Although A Wrinkle in Time has yet to grace the big screen, lead actress, 14-year-old Storm Reid is already becoming a household name.
The talented teen recently took a moment out of her busy schedule to talk to Entertainment Weekly about what the upcoming anticipated box office hit means to her.
“It means everything to be a girl of color and play Meg Murry because Meg Murry is, in the books, a Caucasian little girl,” Reid told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s just surreal because I get to empower other little African-American girls around the world and say that you can be a superhero and you rock and you can conquer the world and you are beautiful just the way you are and your flaws are nothing and you’re awesome. It feels really good to be able to inspire not only little girls [but] everyone.”
Directed by Oscar-Nominated Ava Duvernay, A Wrinkle in Time is based on the novel by Madeleine L’Engle. The story follows Meg as she teams up with her younger brother Charles and classmate Calvin to find her missing father. The three set out on an adventure that transcends space and time, along the way encountering mysterious celestial individuals played by Oprah Winfrey, Mindy Kaling, and Reese Witherspoon.
Duvernay also commented to Entertainment Weekly as to her vision for the young Meg. “The first image [I had in my head] was to place a brown girl in that role of Meg, a girl traveling to different planets and encountering beings and situations that I’d never seen a girl of color in,” she said. “All of those scenes struck my fancy, and then it was also something that [Disney VP of production] Tendo Nagenda said to me, which I’ll never forget. One of the things that really made me want to read it was when he said, ‘Ava, imagine what you would do with the worlds.’ Worlds! ‘Planets no one’s ever seen or heard of,’ he said. There aren’t any other black women who have been invited to imagine what other planets in the universe might look and feel like. I was interested in that and in a heroine that looked like the girls I grew up with.”
A Wrinkle in Time will hit theaters March 9 and it is without a doubt that we will be front-and-center. Will you?
