Why Little Fires Everywhere star Lexi Underwood is one to watch

'I want to continue to be a part of telling those stories and moving that initiative forward to make sure that no young girl or young boy — no young kid ever — has to grow up feeling like they have a lack of representation on the screen'
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Marissa Desantis4 June 2020

To call Lexi Underwood a star on the rise would be an understatement. At just 16 years-old, Underwood has already performed on Broadway, founded her own production company, and most recently, landed a starring role in Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere.

The latter, which is now available for streaming on Prime Video in the UK, is an 8-episode adaptation of Celeste Ng’s critically acclaimed novel of the same name. Amping up the novel’s drama, the show has a female-led cast and crew, with its two biggest stars — Kerry Washington as Mia Warren and Reese Witherspoon as Elena Richardson — also serving as executive producers.

In the series, Underwood plays Washington’s teenage daughter, Pearl, delivering a performance that’s at times nostalgia-inducing (for kids of the ‘90s, that is), and at others so emotionally raw it’s hard to watch. It’s those heavier scenes with Ms Kerry, as Underwood calls her, which had the biggest impact on the young actress.

Little Fires Everywhere launches on 22nd May on Amazon Prime Video

“I was really taken aback at first, but Ms Kerry being a Method actor pulled something out of me that I didn’t know I had in me — I didn’t know that I could go to that extent emotionally,” Underwood says, speaking from her Los Angeles home.

“If she’s screaming, obviously I’m going to continue to cry and stay in that zone of frustration. And it got to the point, where sometimes, we weren’t even following the lines. It was just true to how we were feeling in that moment, and how Pearl and Mia were feeling in that moment. Those words just kind of spewed out, and it worked in the scene because it was 100 per cent authentic for us.”

Little Fires Everywhere launches on 22nd May on Amazon Prime Video

To prepare for the part, Underwood wrote poetry in the voice of Pearl, created a different playlist for each of her moods and even drew up Venn diagrams connecting Pearl to each of the other characters in the story and to Underwood herself. She also studied how best to imitate Washington by watching plenty of Scandal — already a favourite of Underwood’s. She even credits Washington’s Olivia Pope as one of the reasons she wanted to become an actor.

“In our first episode, we were filming a scene and Ms Kerry was like, ‘You said that you’ve been studying me, right? Okay, well then do it like Olivia Pope would.’ It was so intimidating,” Underwood says. “Then after, she gave me a high-five and said, ‘How are you going to do Olivia Pope better than Olivia Pope does Olivia Pope?’ I breathed a sigh of relief, and I was like, ‘Okay, I think I’m doing good.’”

Before she found acting, Underwood’s first love was music, something she says she owes to her parents. Raised in Washington, D.C., Underwood was playing piano by age five, followed by the flute and guitar, eventually adding dance and gymnastics into the mix. She also happens to have a powerhouse voice, which she occasionally shares with her 80,000 followers on Instagram.

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“My mom and dad have two very different tastes in music, so they were playing everything from Prince to the Beatles to Aaliyah,” Underwood says, noting the latter as “one of my biggest inspirations”.

After a trip to New York City to see The Lion King with her parents at age nine, Underwood promptly declared that she wanted to play Nala. A year later, she booked the role of Young Nala in the national tour and Broadway production of The Lion King, before making a temporary move to LA.

“I begged my parents to let me go to LA for three months just to try it out,” says Underwood. “Three months turned into five years.” Her family is still bi-coastal, but has plans to call LA their home full-time in the near future.

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For her 15th birthday, Underwood asked her parents to help her found her own production company, Ultimate Dreamer Productions. Her first project? A documentary, filmed in D.C., featuring a diverse group of young people discussing how to effectively create change in America.

“I always thought there was something so magical about what was also happening behind the camera,” Underwood says. “And on top of that, I wanted to make sure that there is representation for all races and genders.”

Little Fires Everywhere both weaves in and boldly calls attention to racial issues, something that sparks its own fire in Underwood. Even down the phone, her passion for raising awareness of societal issues like representation and cultural appropriation shines through. But more impressively, Underwood is already keenly aware of how to go about changing these issues.

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“I applaud the writers and the producers not only for being open to talking about those ideas, but also for making sure that there was representation of every race [in the writers’ room],” she says.

“Something beautiful was the fact that there were three black women in the writers’ room that could lend their voices to making sure that [Mia and Pearl’s] story was told properly. I think that is a big testament to making sure there is representation. Because when you have all white men in the writers’ room trying to tell the perspective of cultural appropriation or what it’s like to be black or Asian in America and not necessarily knowing what it’s like, that’s when everything gets mixed up.” Underwood wrote her first essay about cultural appropriation in the sixth grade (aged around 11 or 12).

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“I felt that we were shedding light on these issues that no one talks about in the media. Even though the show is set in the ‘90s, all of these things that are happening are happening now.”

That’s what Underwood hopes to do in her own work. “I just want to make sure that I’m continuing to create change. Whatever you’re going through, I want to continue to be a part of telling those stories and moving that initiative forward to make sure that no young girl or young boy — no young kid ever — has to grow up feeling like they have a lack of representation on the screen.”

Little Fires Everywhere is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video

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