Fans of Otto Preminger’s 1958 film, Bonjour Tristesse, based on Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel of the same name, should know that Lily McInerny has little in common with Jean Seberg and her blond pixie cut. With her dark-brown hair, sharp jawline, and girl-next-door smile, the soft-spoken gamine is more of an Audrey-Hepburn-meets-the-French-New-Wave type. But these traits suit her perfectly in Durga Chew-Bose’s new film adaptation of the book, in which McInerny, at 26 years old, stars alongside Chloë Sevigny and Claes Bang in the role Seberg once inhabited.
Long before giving a new spin to Cécile, Bonjour Tristesse’s protagonist, McInerny cut her teeth as a performer in New York City. Born in Manhattan to a father who was a writer and a mother who worked in marketing, McInerny and her brother were “exposed to a lot of incredible art, film, music, and theater from a very early age,” she says.
