Netflix’s coming-of-age romantic drama Along for the Ride is now streaming. Directed and written by Sofia Alvarez, the film stars Emma Pasarow and Belmont Cameli in the lead roles, with Kate Bosworth, Andie MacDowell, and Dermot Mulroney rounding out the main cast.
RELATED: Interview: Along for the Ride Leads Emma Pasarow & Belmont Cameli
“It’s Auden’s last summer before college and she’s spending it in picturesque Colby Beach,” says the synopsis. “While other teens party in the sun, loner Auden spends her time roaming the streets after everyone else is asleep. Everything changes when she meets Eli, a charming and mysterious fellow insomniac. On their nightly adventures, Eli challenges Auden to a quest to live out all her childhood dreams. Their connection pushes them to confront why they’ve been content living life in the shadows as they begin to show each other how to live life to the fullest.”
ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke with Along for the Ride star Kate Bosworth about her role as Heidi and how being a stepmom in real-life impacted her performance.
Tyler Treese: I really enjoyed the film and I was so glad that we got to see a stepmother character in one of these coming-of-age films that wasn’t just this evil person in disguise. So, how thrilling was it to actually give an accurate portrayal of what stepmothers can be, and what did you find most relatable about Heidi?
Kate Bosworth: Well, I have been, I would like to say, a loving, warm, connected stepmom for 11 years in my real life to a beautiful young woman, who’s now 24, but when I met her, she was about 12 years old named Jasper. So, I have also been sort of, probably like many people, like when are we gonna get to see the portrayal of a stepmom who is not the sort of like evil, crazy one, you know? Then Heidi came along and there were so many similarities, to be honest, between her and myself. The first time I met Jasper, I was like this like crazy spastic version, which I brought a lot of that into Heidi, which was like, I met Jasper at lunch and I saw her and I was like, “Hi, I’m Kate! It’s so nice to meet you! … Do you wanna get this?” This sort of bizarre [version of myself]. Basically like desperately wanting her to like me. I really wanted to bring all of that reality to Heidi, and she was already written on the page as such a lovely human, but I was excited to bring in a lot of my real-life experiences to her.
Your character is also dealing with a lot. She has a newborn and her husband is just so focused on his career and there’s a very real issue where parenting isn’t like really divvied up and all the stress falls on one parent. So how glad were you to portray this in a very mature manner?
One of the things I love so much about how Sofia Alvarez, the director, how she approached the characters was allowing people to be flawed. You know what I mean? And allowing the dynamics between characters to have a very sort of realistic nature to it, like how many people are in a parenting situation where one person feels like they’re doing so much more than the other. Then one person feels like they have to focus on the work and whatever it might be. How you have to communicate through those things in order to find a healthy space in order to raise your little ones. And yes, you meet Heidi and she’s like bouncing on this ball, holding her newborn and Auden walks in, and my character’s had no sleep and she has this newborn baby, and she’s not feeling much help from her husband.
She’s just like a total crazy person in that moment. But I love to be able to kind of follow her arc and one of my favorite moments to have been playing Heidi was when she kind of has that like breakdown and Auden walks in and becomes like the person who really starts kind of putting the pieces together to be able to help connect the family. It’s realistic. It’s like the amount of times that I’m very close with Jasper’s, my own stepdaughter’s biological mom. The amount of times that her dad and her biological mother and myself, like all rallied together to come to figure out family moments was not so far off from this movie. So if my role, my real role, real most important role in life was to be a really great stepmom, which I tried every day to do and will do every day for the rest of my life, playing a very realistic version of his stepmom was very important to me as well.
Thank you so much for your time, and the portrayal really shares through in this film.
