Greta Gerwig – The Great

With Barbie, Greta Gerwig injected billions into the box office and joy back into Hollywood. If she has her way and there's every reason to think she will-she'll be doing the same thing for the next 40 years

- By Sloane Crosley. Photographs by Norman Jean Roy

UNLESS YOU’VE BEEN living under a Dreamhouse, you know how this works: In Barbie Land, all Barbies are named Barbie and all Kens are named Ken. But in real life? Everyone is Enya. “Everybody gets ‘Sail Away,’ ” says Greta Gerwig of her ringtone. “Everybody.” In addition to a successful acting and screenwriting career (she starred in Greenberg, Frances Ha, and Mistress

America), Gerwig was personally nominated for three Oscars between Lady Bird and Little Women. Then, this year, her 40th, came Barbie, the highest-grossing film ever helmed by a woman, a commercial anomaly even for its stars. Gerwig also wrote Barbie with her life partner, the writer and director Noah Baumbach. That she maintains a carefully curated existence seems at once a Hollywood rarity and the tentpole of her success. (She uses words like rigor and essential a lot and eschews social media, that “terrifying construction of a self through taste.”) In short: She likes what she likes, be it Truffaut or Titanic, which she saw eight times as a Sacramento teen and “wept beyond anything I thought I was capable of.” Perhaps this explains why, this past summer, a certain generation of women watched Margot Robbie zipping along in her pink Corvette, a challah of blond hair over her shoulder, singing along to the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine,” and thought: Am I really watching this? Or rather, Am I getting to watch this?