VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Kiersey Clemons Shares Her Experience Working With Director Tayarisha Poe On ‘The Young Wife’

Actress Kiersey Clemons shared insights from her new film The Young Wife in her new uInterview. 

The Young Wife follows a woman on her wedding day as she grapples with the meaning of love and commitment and struggles through the chaos and expectations of family and friends, each intensifying her spiraling panic. In the movie, directed and written by Tayarisha Poe, Clemons plays the character of Celestina.

“It just was really refreshing; it wasn’t like anything I had read before,” Clemons told uInterview founder Erik Meers. “Scripts like this don’t normally come my way. So it just felt like such a great opportunity to also work with Tayarisha; I’m a big fan of Tayarisha; I think that we see the way in which we experience art, and we make art the same way.”

Clemons continued, “And something that really drew me in was that there’s a lot of back and forth, people really fighting for what they believe and trying to make the other person get on their side in this movie, and I loved that when I was reading it, I wasn’t always on Celestina’s side. And there were certain things that pissed me off. But I always understood where everyone was coming from and how they got to that thought, how they formed that thought, how they came to that conclusion. I thought it was just such great writing.”

She added, “And the formula of it, the format of the script was super unconventional, which I love – it was unexpected. And I related to Celestina at the time, I really did,  a lot of what she was feeling and I was going through at the time, so it just felt really meant to be.”

Clemons laughed as she mulled her part in the film. “I guess it really is an odd take on the plight of the privileged,” she said. “It’s super odd, especially coming from a black queer girl struggling with ‘What do I do because I have so much?'”

The actress noted how she and the director shared a similar sensibility.

“We both really know that what services a movie the most is when everything feels really good when you’re making it,” she said. “I think when you’re trying to make something like this, or, there’s another movie I did called Hearts Beat Loud, that I feel like has the same feeling of you just kind of feel something in your chest, and whether it’s good or it’s bad, it’s nostalgic. The Young Wife feels very misty. It feels like dawn, you don’t know if something really bad or something really good is going to happen. [Poe and I] love that feeling. We both feed off of that feeling, and that can only happen when everyone is buzzing on set. There has to be this energy, and that’s what I am always on the hunt for. That’s what I want, and so does Tayarisha.” 

The Young Wife is now available to stream on major platforms.