VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Eliza Scanlen On Female Sexual Repression In ‘The Starling Girl’

In The Starling Girl, we follow 17-year-old Jem Starling, played by Eliza Scanlen, as she battles with her budding sexuality in her rural Kentucky town and her fundamentalist Christian church.

In an exclusive interview with uInterview, Scanlen discussed how the film takes on power dynamics.

“I think it’s a complex take on power dynamics,” she said. “I think it displays how patriarchal systems can be toxic to both men and women and it kind of takes away from loving the people we truly love. And we see all the complexity in this relationship because in some ways it’s consensual but there’s definitely an abusive power there but it’s hard to pinpoint the moment it becomes inappropriate. It’s a difficult conversation to have and I have a hard time even putting it in words.”

Scanlen then went on to talk about the hardest scenes for her to shoot.

“I think when Jem and Owen begin to develop a connection, that’s when it starts to become complicated because Owen is very aware of his own power but Jem is so oblivious to the hold that he has over her and how dangerous that might be,” she reveled. “So I think a lot of the scenes were kind of challenging in that way.”