‘My Animal’ Stars Amandla Stenberg and Bobbi Salvör Menuez Talk Their Queer New Werewolf Horror
In Jacqueline Castel’s new film My Animal, which recently had its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, takes well-worn lycanthropic tropes and places them in the center of a budding queer relationship. Queerness, and more broadly being an outsider, are ripe for the werewolf subgenre. And Castel, with writer Jae Matthews, use that to their advantage to craft a story about aching queer love.
In My Animal:
Tamped down by an oppressive family dynamic orbiting around her alcoholic mother, kept on the sidelines of the hockey team she yearns to join, and imprisoned in her own home each full moon, Heather is in a struggle for her life against the constrictive forces in her small northern town. When an intriguing figure skater enters the rink, Heather’s life, sexuality, and personhood are pried open. Jonny, played by Amandla Stenberg, and Heather, played by Bobbi Salvör Menuez, have bombastic chemistry that plays out on screen with attitude, style, and ferocity. Far from the typical werewolf story, Heather’s condition is one of many reasons for her outcast status. Luckily, Jonny is happy to join her on the outskirts.
Dread Central sat down with Stenberg and Menuez to talk about the beauty of queer love in their new film.
This is the first part of our conversation with Menuez and Stenberg. Stay tuned closer to the film’s wide release for part two!
Dread Central: What attracted you to being a part of My Animal?
Bobbi Salvör Menuez: I fell in love with the script pretty much immediately. The world felt so visceral, so real. I just fell in love with this character. My heart broke for everything that she was moving through. And it just felt so real and so true to different queer experiences and things that I’ve experienced. I also was excited about a queer narrative that I felt like I hadn’t seen before.
DC: Hell yeah. And then Amanda, what about you?
Amandla Stenberg: It was the same for me. My Animal was a world that I felt like I could very naturally slip into. It felt really colorful and huge. That’s also because our screenwriter, Jae Matthews, I think has a really special way of creating worlds through her music and through her writing. And I was a big fan of hers beforehand, so that was so exciting. Getting to learn Jacqueline’s work, I could just see very instantaneously how she would manifest the film. Then [it was amazing] being able to work with Bobby, who I’ve just loved and respected for a long time.
DC: The dynamic between the two of your characters is really fascinating to watch. Obviously, there are a lot of really incredible portrayals of queer longing, but there’s also a little bit of toxicity underneath in My Animal, which I really like in terms of a more complicated queer dynamic. I wanted to hear more about how the two of you work together to kind of create this really fascinating dynamic between Heather and Johnny.
BSM: I mean obviously it’s so much more fun to play queer relationships with other queer actors. Just to have that base of personal experience to pull from. There’s just so much about queer relationships that include so much nuance and can blur the lines between friendship and a romantic relationship, especially for teenagers in a small town where that doesn’t seem like a super viable reality to step into. They might have moments of something really beautiful and real between them, and yet the realities of the oppressive forces around them and the internalized shame that they’re experiencing, warp the real thing that they’ve touched in each other.
I feel like that’s where that kind of toxic stuff comes up from a place of survival. These characters are trying to survive in really challenging conditions and there are moments where it feels hard to feel where there’s room to step into the beautiful thing that might be there between them.
AS: Queer relationships are so beautiful because they can traverse so many different roles, from lover to best friend to parent to sibling. Not to sound incestuous, but there’s a lot of flexibility in queer relationships that I think comes from the innate spirit that we as queer people have, but also because of the way that our sense of family is defined by how we find each other and how we love each other.
I think these characters are having that kind of relationship and are also recognizing something in each other that allows for the exploration of their own identity. And they’re bumping up against the confines of their environment and the result of that can be really painful, especially when you’re not quite at the stage in your life where you feel comfortable inhabiting who you’re meant to be and are in a place of resistance.
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