Standard knowledge now has it that Hollywood now not creates and nurtures younger stars in the way in which it as soon as did. Which is to say that if the system gained’t do it for her, Molly Gordon will merely make herself a number one girl.
Recognized for supporting roles in sequence similar to “The Bear” and “Winning Time” and options similar to “Booksmart,” “Shiva Baby” and “Theater Camp” (which she additionally co-wrote and co-directed), Gordon is lastly stepping as much as her first main position in a movie, for the brand new “Oh, Hi!” with a efficiency that’s equally heartfelt as it’s unhinged.
It premiered earlier this 12 months on the Sundance Movie Pageant, after which it was acquired for distribution by Sony Photos Classics. Gordon shares a narrative credit score on the movie and can be a producer, as she takes a stronger grip on creating the roles (and profession) that studios might not but be offering her. Sensible, witty and weak, she will be able to come throughout as a contemporary iteration of the urbane persona of Diane Keaton.
“I don’t think I’ve gotten to really show this emotion or this darkness or gotten to be this crazy,” says Gordon, 29, of her “Oh, Hi!” flip. “It would’ve been cool if it came with someone else giving me that opportunity, but it just didn’t really feel like that was going to happen. So hopefully this shows people that I can do other things. But if not, I will keep trying to make my own things.”
Logan Lerman, left, and Molly Gordon within the film “Oh, Hi!”
(Sony Photos Classics)
The film stars Gordon and Logan Lerman as Iris and Isaac, taking their first out-of-town journey collectively to a romantic rental home within the nation. After some zesty, playful intercourse impressed by the grownup toys they uncover in a closet, Isaac reveals — ill-advisedly — that he doesn’t see theirs as a dedicated relationship whereas nonetheless handcuffed to a mattress. She takes this as a possibility to persuade him in any other case, leaving him chained up as she pleads her case for why they’d make an ideal couple. He threatens to have her arrested, she requires backup from her pals (Geraldine Viswanathan, John Reynolds) and issues ensue.
Getting into a trendy Los Feliz bistro in a sunshine yellow scoop-neck minidress, a forest inexperienced ballcap for native NPR station KCRW perched atop her head, Gordon greets me with an endearingly awkward alternate — to remain seated to shake palms or get up and hug? — to rival any high-’90s romantic-comedy heroine.
“I’ve been calling it a rom-com gone wrong,” says Gordon, “because I don’t know how else to explain it. She thinks they’re in a rom-com but they’re not in a rom-com.”
“Oh, Hi!” enters a summer season of debate in regards to the fashionable romantic comedy, with Celine Music’s “Materialists” and Lena Dunham’s “Too Much” pushing the shape in some new instructions.
The premise of “Oh, Hi!” is one thing of a Computer virus, as its girl-takes-boy-hostage idea creates a platform for conversations and issues on the difficulties of courting. Together with her mixture of winsome attraction and understanding air, Gordon feels of a bit with such established rom-com stars similar to Meg Ryan, Reese Witherspoon or Kate Hudson — but with simply sufficient smartphone-era savvy to additionally really feel notably now.
“I think the world is in such a heightened place that it feels like maybe the right rom-com of our time,” she provides. “In this moment, nothing feels normal. It’s not like Meg and faking an orgasm at the deli anymore. Life is just crazy. It’s just a different moment.”
“I think the world is in such a heightened place that it feels like maybe the right rom-com of our time,” Gordon says of “Oh, Hi!” “In this moment, nothing feels normal. It’s not like Meg and faking an orgasm at the deli anymore.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)
Born and raised on the westside of Los Angeles, Gordon moved to New York Metropolis for school however quickly dropped out to pursue performing full-time. Within the years since she has usually break up her time between the 2 cities, however has most not too long ago been spending extra time in New York, particularly since her dad and mom moved there after shedding their house within the January fires. Maybe in a rom-com premise all its personal, Gordon is in what she describes as “a new chapter in New York.”
Gordon’s mom Jessie Nelson is a director and screenwriter whose credit embody the options “Corrina, Corrina,” and “I Am Sam,” whereas her father Bryan Gordon is a prolific tv director. (He as soon as labored with a younger Lerman in an episode of the short-lived sequence “Jack & Bobby.”)
“Oh, Hi!” writer-director Sophie Brooks and Gordon are longtime pals who discovered themselves each again of their dad and mom’ homes throughout the early levels of the pandemic and commiserating on relationship troubles and uncommunicative exes.
“She’s so funny and dynamic and she has this inherent charm and likability to her onscreen that feels like a leading-lady energy,” says Brooks, 35, of Gordon’s onscreen presence. “She also has this range of being able to do really sentimental, sincere scenes and also being incredibly funny and absurd and big.”
Logan Lerman, left, and Molly Gordon in ‘Oh, Hi!’
(Sony Photos Classics)
Viswanathan, 30, was sitting in a sushi spot on Sundown Boulevard that she and Gordon usually go to collectively as she took a name not too long ago to speak about her good friend. The 2 have been shut ever since assembly whereas capturing the 2020 film “The Broken Hearts Gallery” and Viswanathan recalled additionally being shocked when Gordon talked about that “Oh, Hi!” was her first time main a movie.
“She said to me once: ‘This industry is like a swinging spotlight that shines its light on people at various times,’ ” mentioned Viswanathan, who additionally appeared on this summer season’s “Thunderbolts*.” “And I just think that was one of the most profound pieces of wisdom and advice that I’ve gotten from anybody in the business. That’s the perfect way to think about it, because the spotlight — it moves around. She just feels like such a seasoned pro.”
Alongside Viswanathan, Gordon can be shut with such multi-hyphenate skills as Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri, forming a cohort of sensible, proficient ladies who’ve all been navigating Hollywood on and off-screen collectively.
Gordon likes to maintain up with the Hollywood trades, studying scripts and monitoring tasks she has nothing to do with out of a mixture of beginner enthusiasm {and professional} curiosity. She tasks a composure and clear-eyed point-of-view which will come partly from rising up across the trade but in addition from her personal studious curiosity in how the up to date leisure enterprise works, proper now, from how movies get green-lit to how movie star gossip will get circulated
“It’s a very precarious landscape for women,” says Geraldine Viswanathan, photographed on the Los Angeles Instances Sundance studio in January. “But that’s kind of the magic of Molly. She’s just the most likable person.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Instances)
Final 12 months Gordon discovered herself the goal of surprising scrutiny when tabloid pictures emerged of her together with her “The Bear” co-star Jeremy Allen White, stoking fevered hypothesis from the present’s passionate fandom. “Oh, Hi!” additionally consists of Gordon’s first nude scenes, with photos taken from a preview screening popping up on-line earlier than the movie had even opened. It has taken all her sharpness and confidence to steer round these pitfalls of rising fame.
“I think the internet is really gross and scary and I’ve become my most depressed when I start to view my art through that or I read too much of that stuff,” says Gordon. “That’s the hardest part about making things in 2025. But then I also talk about this with my sounding board of women, it’s like you have to kind of be a little bit on the internet to know what people want and it helps your art. Especially with comedy, you want it to be so of the time. But then sometimes I’ll read stuff and I’ll be like, ‘Oh, now I’m thinking about making a movie through this lens of a review or a bad comment.’ It’s just hard to find that balance. So I try to not look at it that much.”
As as to if she is at the moment in any sort of relationship with anybody in any respect, Gordon says succinctly, “I don’t ever want to talk about my personal life. Remember Jack Nicholson with the sunglasses sitting courtside at the Lakers? Let’s all go back to that.”
The character of the story in “Oh, Hi!” meant that Lerman spent lengthy stretches of the manufacturing handcuffed to a mattress, typically for hours at a time. Between pictures, Gordon would make certain he had water or fetch him snacks.
“She really was looking after everybody in this production and really wanting everybody to do their best work,” Lerman, 33, says in a cellphone name from his house in Los Angeles. “It was infectious. And I think it flowed through to everybody else, every other department, just how much Molly loved this movie.”
Brooks notes how when Gordon was in a scene, their dynamic was one in every of actor and director, however between pictures, “she was an incredibly active producer, really dealing with nitty-gritty things.”
Throughout one pivotal early scene, wherein the 2 essential characters have a romantic dinner exterior, issues virtually pressured a revision resulting from finances and scheduling points. Nevertheless it was Gordon who backed up her director.
“It was written as outside — I wanted it to be outside,” Brooks remembers. “And there was this day where kind of everybody was pushing me to move it inside. And she was like, ‘Sophie, you don’t want it inside. You want it outside, it should be outside.’ And she was right. I was so grateful to her in that moment that my producer was like, ‘No, that’s not what you want. let’s keep it as you intended it.’ ”
Viswanathan recalled a time when she and Gordon had been going up for a similar position and labored on their self-taped auditions collectively. (Neither obtained the half.) Gordon’s notes and path had been decisive and convincing, and so Viswanathan just isn’t shocked to see her shifting additional towards creating and shepherding her personal tasks.
“It’s a very precarious landscape for women with roles like [‘Oh, Hi!’s’ Iris],” mentioned Viswanathan. “But that’s kind of the magic of Molly. She’s just the most likable person. It was something that she had to constantly find the balance for: how crazy to make her, how sympathetic, how comedic, how dramatic. It’s a difficult tone. So watching her navigate all of it on no sleep was really a marvel.”
As an actor Gordon will quickly be seen alongside Hugh Jackman and Emma Thompson within the 2026 live-action-animation hybrid “Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Movie” (for which, she emphasizes, all of them play individuals). Gordon can be co-writing the screenplay for a remake of the ’80s comedy “Outrageous Fortune” about two struggling actresses for Searchlight Photos which she hopes to be allowed to direct herself.
“What I have in my head is going to be big,” says Gordon, likening the concept to “The Nice Guys,” the Ryan Gosling-Russell Crowe action-comedy. “And so I’m going to have to convince people and do the song-and-dance. And I’m ready to do it.”
Earlier than that she’s going to direct and star in the highschool reunion comedy “Peaked,” which she additionally co-wrote, for A24.
“The movie kind of explores the age that I’m at right now, which is kind of: Where do we fit? I’m not a mother but I’m not the naive 22-year-old. I’m in this nebulous place of like: Where do we put her?” says Gordon. “Which is kind of why I started writing my own stuff.”
Has she answered that query for herself but?
“Where do I fit? I think it’s a constant question,” says Gordon. “I’m lucky to have that mirrored back in all my friends who see the world in a similar way that I do. But I’ll be on my journey of where do I fit probably till I die.”
Interview completed and on her approach to the door, Gordon navigates her farewell having already reconfigured the blocking of who sits and who stands in a small-scale piece of directing, producing and performing unexpectedly. That’s at the very least one drawback solved.
