Booksmart star’s harrowing new role

Fresh from shooting laugh-out-loud coming-of-age comedy Booksmart, Kaitlyn Dever plunged headfirst into the distressing true story of a young woman charged by police after reporting that she had been sexually assaulted.

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Fresh from shooting laugh-out-loud coming-of-age comedy Booksmart, Kaitlyn Dever plunged headfirst into the harrowing true story of a young woman charged by police after reporting that she had been sexually assaulted.

Dever, who has starred opposite Tim Allen in Last Man Standing since 2011 and played Hugh Jackman’s daughter in The Front Runner, was surprised by the difficulty of the role in the new Netflix drama series Unbelievable and by how closely entwined she would become with her character.

Kaitlyn Dever stars in new Netflix drama Unbelievable.

“I have to say this is one of the hardest things I’ve had to do in my career, the hardest project,” she
tells Insider. “I don’t think I’ve ever had so much emotional connection to a role before.

“I was in it for the duration of shooting, I didn’t really come out of the sadness of it all.”

Unbelievable is an eight-part drama series based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pro Publica article An Unbelievable Story Of Rape.

Marie, a teenager finding her feet after a lifetime in foster care, is brutally attacked by a masked intruder in her Seattle apartment. She reports the sexual assault to police, but after a few inconsistencies in her story and a lack of physical evidence, investigators quickly turn their suspicion towards the victim.

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Under pressure and without support, Marie concedes the attack may have been a dream before reluctantly saying she fabricated the entire story. She’s charged with filing a false police report and her life begins to spiral — friends are lost, she’s fired from her job and she is turned away from the sponsored apartment she lives in.

Three years later and thousands of kilometres away in Golden, Colorado, two detectives — played by Toni Collette and Merritt Weaver — are hunting a serial rapist terrorising women across their counties.

Their dogged investigation eventually puts Marie’s experience back under the microscope.

The Arizona-born Dever who has been acting since the age of five, hadn’t heard of the story before being sent the script while wrapping up production on Booksmart, but she immediately wanted to be a part of bringing this young woman’s story to life.

Dever in a scene from Unbelievable. Picture: Beth Dubber/Netflix

“After I read her story my heart broke for her and it made me so sad that someone so young, who had already had a tough life to begin with, had to go through this, something so traumatic, and what she dealt with in the aftermath,” she says.

“It was very exciting for me to shed light on a story that was not known to a lot of people.”

For an actor, stepping into the shoes of a character who is still alive is hard enough. They’ll be watching and judging. But when that person comes with a deeply personal story, the pressure’s on to capture and respect their experience.

“For me the pressure was on the fact that I was telling Marie’s story and I just wanted to do her character justice,” she says. “We talked about possibly talking to her on the phone but I had so much information about Marie that I was lucky enough to have access to.

“She was already allowing us to tell her story which is enough alone so I wanted to respect her privacy as much as possible.”

Merritt Wever and Toni Collette also star in the series. Picture: Beth Dubber/Netflix

On paper, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is an extended episode of Law & Order: SVU, but Unbelievable focuses on the personalities of those involved in this hunt and shines a spotlight on the emotional damage a woman suffers being raped and the different ways in which they cope.

“The show does a beautiful job of showing how it affects women — this is a thing that doesn’t only affect your life for a short period of time, it affects your life forever,” Dever says.

It’s been more than 30 years since Jodie Foster won an Academy Award for The Accused, a movie about a young woman gang-raped at a bar and then all but blamed for bringing on the attack herself.

The role marked Foster’s official transition from child star to critically acclaimed adult performer and when Dever’s performance is compared to that of the acclaimed actor-director, the 22-year-old rising star is genuinely taken aback.

“Oh my god, I just got chills when you said that,” she says. “It makes me so emotional, I definitely looked up to her growing up.”

Beanie Feldstein with Dever in Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart. Picture: Francois Duhamel / Annapurna Pictures

She also points to Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Lawrence and Joaquin Phoenix as actors who have inspired her. Then there’s Olivia Wilde who directed Dever and Beanie Feldstein in Booksmart and gave her the opportunity to be involved in another movie that was breaking new ground.

Telling stories that may have been ignored or glossed over not too long ago is clearly important to Dever and why she was so happy to be cast as Amy in the critically acclaimed Booksmart. Amy is gay but it’s not the focus of her character and it’s not something that’s taken advantage of by the writers.

“That’s a really big deal in a comedy where she’s not brought into the movie to be the butt of the joke because of her sexuality,” Dever says. “We don’t just mention her sexuality either, we talk about it and she explores it — you can see it in the film and the only love scene in the movie is hers and it’s so powerful.”

Despite her youth, Dever has been in the industry for more than a decade. She’s happy with the progress that’s being made in telling diverse stories — even if it could move a little faster.

“I think there’s a lot more work to be done but there are a lot of people coming together to make projects that are really moving the needle forward,” she says.

* Unbelievable is streaming on Netflix from September 13

Originally published as Booksmart star’s harrowing new role