Yahoo News No Hard Feelings star Andrew Barth Feldman is a graduate of the Jennifer Lawrence school of comedy
Because not all of life's lessons are learned in the classroom, Andrew Barth Feldman deferred from Harvard University to film a wildly raunchy comedy with Jennifer Lawrence.
The actor, 21, stars opposite the Academy Award winner in No Hard Feelings, Gene Stupnitsky's R-rated romp inspired by a real Craigslist ad. It's one of those stranger-than-fiction stories: Percy (Feldman) is an introverted high school graduate whose wealthy helicopter parents (Matthew Broderick, Laura Benanti) put out an ad in search of a young woman to help bring him out of his shell before he heads off to Princeton. The payment? A car. Enter: Maddie (Lawrence), a struggling Uber driver on the brink of losing her late mother's home in gentrified Montauk. Maddie agrees to date Percy's "brains out," per his parents' request, and the two form an unlikely friendship in the surprisingly heartfelt flick about what it means to grow up.
Stupnitsky and Lawrence, also a producer on the movie, knew they had found their Percy in Feldman immediately after he auditioned, so Feldman decided to take some time off from his studies at his own Ivy League, where he was enrolled in writing and directing courses, to take on the role. "It feels like an evolution of comedy [and] the beginning of the next phase of R-rated comedies in theaters, which is really exciting," Feldman tells EW over the phone from New York, citing the no-holds-barred script reminiscent of the kind of adult comedy from a more unfiltered theatrical past. "Rather than evolving it, we've just not been doing it over the last few years."
"I just love this character," he adds. "I felt so connected to him from the very beginning. There was something so symmetrical about me and him and the way we talk, the fears that we have about the world, the questions we have about the world."
Macall Polay/Columbia Pictures Andrew Barth Feldman in 'No Hard Feelings'
Though Feldman very much has the extroverted persona of a theater kid, having made his acclaimed Broadway debut at just 16 years old with the title role in the Tony-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen in 2019, he says much of his anxieties run parallel to that of Percy's. That "same engine that drives me toward that attention," Feldman, a self-identified Leo rising, observes, "is the same one that drives Percy into himself. I need everybody to like me and when they don't, I get defensive. I have all the makings of the same kind of person. I just try to use it for connection and in healthier ways, as I think Percy is finding himself doing toward the end of the film as well."
Feldman gravitated toward such connection at a young age, finding it on the stage. His love for theater dates back to toddlerhood, when he saw his first Broadway show, Beauty and the Beast, at the age of 3. Feldman saw the production as "this route to another world." At age 8, he discovered he could actually be a part of that world (to quote another Disney musical). Thus, the aspiring thespian signed on for a production of Annie at a community theater, where he truly caught the acting bug. "I was doing like five shows at a time at different youth and community theaters," he recalls. "I would do crew and lights and write music. It was like a second home for me."
His role as Frank Abagnale Jr. in his high school production of Catch Me If You Can, at New York's Lawrence Woodmere Academy, changed everything. Feldman won the 2018 National High School Musical Theatre Awards, more commonly known as the Jimmy Awards, for the performance, which "still boggles my mind," Feldman says, marveling at the fact that our call just so happens to take place on the morning of this year's June 26 awards. It was his performance on the Minskoff Theatre stage that particular evening that caught the attention of the Dear Evan Hansen casting director and producers. "Two weeks later, I was basically at the final callback, but it was my only audition, and like two or three days later I found out I got the job," Feldman recalls. It's a story he's admittedly told many times over the years, but it's one he still can't quite believe.
"I learned so much about just being myself and letting go of the pressure I'm putting on myself and the supposed stakes of telling a story like that," Feldman says of Hansen. "And just knowing that I'm enough [to play] this character. My instincts are enough. My heart is enough. And same with Percy. There's something so connected between me and these characters that I really didn't have to put anything on. And if I hadn't done that, I don't think I could have done Percy."
Macall Polay/Columbia Pictures Andrew Barth Feldman and Jennifer Lawrence in 'No Hard Feelings'
Feldman would go on to book his first TV role on Disney+'s High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, centered on a drama club at a fictionalized version of East High School as they stage a production based on the film series that catapulted Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens to fame. That show marked Feldman's first time in front of a camera, having portrayed the snooty French foreign exchange student Antoine in season 2 opposite Olivia Rodrigo. He didn't return for season 3, where Rodrigo had a scaled-back role following the success of her debut album Sour. (On a potential return in the fourth and final season, Feldman teases: "You're just gonna have to see.") The two still keep in touch despite living on opposite coasts.
"She texted me to congratulate me on [No Hard Feelings]," Feldman says. "I was starstruck by her long before the 'Drivers License' of it all. I mean, she had, at the time, and I know she still does, such a good head on her shoulders and so much gratitude and this constant remembrance of how huge it was and how fortunate she was."
Feldman's role on HSMTMTS and the Netflix romance A Tourist's Guide to Love helped that transition to No Hard Feelings, as did those two scenes he shot opposite Adam Driver in Noah Baumbach's 2022 apocalyptic dramedy White Noise — even though they were ultimately cut from the film. He played a student trying to get into the class of Driver's well sought-after college professor. "I found out they were cut while we were filming No Hard Feelings," Feldman recalls with a laugh. "There's a point in the movie where my face is in the background. I had lines and they all got cut, and it's okay! I did not take it personally at all."
Such news is hardly a blow when it comes while on set with Jennifer freakin' Lawrence. Feldman is one of few who can say he has "something very kindred" with the Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook actress. He recalls their chemistry read: "Something is very, very connected between the two of us as people and we figured that out really fast." On the first day on set, "We were talking about our whole family history and telling each other everything about ourselves," Feldman, who recently lost his mother in 2019, recalls. "There was so much joy in that, and it just sort of opened up the gates for us to do anything with each other."
Macall Polay/Columbia Pictures Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Barth Feldman in 'No Hard Feelings'
That included risqué scenes wherein Maddie desperately tries to seduce the unseduceable Percy — plus, one side-splitting sequence where the teen accidentally punches Maddie in the throat during a confrontation with a parent at a house party full of college-bound teens. Feldman did not, in fact, strike Lawrence, citing his terror and crediting the finished product to a "very well choreographed stunt." "I was so scared to do it," he says. "It didn't look real because I was so afraid. That one [take] in the movie is maybe the only take that looks at all real."
He did, however, have a much more hands on approach to that memorable piano ballad of Hall & Oates' "Maneater," which was scripted to encapsulate Percy's transformation as he finally came into his own. "When Gene presented it to me, I was so excited," Feldman says. "I got to arrange it myself, actually. That arrangement that you hear in the movie is mine, which is something that I am so proud of and so thankful for that they trusted me with that." Though the easiest route would have been to record the cover in a studio and lip sync to it in the scene, Feldman says he and Lawrence were adamant about performing the sequence live on the day of filming. "It's not about me sounding good. It's not about having the cleanest performance and getting to do it a hundred times until it's perfect," he says. "It's about Percy revealing himself for the first time. It should be messy and imperfect."
Feldman, in a similar way, is revealing himself as an actor to a much wider audience than he's used to, even as he charts a return to Harvard. He's not necessarily in any particular rush to do so, though. As he says, "It's not going anywhere." Lately, he's been more focused on his music and writing, having released his fifth single, "The College Breakup," in early June. Feldman is also the co-creator of Foul Play, an interactive online murder mystery series that has featured other Broadway alums among its cast, including Stranger Things' Gaten Matarazzo and Shrinking's Michael Urie. "I'm always making. I'm somebody who makes," Feldman says.
The actor, now a metaphorical graduate of the Jennifer Lawrence school of comedy, is open to whatever comes next, should it be another movie or TV show. As with Percy and his other roles, though, it just has to connect. "I'm saying no to a lot of things right now, and I'm also chasing a lot of things that are really meaningful to me," Feldman says. "So you can trust that whatever you see me do next is something that I care very deeply about."
No Hard Feelings is in theaters now.
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