HANNAH MURRAY
“When I read the script it was everything I wanted it to be,” says Hannah Murray, star of God Help the Girl, the indie rock musical written and directed by first-time filmmaker Stuart Murdoch, the lead singer-songwriter of Belle and Sebastian. Murray, whose breakthrough role was Cassie Ainsworth on the UK teen drama Skins, plays another Cassie in God Help the Girl, a rich, tandem bicycle-riding teenager who joins with her friends, played by Emily Browning and Olly Alexander, to attempt a band one summer in Glasgow. “I think anyone who has a love for music probably goes through a phase of, ‘I want to do that.’ But I realized long ago that was never going to be possible for me,” she says. and laughs. “And that’s something that is amazing about acting. There are those few seconds when you forget and think that you’re in a band— and you kind of are, in that fantasy moment.” The Bristolborn actor recalls first listening to Belle and Sebastian as was a teenager. “The song ‘Expectations’ was a huge thing for me because it so encapsulated the experience of being a teenage girl and feeling like an outsider,” she recalls. “Like you’re weird and different and not going to fit in. It meant a lot to me to feel like I wasn’t alone, that other people were going through the same thing.” It was particularly gratifying to watch Murdoch realize his shipin-a-bottle storytelling with new breadth. “It was amazing to watch someone take so much joy in their work,” Murray says. “I think because he was a first time director, but also because he was coming at it from a place of having been a musician and probably never expecting to be a director. He was amazingly grateful and appreciative and enjoying the experience as much as possible.” MARK JACOBS COAT AND HAT GUCCI P/F 2014