Haley Lu Richardson took inspiration from Hailee Steinfeld while preparing for Unpregnant

Haley Lu Richardson watched videos of Hailee Steinfeld’s performance in their movie The Edge of Seventeen while she was shooting her new film Unpregnant.

The Five Feet Apart actress stars alongside Euphoria’s Barbie Ferreira in the new HBO Max road trip comedy, which follows her teenage character Veronica, who discovers she’s pregnant and travels to another state to get an abortion.

Richardson found it challenging balancing the sensitive subject matter with the comedy elements, so she looked to Steinfeld’s performance in their 2016 movie to see how her co-star managed to get the tone right.

“I found myself thinking about Hailee and her performance in The Edge of Seventeen,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “She did a really similar thing with the tone of Edge of Seventeen, only she’s dealing with these really real things like the loss of her dad, depression and not fitting in in the world. She just did it so seamlessly, and I was like, ‘How the frick did she do that?’

“When I was doing Unpregnant, I literally would YouTube scenes of Hailee in Edge of Seventeen and be like, ‘How did she do that?’ and get inspiration from her with the tone and how to balance that as an actor. It’s a really hard thing to do, and I don’t think that I realised how tricky that was going to be until I was in the thick of filming and doing the scenes.”

Richardson, who played Steinfeld’s onscreen best friend in the 2016 movie, also called up her former co-star on FaceTime to discuss her performance while she was shooting Unpregnant, which is available on HBO Max now.