With The Half Of It arriving on Netflix on May 1st, I recently got the opportunity to hop on the phone with writer-director Alice Wu for an extended conversation about the movie. We already shared the portion of our chat detailing Wu's journey from her the release of her feature directorial debut in 2005 to her return to filmmaking for The Half Of It, but now it's time to put the spotlight on her stars, Leah Lewis and Daniel Diemer.

Lewis stars in the movie as Ellie, an extremely bright high school student who usually keeps to herself, except when she's being paid to complete her peers' homework assignments. Paul (Diemer) has something different for her though. He wants to pay her to write a love letter to his crush, one of the school's most popular students, Aster (Alexxis Lemire). It starts as just one letter, but turns into something so much more when Ellie and Paul realize the importance of their budding friendship.

Lewis and Diemer have some serious on-screen charisma and chemistry, so I'm willing to bet that once The Half Of It arrives on Netflix, their star power is going to skyrocket and you might want to learn more about them. Check out what Wu told me about working with the pair below.

I think everyone is going to fall in love with Leah and Daniel after this. Can you tell me about their work on set and what you really admired about them?

WU: So it's so funny; Leah in real life could not be more different than Ellie. An interesting point when I first saw her read, I was like, ‘I don't know if this person will be right,’ because her instincts are so different, but she's so watchable. I was like, ‘There's something where I really enjoy watching her.’ But we spent time talking and I described this character more, and a lot of it is because Ellie is a character that hates attention. And Leah, she's beautiful, she's funny, she's just got the whole package, right? So from a very young age, people loved Leah. And so for her, she was singing and she was totally that kid at 15 that was going to parties and asking out celebrities. She was that kid!

And so she's so much cooler than this character ever was, so it was fascinating when I talked to her because then she slowly started to understand more like, ‘Oh, that's who this is.’ We would talk through the scenes and she took direction so well. A lot of it was in rehearsals, just us peeling the layers until she could actually find this character inside her. Because inside everyone, there is that character, there is that place where we're all lonely and terrified and we're scared of attention, right? And where I admire Leah so much, is I was basically asking her to strip away all the things, these incredible gifts she's had in her life, incredible talents, and I'm asking her to peel those away and leave them behind and try and access that vulnerable place, and she totally went there, and I just think that's a huge credit to her. But it's just so funny because if you meet her in person, it's just really charming how different she is. 

Now Daniel is on the opposite side of the spectrum. If you ask Daniel, Daniel would say he's nothing like Paul. But actually, Daniel is totally like Paul except that Daniel's way more intelligent than Paul! Daniel's very, very smart in terms of book smart. But, Daniel has a deep essential decency. And again, for each of my three main characters, I literally must have read 500 to 600 people for each of them, because I was so specific about what I wanted. I didn't want any names. I read a bunch of people who had names, but I was like, ‘I really want fresh faces.’ I really want the audience to believe these people exist, these characters exist. I don't want them going into it being like, ‘Oh, I recognize that person!’ But it was actually shockingly hard to find a young man who just would feel like that guy, that had this raw essential sweetness, but also just feels like an American boy, not like a pretty boy, you know? And Daniel's handsome, but there's a quality of him, it's like a soulfulness. And what I loved is that the way we groom him at the beginning of the film, when he shows up you're a little bit like, ‘Who’s this guy?’ But then, as the film goes on, you start to fall in love with him the way Ellie starts to fall in love with him as a friend. And I think by the end, you're like, ‘I love this guy!’ 

And that's the journey I wanted to go on. I didn’t want him to show and to immediately be like, ‘Oh, this pretty guy. Why would this guy need any help getting a girl?’ There's a way that our heart goes out to Daniel, or to Paul because of the way Daniel is. That said, I will also say Daniel is also an incredibly talented actor. They're very different. Daniel is very much an actor who needs to emotionally connect, and he needs to emotionally connect with his scene partner. I think Leah lives in her head a lot actually.  Leah’s so funny and so clever. Leah always gets the joke and she's very, very funny. I was always like, ‘Okay, but with Ellie, it's funnier if you play it straight. You can't know what the joke is. You need to play it straight and it will be funnier to us.’ And after working with her, she eventually got there. And then watching their chemistry explode, their chemistry is fantastic. It was just really fun to at rehearsals watch them start to interact with each other.