“Sometimes people forget that I’m 25 years old and not nine anymore,” sighs Abigail Breslin. Partly that’s down to how she looks. “I’m really short,” she says (she’s 5ft 1in), “and I look very little.” And partly it’s down to the role that made her name.
Her breakthrough as Olive, the girl whose family enters her in a beauty pageant in Little Miss Sunshine, won Breslin an Academy Award nomination in 2007, when she was just 10 years old.
Since then, she has appeared in 2013’s prestige drama August: Osage County, playing the daughter to Ewan McGregor and Julia Roberts, but in the main her career hasn’t lifted away from playing adolescents (see sorority-set TV show Scream Queens or the film Zombieland) in the way, for example, Kristen Stewart managed post-Twilight.
Despite two decades in the business, her agents are still battling shortsighted casting directors, as they trot out the same response: “She’s a little young for it.”
“People tend to want to keep you in one specific pigeonhole,” she says.
Breslin holds nothing against Little Miss Sunshine, however much that cemented her forever-young image in people’s minds.
“I would never want to distance myself from it. It opened so many doors for me and gave me so many opportunities and is the reason why I’m where I’m at today,” she says.
“I don’t want to disrespect it. It’s sweet in a way because I think people felt so emotionally attached to that role and to that film. They want me to be Olive. I understand that. I’ll always have a bit of Olive in me, but I want to try new things.”
She finally gets the opportunity to do that in the dramatic new thriller Stillwater. Co-scripted by Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré, the French writers behind the Cannes-winning Dheepan, Breslin plays Allison, a former student languishing in a Marseille prison for the murder of her lover. Five years into her sentence, Allison is protesting her innocence. “I just immediately fell in love with the idea that there was no villain,” says Breslin.
Premiering earlier this month at the Cannes Film Festival, the story has been loosely – very loosely – inspired by the real-life fate of the American student Amanda Knox. The director, Tom McCarthy, told the Cannes press conference he was “fascinated” by the case – in which Knox was imprisoned and later acquitted for the murder of her English roommate – and confessed it served as “an initial inspiration”.
He then took his story in a radically different direction, with Matt Damon starring as Allison’s estranged father Bill, an oil-rig worker who starts playing detective when new evidence comes to light.
Breslin’s scenes with Damon are among the film’s best, with the actors crammed into claustrophobic visiting chambers at the Baumettes prison in Marseille. Breslin looks drained – the consequence of Allison still facing four more years of her sentence.
Shooting these scenes over 10 days, she did everything possible to enter Allison’s mindset. “I tried to distance myself from talking to friends and family and just be in solitude,” she says. She refused make-up and only slept three hours at night.
“When you have to do scenes where you’re really on edge, it helps when you’re exhausted.”
She soaked up life in Baumettes, too. The guards walked her through the jail, talked her through what a prisoner’s daily routine inside might be, and locked her inside a cell.
“I found the writings on the wall to be really disturbing. There were so many check marks. On one, I think it said, ‘342 days left. F**k prison.’ I could never imagine being in a situation like that ever in my life.”
When we meet in a hotel room in Cannes, air-conditioned to within an inch of its life, Breslin has just escaped something almost as frightening: the stresses of the festival red carpet. She wore an emerald Dolce & Gabbana gown, but was paranoid she was going to stumble on the famous steps outside the Palais.
“Those pictures are there forever. And they’re snapped in a millisecond – a million of them, all at once. So the odds are, you’re gonna have about half of them see your face in an awkward position or your body tilting a weird way.”
Breslin stresses these are “champagne problems”, but it feeds into social-media trolling.
“People love to criticise and analyse women, that’s just the way that the world is. Men don’t have that same pressure on them. So I think it’s hard to not get stressed out before those things.
“At the end of the day, you have to remember it’s not a life-or-death situation. But the way that people make it feel sometimes in this industry, it can be the end of the world if it’s not perfect-looking.”
In other ways, it’s been an extremely “brutal” past 12 months. Breslin lost her father to Covid-19 in 2020. She posted lovely tributes to him on Instagram – where she frequently reminds people to sanitise their hands and wear their masks – and was overwhelmed with the response.
“I definitely got a lot of people reaching out that have lost loved ones because of this virus and that’s been very touching and comforting that so many people have given their support.”
Breslin grew up in New York, the youngest of three. Her father was in telecommunications and computers, while her mother worked as a talent agent, which might explain why Breslin did her first commercial when she was three, then was starring alongside Mel Gibson in M Night Shyamalan’s Signs when she was five.
But she says: “My parents were great about making sure that I had a normal upbringing – as normal as anybody’s childhood can be.”
How normal is her life now? She still lives in New York, a city where people famously ignore celebrities. Do people pester her for selfies? “They do sometimes. But for the most part, I think people don’t expect to see me looking like a troll, which is how I usually look in my real life, with my hair in a bun and huge T-shirt and leggings.”
Disguise and conquer seems to be Breslin’s modus operandi. “I change my hair colour so often that I think they don’t always [recognise me] but it’s weird that it happens in clusters. For the most part… I’m not that famous!” That may change after the success of Stillwater.
She’s recently shot Slayers, a comedy-horror about social media influencers and vampires. The difference is, she’s one of the producers – a new step for her. She’s also developing a TV comedy she wrote called Door Girls. “It’s nice to sometimes just be sitting behind the monitor instead of being in front,” she says.
After this watershed year, it’s another sign of Breslin’s growing maturity. No longer the adolescent, she’s moving into adulthood – whether Hollywood likes it or not.
Stillwater opens in cinemas on 6 August