When Alia Shawkat read the script for The Wrong Girls, the new stoner comedy she stars in alongside Kristen Stewart, she felt seen. “I so identify as a ‘wrong girl.’ That’s me,” she says on a recent video call, and by her own account she feels exactly right for the role.
Written and directed by Dylan Meyer, the film casts the 37-year-old Shawkat as Molly, a committed stoner and aspiring chef with a specialty in blue-cheese brownies, and the codependent best friend and roommate to Stewart’s Frankie. Gloriously out of it, the pair get swept into an international tug-of-war over an experimental serum that, of course, they end up consuming, with predictably chaotic results. The movie arrives in theaters August 14.
The part fits neatly into a career built on characters slightly out of step with the world. Shawkat has moved through the lesbian romance Duck Butter in 2018 and the millennial-skewering dark comedy Search Party across its 2016 to 2022 run, choosing projects with intention because, she says, she knows how easily she can be typecast.
That deliberateness now extends beyond the work. A new mother, Shawkat says she has no interest in living an A-list celebrity lifestyle, a stance that has kept her filmography idiosyncratic rather than obvious. As viewers, the piece argues, we are lucky she chose something as sharp and funny as The Wrong Girls.
Her instincts trace back a long way. Asked about the first screen work that cracked something open in her, Shawkat points to the kids’ sketch-comedy show All That, her earliest memory of realizing that acting could be both a job and genuinely fun. Decades on, in a buddy comedy about two women who are wonderfully, hopelessly wrong, that early sense of play is still doing the heavy lifting.
