Kat Borchart/The Licensing Project
Amandla Stenberg, 20, has already played a number of memorable roles—from Rue in The Hunger Games to Leyna, a biracial teen in Nazi Germany, in Where Hands Touch—but none have suited the actress more than Starr Carter, the character at the heart of The Hate U Give (October 19). Stenberg carries every scene of the Black Lives Matter–inspired movie, directed by George Tillman Jr. and based on last year’s YA novel of the same name.
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“Angie Thomas, the book’s author, told me that when she was writing, she’d seen my video about cultural appropriation and said, ‘Oh my God, that’s Starr,’ ” Stenberg says. “So from the jump it was very synchronistic and organic.”
The video in question, “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows,” was a school project that went viral and launched Stenberg as one of the most influential voices of her generation. But she has more in common with the character than a proclivity for social justice. Like Starr, she grew up in a predominantly black community and attended a school populated by rich white kids—which, in Stenberg’s case, required taking a daily hour-and-a-half bus ride from South L.A.
That shared experience resonated, Stenberg says. “Just to see how Starr code-switches. It was something that I was challenged by very early in life—how to present yourself in an environment that’s so different from your own, how to compromise parts of yourself in that process.”
Like Starr, who watches a white officer fatally shoot her friend, Stenberg came to realize there is power in authenticity. “I’ve been interested in stories that usually white girls get to be at the helm of,” she says. But The Hate U Give was an opportunity to integrate her art and activism and navigate “a world within blackness that we don’t always get to explore onscreen.”
This article originally appeared in the November 2018 issue of ELLE.
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