Unlike most of Hollywood, Ariella Glaser didn’t grow up dreaming of becoming an actor. She wanted to be an astronaut, but a propensity for severe motion sickness brought her crashing back down to earth. “It’s not very compatible with an astronaut lifestyle,” the 19-year-old says with a grin from her new apartment at the University of Edinburgh, where she’s about to start her sophomore year.
Glaser, who was born and raised in London, has been acting in school plays since the age of four, when she starred as Dorothy in a nursery-school production of The Wizard of Oz. Being onstage felt natural to Glaser. “I’ve always been quite outgoing,” she says. “I’ve liked talking at people and forcing people to watch me onstage.”
When she was 12, she caught the eye of a casting director who sat in on her drama class at the City of London School for Girls. That’s how Glaser booked her first movie role, in the 2019 Marie Curie biopic, Radioactive. Rosamund Pike played Curie, and Glaser played her daughter Irène.
After spending five years focusing on high school and university acceptance, Glaser is returning to the screen. She stars alongside Helen Mirren and Gillian Anderson in the upcoming adaptation of R. J. Palacio’s graphic novel, White Bird, from her wildly popular Wonder series.
The Holocaust coming-of-age drama, directed by Marc Forster, tells the story of Sara Blum and flashes back and forth between 1942, where she’s a young Jewish girl, played by Glaser, in Nazi-occupied France, and the present day, where she’s a grandmother, played by Mirren, telling her grandson how she survived World War II.
To prepare for the role of Blum, Glaser, who is Jewish, read her family’s own accounts of the Holocaust. “There were so many harrowing similarities to the White Bird story,” she says. “That was difficult to read.”
“I think that the whole message of the story and its relation to the Holocaust is [that] something like this, genocides like this, cannot be allowed to happen again,” says Glaser. “And I think the point of making a film like this is to remind people of that.”
Portraying Blum accurately and respectfully felt deeply personal to Glaser, given not only her own heritage but today’s political climate. Luckily, she had none other than Mirren as her impromptu acting coach.
During filming, which took place in Prague, Mirren invited Glaser over to her trailer for afternoon tea to discuss their portrayal of Sara, hoping to create symmetry between the younger and older versions of the character. Glaser and Mirren dissected everything from Sara’s mannerisms all the way down to how she held her hands.
“It was just so surreal to be giving Helen Mirren answers for acting questions,” says Glaser. “But she was just so generous and kind.”
Though Glaser loves cinema, she’s still not entirely sure what she wants to do when she grows up. “I’ve always enjoyed learning. I’m a bit of a nerd,” she says, discussing her decision to major in politics. “It’s been nice to have specific years that are just dedicated to that before I have to decide what to actually do with my life.”
White Bird is playing in theaters now
Paulina Prosnitz is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
