite renowned.
Take her role as young Gamora in Infinity War, one of her first jobs after Stuck in the Middle. She was sharing scenes with Josh Brolin, at barely 9 years old. “Being painted green at 5 in the morning and in front of this guy who’s in this little gray mo-cap suit with dots all over his face, it really was out of this world and I was just obsessed with it,” she says. The job could be daunting to anyone, but Greenblatt knew: she belongs here.
She would go on to shoot other intense projects, like the vibrant screen adaptation of Lin Manuel-Miranda’s musical In the Heights, or the sci-fi 65, shot in New Orleans and Oregon, where she and Driver “filmed outside for three to four months…in the rain, in the mud, in the wind, in all of the climates you can kind of ever think of.”
Borderlands was challenging in different ways. Starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, and Jamie Lee Curtis, and co-written by The Last of Us’ Craig Mazin, it marks Greenblatt’s first video game adaptation. She isn’t a gamer, but she played every night, often to the point of frustration, to prepare for the rambunctious role of Tiny Tina. She wanted to stay true to the original character but also give it “my own little twist” and imbue her with “normal teenage girl feelings.”
After all that name-dropping, Greenblatt still has a big list of dream collaborators, which she flashes to the screen on her notebook: Natalie Portman, Timothée Chalamet, Joaquin Phoenix, Winona Rider, and Angelina Jolie (Girl, Interrupted is a current favorite), Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Jordan Peele, “and then Tim Burton, obviously.”
When I float the idea of her appearing in season 2 of Wednesday, which Burton directs and Ortega leads, Greenblatt nearly squeals, “Sisters reunite?” But she’d love to collaborate with the filmmaker on anything, honestly.
Greenblatt has an “urge to direct” herself, and observed Gerwig on the Barbie set. Even when she’s with her friends, she says, “We could be making a really dumb TikTok, but I have to make it cinematic, somehow.” Her ultimate goal is writing and directing her own movie from the ground up. And, she adds in classic teenage fashion, “getting a really sick car.”
Hair by Vernon François for Redken; makeup by Karo Kangas for Westman Atelier; produced by Rhianna Rule.
A version of this story appears in the May 2023 issue of ELLE.
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