Talk to Molly Gordon’s collaborators and they’ll eagerly rattle off the cascading qualities that make the 27-year-old actress shimmer on-screen. She’s witty and warm. Beautiful and approachable. Charismatic and kooky.
With ‘Theater Camp,’ Molly Gordon bets on herself. And doubles down.
The 27-year-old scene stealer steps into the spotlight as a director and Ben Platt’s co-star
By Thomas Floyd
Yet the filmmakers behind the mockumentary “Theater Camp” had to learn the hard way not to underestimate Gordon’s radiance. When they played an early cut of the movie for a test screening this past fall, the audience reaction made it clear: There needed to be more of Gordon’s character, Rebecca-Diane, an off-kilter musical theater teacher whose role had been largely excised.
Molly Gordon the co-director, it turns out, could’ve used a little more reverence for Molly Gordon the actress.
“I definitely wanted to cut myself down,” Gordon says during a recent video chat from New York, leaning toward the camera with earnest attentiveness. “It was a funny thing that I directed it. Everyone was like, ‘What did you do to yourself?’ But I was just so obsessed with everyone else’s performances.”
Nick Lieberman, her directing partner, confirms Gordon’s recollection. “It was definitely a wake-up call for us that we can’t just go off of what Molly thinks is good of Molly’s work,” he says. “We have to go off of what other people are going to enjoy — which is probably a lot more.”
Gordon may not have recognized her allure, but Hollywood has known for quite some time. Consider Gordon’s memorable turns as a misjudged mean girl in the high school comedy “Booksmart,” an ecstasy-chasing neighbor in the tween romp “Good Boys” and a longing ex in the micro-budget pressure cooker “Shiva Baby.”
Now, Gordon is growing beyond her character actress reputation. With her recurring role in Season 2 of “The Bear,” as the casually confident love interest Claire, Gordon concocted chemistry with star Jeremy Allen White on one of television’s buzziest shows. On Friday, her directorial debut will hit theaters after Searchlight Pictures acquired “Theater Camp” for $8 million out of January’s Sundance Film Festival — where Gordon’s Rebecca-Diane was, mercifully, restored to the lead role that was originally intended.
“Everybody wants some of Molly,” says Jessica Elbaum, a producer on “Booksmart” and “Theater Camp.” “On-screen, off-screen — all of it.”
The West Los Angeles-raised child of directors Jessie Nelson and Bryan Gordon, Molly Gordon was first cast in the world of community theater as an overexuberant 3-year-old. “Everyone called me Shirley Temple,” she says, “because I had really curly hair and I could not stop dancing around.”
It was then that she met the 5-year-old Ben Platt, whom she proceeded to perform alongside in myriad local productions before he grew into a Broadway darling and one of her “Theater Camp” co-writers and co-stars. Around the time she was 12, Gordon founded a group called the Theater Geeks of America and recruited Platt’s friend Lieberman to the cause. Galvin, another “Theater Camp” co-writer who appears in the film, crossed paths with her several years later when they were workshopping an off-Broadway musical, “Alice by Heart,” directed by Gordon’s mother.
“Molly was the first person I had met in my professional adult life that felt like my people,” Galvin recalls. “I immediately realized that I wanted to weasel my way into every part of her life and her friendships and her world that I just thought was so magical.”
With Gordon as the glue connecting that quartet — she takes credit for introducing Platt and Galvin, who are now engaged — Gordon, Platt, Galvin and Lieberman began working together, first on a comedic web series that never saw the light of day, then on a short film version of “Theater Camp” that was released in early 2020. When the pandemic put show business on pause, the group connected over Zoom and hashed out a “scriptment” — a loosely written script designed to tee up on-set improvisation — for a feature-length adaptation of that short.
As Elbaum and other producers lined up behind the project, Gordon and Lieberman raised their hands to co-direct. Despite being the daughter of filmmakers, Gordon says she hadn’t seriously considered directing until she got lunch with Elbaum after they worked together on 2019’s “Booksmart.” But Elbaum, Will Ferrell’s producing partner and the head of Gloria Sanchez Productions, had gleaned a creative spirit and on-set curiosity in Gordon that hinted at a burgeoning visionary.
“I knew I wanted to sit down with her,” Elbaum says, “and talk about if my instinct was correct.”
Gordon suddenly felt seen. Working with “Booksmart” director Olivia Wilde had, in fact, ignited Gordon’s dormant filmmaking desires. Following up that movie with another female-fronted project — Emma Seligman’s “Shiva Baby” — and “meeting women being openly ambitious in this beautiful way” further entrenched Gordon’s creative impulses.
“I was raised by a female director, and it’s really interesting to sit with the fact that I still couldn’t really own that I really wanted this,” Gordon says. “I think it’s unfortunate that women being in control is seen as being difficult or, ‘She sounds like my mom nagging me.’ I hear those voices and I’ve just heard so much rhetoric like that, and I couldn’t be brave enough to say that I really wanted that.”
So, last summer, with a modest budget, a children-heavy cast and three weeks to shoot in Warwick, N.Y., Gordon and Lieberman oversaw production of “Theater Camp.” Set at the fictional AdirondACTS camp, the film follows Gordon’s Rebecca-Diane and Platt’s Amos as the bickering friends and overambitious instructors try to stage an original musical in honor of the facility’s coma-stricken founder (played by Amy Sedaris).
While “Theater Camp” is set in the modern day, the movie was inspired by the writers’ childhood experiences — cherished and painful alike — at camps such as New York’s Stagedoor Manor and French Woods. (“I had the experience of kissing a guy at summer camp,” Gordon says, “and having him immediately be like, ‘I think I’m gay. You helped me figure this out.’”) For all of the film’s timing constraints and logistical challenges, Gordon’s collaborators credit her with cultivating a home away from home for the “Theater Camp” cast and crew.
“I’ve always called Molly my favorite unlicensed journalist,” says Galvin, who plays the camp’s underappreciated stage manager. “You’ll be at a dinner party with a bunch of random people you’ve never met, and you look up 20 minutes in and Molly’s having a really, really, really deep heart-to-heart with the weird aunt in the room. And she’s able to use those same tools as a director.”
If managing a set wasn’t daunting enough, Gordon also takes on her most central on-screen role to date as Rebecca-Diane, a teacher and lapsed performer with a deep love of songs and seances. In a movie that lovingly skewers theater camp’s eccentricities, Gordon evokes various teachers who molded her care for the craft — most notably Janet Adderley, the head of the Adderley School that Gordon attended as a child in Los Angeles.
The result is a delightfully unhinged, mostly improvised performance unlike anything else in Gordon’s filmography as the character spontaneously sings, delivers comically blunt truths and guides prepubescent youths through a “past lives seminar.”
“Just constantly shocking things come out of her mouth,” Lieberman says. “You just always have those moments with Molly that are just like, ‘Where did that come from?’ And yet it’s so right and it’s so funny.”
“I’m a very wacky person,” Gordon acknowledges. “It’s always been funny that I’ve gotten cast sometimes as these cooler, kind of bitchy girls. I’m so not like that. So it feels like an interesting moment that Claire and Rebecca-Diane are going to be out into the world at the same time, because I feel like they’re a really cool combination of actually who I am.”
When it came to casting Claire, the decidedly more grounded figure Gordon plays in “The Bear,” Storer says she was “the only real option” he considered after directing her in a 2019 episode of “Ramy.” Having devoured “The Bear’s” first season, Gordon leaped at the opportunity to slip into that ensemble — even if it meant filming episodes in Chicago by day and helping edit “Theater Camp” via Zoom by night. If “Theater Camp” showcases Gordon’s range, her endearingly disarming performance in “The Bear” makes an exemplary example of her inherent appeal.
“She’s one of those actors that can go from light to dark very quickly,” Storer says. “She has these eyes that are so piercing that when you’re talking to her, you sort of feel like not only do you have her undivided attention but also her undivided love.”
It’s a quality Gordon has long wielded to steal many a scene. As the actress enters her late 20s, she cherishes the smaller roles she took while biding her time in the industry. “But I also think I’m at a place in my life,” she says, “where I’ve made it maybe too clear how much I love that.”
With her directorial debut and a couple of meaty parts under her belt, the same artist who ruthlessly cut down her own performance is, at last, ready to go all in on herself — as a writer and director, a supporting player and star, and everything in between.
“This business is so hard and complicated and all the things,” Gordon says. “But truly the only thing you can control is your ability to just be brave enough to put out work.”
