In recent years, Nicole Peltz Beckham has mostly been known for her larger-than-life wedding to Brooklyn Beckham, her best friendship with Selena Gomez and her many fashion appearances. It’s enough to make one wonder if perhaps the “Transformers” actress had hung up her Hollywood hat for good.
But behind the scenes, Peltz Beckham had been working on a story, that six years after she wrote it, is finally out in the world.
“Lola” is a coming-of-age story that follows Lola James, an impoverished young woman working at a strip club and convenience store trying to save enough money to get her brother out of their toxic home. Pelz Beckham is the writer, director and star of the project, which was initially to be co-directed alongside “The Florida Project” actress Bria Vinaite before they parted ways, and is Peltz Beckham’s debut as a writer and director.
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Peltz Beckham, now 29, wrote the script when she was 23 years old, in a three-day straight stretch.
“I did not sleep for three days. I have screenshots of 4:50 a.m., just me writing. When I started putting my thoughts down, they just wouldn’t stop,” she says.
She wrote in chronological order, without an outline or a sense of what the ending might be, which she says avoided “putting pressure on myself.”
“Writing to me was always something private,” Peltz Beckham says. “It was just a love that I had that I never was planning on sharing, or at least not then.”
Her acting coach was the first person to see the script — which at that time, was one continuous sentence — and encouraged her to turn it into a proper draft.
Many of the secondary characters in the script are based on people in her life: the best friend in the film is inspired by Peltz Beckham’s childhood best friend Angela, and the little brother is based on her godson. Lola herself obviously has quite a different life from the writer, who grew up in New York and is the daughter of billionaire Nelson Peltz.
“I just felt like I read a lot of scripts, and I wanted to play a resilient, strong girl, but I didn’t want the star of the film to always be right. I wanted it to be through her point of view, but that doesn’t mean all her decisions were right,” the actress says.
“I wanted to write a flawed character, but also someone where their heart’s in the right place. I just think that’s life, and imperfection in life will always inspire me. And I think that to have the story through her point of view was something that was always interesting because when they say ‘there’s your story, his story, and then the truth,’ I just think that’s really true. I wanted it to be through her eyes. It doesn’t mean that the audience will agree with every decision she’s made, but you can understand why she’s making the decision she is.”
There is irony to be found in the daughter of a billionaire — and daughter-in-law of one of the most famous celebrity couples on the planet — writing and then casting herself in a story of a young woman struggling to make ends meet, and the film has drawn criticism since its release. It’s nothing Peltz Beckham isn’t prepared for.
“The way I see it, I feel very connected to the characters I created. And like I said, my best friend and my godson, those came from my life and a lot of connections and relationships came from my life. But of course, I did not grow up like Lola at all,” she says. “And I wanted to write a story from a person’s perspective and another point of view that was not my personal view and not my upbringing. I am an actress and my dream is to get to look at the world from different perspectives.”
Her goal with “Lola” was to make something that people connect to, and she says that at the film’s premiere she had several come up to her saying they were moved by Lola and her choices.
“That’s all I could ever ask for,” she says.