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.
She studied at LaGuardia High School—the alma mater of many current Hollywood stars, including Adrien Brody, Lola Tung, and Ansel Elgort—on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and graduated in 2017 as a drama major. “During my first years there, I wasn’t involved in the school productions,” recalls McInerny. Daunted by the talent of her peers, she didn’t take part in the school plays until her junior and senior years. Auditions could “be competitive,” she remembers, especially with competition like fellow alumni Timothée Chalamet.
Upon leaving LaGuardia, McInerny enrolled at Bennington College, in Vermont. There, she pursued a degree in the performing arts—but after two years she dropped out, at age 20, in hopes of pursuing professional acting more seriously. “I decided to give it my full effort,” she says. “I knew how difficult it would be to get a foot in the door. But I knew I would have hated myself if I didn’t at least try.”
McInerny moved back to New York City, where she landed parts in Off Broadway plays, including Tony Award–winning theater director David Cromer’s 2022 production of Camp Siegfried, at Second Stage, and in Uncle Vanya director Jack Serio’s 2024 production of The Animal Kingdom, at the Connelly Theater.
Her big break arrived in 2022, when she was “street cast” for a starring role in Palm Trees and Power Lines, the drama written and directed by Sundance Film Festival–featured filmmaker Jamie Dack. “It was one of the first features I’d ever auditioned for at that point, and it just really changed my life,” she says.
McInerny’s portrayal of Lea drew critical acclaim. But perhaps no one was more aware of her burgeoning acting ability than the director Durga Chew-Bose, who also happens to be McInerny’s family friend. While studying literature at Sarah Lawrence College in the early 2000s, Chew-Bose babysat McInerny.
Two decades later, Chew-Bose, now well into her career as a writer (she was a journalist and the editor of the clothing brand SSENSE’s editorial arm prior to becoming a filmmaker), thought of McInerny for the role of Cécile in Bonjour Tristesse. “Durga witnessed my own coming of age in my own personal life,” McInerny says. “Getting to tell a coming-of-age story together was one of the most special parts of this entire experience.”
To prepare for the film, McInerny “heavily immersed” herself in the world of Bonjour Tristesse. And yet despite reading Sagan’s novel before arriving on set, McInerny didn’t watch the original movie until shooting wrapped in Cassis, wanting to make her performance her own.
After eventually viewing it, she relished the “melodramatic voice” present in Segel’s first-person narration, but in her own portrayal of Cécile she relies less on vocal ability than on her own facial expressions—and her wardrobe and hair. In the film McInerny’s character initially wears bold primary colors with her brunette hair down, but later goes blonde, wearing her hair up with muted clothing, signaling her transformation into the woman of the house.
In Hollywood, these coming-of-age stories are often delivered through a John Hughes–esque lens, in which teenagers are dismissed as charming troublemakers who just want to have fun. Recognizing that “teenage girls are often underwritten” in films, McInerny created depictions of Lea and Cécile that are far from that standard characterization.
“Being a teenager is the combination of such deep feeling and so little control. It creates this emotional hurricane. I’ve never felt and thought so deeply as I did when I was 17, and struggled so intensely,” McInerny says. Ultimately, “I felt really excited and proud to be able to represent that. It was incredibly cathartic.”
Bonjour Tristesse is now playing in theaters
Carolina de Armas is a Junior Editor at AIR mail
