By Stephanie Bunbury
When she told friends that she was about to play a rapper from the wrong side of New Jersey's tracks, says Danielle Macdonald with a chuckle, they were simply amazed. She didn't mind; she is still amazed herself. Geremy Jasper's Patti Cake$ arrived at the Cannes Film Festival in May preceded by a buzz of expectation generated at Sundance in January, where it was hailed as "a hip-hop bombshell" and the virtually unknown Macdonald as an instant star.
"I didn't think I would do anything like this, ever," she says. "It seems so far from myself and so impossible."
Break-out role: Australian actress Danielle Macdonald as aspiring New Jersey rapper Patricia Dombrowski in Patti Cake$.Credit: Sundance Institute
Macdonald grew up in Clareville on Pittwater, north of Sydney; her mother is an accountant, her father a shipping company manager. Sitting in a beach restaurant at the Cannes Film Festival, swathed in a sleek green wrap dress with her hair in an elaborate construction of plaits, she certainly doesn't look or sound like a sweary Jersey queen with one black bra to her name. But this isn't really her either, she adds hastily.
"This is me in Cannes. You are far more likely to see me in jeans and thongs and no make-up and my hair crazy. That's me. That is definitely me. I can't help that."
Danielle MacDonald watched countless videos to master rap moves.Credit: Jeong Park
Geremy Jasper was also an unknown. He had drifted into film-making from rock, having worked closely with Beasts of the Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin, making clips for his modestly popular indie band The Fever. When The Fever broke up, he started making promotional and music films that aimed to be "off the wall". Eventually, he won a place at the Sundance lab to develop his own feature script. Quentin Tarantino was his first adviser.
Patti Cake$ took him four years to write, despite being based closely on his own life. At 23, he was exactly like Patti Dombroski, an aspiring musician stuck seemingly forever in his parents' New Jersey basement with an ailing grandparent fixed in front of the television upstairs, a crazy best friend working in the local pharmacy, and a bad job in a bar. He was also obsessed with hip-hop, having started writing rhymes when he was eight; Jasper wrote Patti's thrilling raps himself.
If he could have rapped convincingly, he says, he would never have formed an indie band.
"Every kid I know in the suburbs is obsessed with rap music," he says. "In the suburbs there is no culture; it's not like there are all these venues to go and see music or go and see art. There's just nothing, so everything is pumped in through the television set, through the internet, or through the radio. For people like Patti, rappers are their gods."
Danielle Macdonald as Patti and Siddharth Dahanajay as Jeri.Credit: Jeong Park
Like her, he could see New York across the river from where he lived but had no sense that he would ever get there. The film was eventually shot in Hillsdale, near where he grew up.
Why he wanted to tell his own story in a woman's voice – and set it in an entirely female household, his own invalid grandfather becoming tough old Nana, played by Cathy Moriarty – is something of a puzzle.
"I don't know. It just made sense to me. I grew up with a lot of strong, tough women. Big women."
He is also drawn to misfits. A lot of hip-hop is aggressively misogynist; a fat girl like Patti gets double the hate. When it comes to a word battle, however, she is Boadicea.
"I loved the idea of a young woman taking that stuff, owning it and spitting it back.".
Macdonald knew nothing about rap apart from a few hits she heard on radio growing up, but she obviously had Patti's grit. Now 26, she was 15 when she knew she was going to make her living as an actor; when she was 18, she was cast in an American cable series called Huge about a weight-loss camp. She then lost the role because her work visa didn't arrive in time, but went to Hollywood anyway, determined not to waste her visa.
Of course there were plenty of naysayers around to tell her anyone her size had no hope of making it in Hollywood, land of the lettuce lunch.
"I got a bit of that in Australia. But I said 'How will I know if I don't try?' "
In fact she found the US was way ahead of Australia in its attempts at diversity in casting. Her first role was in a short film by Rachel Weisz called The Thief, starring Joel Edgerton.
"That was kind of funny – I came all the way to America to work with Joel Edgerton. He's so cool!"
As it happened, one of Jasper's producers saw that film and was impressed by her. Jasper had been thinking he would have to shelve his idea because he would never find anyone to play Patti.
"Because she has to do everything. She has to do music, she has to do comedy, she has to do a love scene, she has to be sexy, she has to be vulnerable, it's the whole gamut," he says.
When he was shown Macdonald's photograph, he asked her to Sundance and they began work on developing a character.
"And within 10 minutes of rehearsing a scene I just knew. She has so much depth and she can pull things to the surface in a way I've never seen."
Macdonald says she was drawn to a project about a "big girl" which wasn't about losing weight.
"That's one of the things I loved about it. It was just, 'This is life, these are these people, these are these characters.' Yes, she is big and she has to deal with people who are going to hate on her for that, but the story is about her relationships and her passion for life and her need to get where she is going. It felt very real and I liked that."
Perhaps she could boost her own casting opportunities by losing weight, but she won't go down that road.
"No! You know, you've got to do you. You've got to be yourself. If I ever choose to change it's going to be for me, not for Hollywood. It's your life and your body. If you make it about your career, what are you living for?"
Film and television are supposed to reflect life, after all. "And I'm representing a fair proportion of the population right now. That's the thing – growing up, if I'd seen more people who looked like me on TV or film, I probably would have felt differently, not completely alone in this part of my life."
Her decisions have been vindicated, because her career seems to be working out exactly as she had hoped. Seven years on, she has an apartment in West Hollywood, a dog and a cat and a slippery mid-Pacific accent that changes according to what she's talking about. She sounds more Australian talking about school, more American talking about her next film.
"You get less auditions than other people and there is not as much stuff but at the same time, the stuff is really cool that you get to play with," she says. "You get, 'Oh, we need a big girl', but the big girl can be the sweet best friend, the bullied character, the Goth girl, the bully herself, the child killer, the New Jersey rapper. I have had to learn how to do all those different things."
She has also finally fallen in love with rap, after learning how to do it from a bunch of musicians in Brooklyn. "At first I was really intimidated, I was in the studio with all these guys and they were like really cool and I don't think I am a cool person."
She was even more anxious about getting the moves right, so immersed herself in watching clips. "But then I realised that every single person has their own way of moving. It is all about who they are as people and how they are feeling in the moment and that was something I had to find.
"As I learned how to speak and talk as Patti I really started to respect and understand the culture. You really listen to the lyrics and you think, 'Wow, that is really meaningful and that is your story'. And I think that is incredible."
Patti Cake$ is screening at the Sydney Film Festival on Friday, June 16, 9pm and Saturday, June 17, 8pm, sff.org.au. It screens nationally from September 28.