VIRGINIA GARDNER SEEKS OUT UNHEARD VOICES

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This year, everyone’s been raving about Wakanda. Last year, Gal Gadot and Patty Jenkins were the big story. Between these important triumphs for African-Americans and women came another huge step forward for superheroes: Marvel’s first openly gay character, Karolina Dean, featured on Hulu’s show Runaways, returning for its second season this week. Throughout the first few episodes of the series, Karolina appeared to be an ordinary teenager with a perfect family, but it turned out there was much more than met the eye.

The same seems to be true for Virginia Gardner, the actress who has brought Karolina to life. Everything about Gardner screams movie star. She has it written all over her: her breezy blonde locks (now brunette and just as windswept), her inquisitive eyes, her affable smile. Her name even has that buzzworthy quality that agents look for. But a simple conversation or a look on social media shows she’s much more grounded than she first appears—she’s a Catan fanatic, with a black belt in taekwondo, and she throws one mean gutter ball.

Gardner, who goes by Ginny to close friends and Instagram followers, began acting when she was sixteen years old. Her desire to do so can be traced back ten years prior to the release of the 2001 Sean Penn film I Am Sam. “In the movie, Dakota Fanning’s dad has autism, and I have a brother with autism and I remember watching that as a young girl and relating to her character and being affected by that,” Gardner explains. “That’s what made me want to get into this industry and make things that can affect people and that people can relate to.” Raised in the Sacramento suburbs, Gardner was not exposed to many diverse stories, but I Am Sam changed that for her, showcasing how filmmaking was a medium ripe for representing distinct and unique characters.

Gardner, now twenty-three, began her career in the world of television. After appearances in notable shows like Lab Rats, Glee, and The Goldbergs, she made her first firm foray with the teen time-machine drama Project Almanac in 2015 and she has felt comfortable jumping back and forth between the two mediums ever since. While her early roles certainly showcased her knack for channeling the nuances of her characters’ worldviews, it wasn’t until she landed this role on Runaways that she got to explore diversity in the way that she longed to since she was a kid.

Karolina is a unique part for Gardner in that she’s a multifaceted LGBTQ hero. Literally, of course, as she has supernatural abilities (flight and light are her areas of expertise), but also figuratively—as her glowing rainbow skin often signifies. Oftentimes, she is forced to reckon with her new identity as a superhero, while simultaneously figuring out who she is as a teenager—who she loves, what her faith means to her, and who she wants to be when her controlling mother, who helps lead the nefarious secret organization she and her friends are looking to overpower, isn’t in her life dictating her every move anymore. “Even though you’re playing a superhero and you’re dealing with things that are still out of the realm of possibility in our world, the character still feels grounded and still feels like someone you can relate to,” Gardner explains. Identity exploration, which is always a key part of a superhero narrative, is also a crucial part to coming out as an LGBTQ individual. Perhaps that’s why it’s even more surprising, and frustrating, that this sort of character has never been showcased before.

Karolina has helped generate authentic visibility for LGBTQ characters, which have so often been erased or portrayed stereotypically in culture, as Gardner is well aware. “I feel like what films and TV shows do is they do the queerbaiting or they’ll play at having two female love interests for the sexiness of it and not for the right reasons,” she argues. Runaways, helmed by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage (previously of Gossip Girl and The OC), has always been mindful of this problem, with most of its characters representing a facet of the minority experience. Along with Karolina, the show features Alex, a bookish African-American leader; Nico, an Asian-American goth girl; Gert, a Latinx activist dealing with anxiety; Chase, an athlete who must break past stereotypes to showcase his passion for engineering; and Molly, Gert’s adopted sister who is also Latinx and struggling with puberty. The show, whose target demographic skews younger, touches on issues that are specific to Generation Z at this point in their lives (unrequited love and lust, dealing with burdensome parents), as well as those that will have ramifications for the rest of their lives (cyberbullying, consent, the harms of slut-shaming).

Gardner feels an obligation to look for roles that are always conscientious of these sorts of important issues. “I want to tell responsible stories,” she says. “I don’t want to be in anything that’s putting women in a bad light. I was so affected by films when I was younger and I want to be able to affect people in the same positive way and not do projects for the sake of doing them. I want to be selective with what I choose.”

Her recent stint as Vicky in David Gordon Green’s Halloween update reflected this intense affinity for strong female characters. “In Halloween, these three female leads are surviving a really horrific event,” Gardner explains. “Politically, the movie actually became something more than just a revamp of a horror film.” In John Carpenter’s original Halloween, which came out in 1978, women were portrayed as sexualized objects and fell victim to fetishized violence. Green’s version showcases the strength of women and their ability to use unfiltered forms of authoritative femininity to overpower evil.

Outside of her feminist lens, Gardner often ventures beyond her comfort zone for roles. For her, it isn’t about finding a character she can relate to, but about finding a character she is intrigued by—someone different than anything she’s read in a script before. “I really like being able to showcase different parts of who I am and put those into different characters,” she adds. “I really don’t like playing a version of the same character over and over again.” Moving forward, she says she hopes to continue this bold exploration into new characters, new genres, and new perspectives.

Gardner’s longstanding interest in exploring unknown territories and unfamiliar human psyches wasn’t fostered by anything she saw on screen. Other than I Am Sam, she rarely encountered the sorts of diverse stories she hoped to find as a young girl. Today though, viewers have a variety of unique stories at their fingertips, and that excites her. “When I grew up, it was a very specific kind of story that was being told over and over and over again,” she recalls. “Now, there are so many different types of stories. I think it’s really important that the younger generation has diverse characters and diverse stories.” This variety has come about, in large part, because of how accessible and varied storytelling has become due to the flourishing of premium cable and streaming. One of the biggest factors though is demand. “Social media has given so many people a voice,” Gardner says. “As a generation, we can demand the things that we want to see in politics and in the media.” Karolina, and the rest of Runaway’s characters, came about because people are now insisting on seeing characters of all races, genders, sexualities, and religious beliefs represented onscreen, and in turn, those characters are using their powers to make our own offscreen world a better place.

Runaways returns on Hulu on Friday.