SPECIAL K

After breaking out in comedy Booksmart, Kaitlyn Dever proved her dramatic chops with a run of heartbreaking performances. Now returning to the laughs with TICKET TO PARADISE, she tells Total Film how she wants her roles to reflect real experiences.

- JANE CROWTHER

Blades Of Glory gets it kind of right about the figure-skating world – no joke!” laughs Kaitlyn Dever from her home in LA. She would know. As the daughter of former professional skaters, Tim and Kathy (her dad competed in the 1988 US Figure Skating Championships), Dever has grown up in a house of performers. So it wasn’t such a leap from playing with dolls when, as a kid, she decided she wanted to be an actor. Having cut her teeth performing in adverts as a nipper, Dever convinced her mum to move with her from their Phoenix family home to LA on a trial basis to see if show business would work out. Almost immediately, she got a gig on a movie (Chrissa Stands Strong) and never looked back.

Though she’d stacked the CV with jobs on Last Man Standing, Beautiful Boy, Detroit and Justified, another movie she’d had her eye on through years of development was the one to put her on the map as an adult, kicking off a run of performances that would wow audiences and awards bodies. As Amy, a nerdy high schooler trying to live her partying life in one night with her bestie Molly (Beanie Feldstein), Dever delighted in Olivia Wilde’s assured 2019 directorial debut, Booksmart. She had arrived.

“I had read the script probably three or four years prior to actually shooting the movie,” Dever recalls with a sunny smile from her living room. Wearing no make-up on her freshly scrubbed face, she’s sporting a grey Tennessee t-shirt. “It was always one of those things where I was literally turning down other projects because there was always a moment when we thought