Chiara Aurelia (Cruel Summer, Hysteria!) is having a theater girl summer: first, alongside Ella Stiller and Christopher Briney in the off-Broadway play Dilaria, and currently, as Shelby in John Proctor Is the Villain — the part she took over from Sadie Sink, her friend and former costar (in Fear Street: Part Two) who originated the character. While different in tone, both plays portray complicated young women finding their way through turbulent worlds, a common theme in Aurelia's work so far.
The first project helped prepare Aurelia for the second. The 22-year-old actress is primarily known for film and TV, with a breakout role as the polarizing Jeanette Turner in Freeform's Cruel Summer alongside Olivia Holt, and a follow-up hit in Netflix's Luckiest Girl Alive. Dilaria, and particularly her friendship with Stiller, taught Aurelia about everything from stage terminology to how to take care of her voice over dozens of shows. Now as Shelby, she's part of a big ensemble cast in the Tony-winning story about high schoolers reading The Crucible in Me Too-era Appalachia.
“It's a whole new world to me, but it's a great one,” Aurelia tells Teen Vogue, fresh off her Broadway debut in John Proctor, which will wrap up its run of shows in September. Below, Aurelia explains why she loves complex female characters, talks the origin of her friendship with Sadie Sink, and shares her thoughts on the forthcoming John Proctor Is the Villain movie.
Chiara Aurelia: Well, when I moved to New York about a year ago, my goal was to allow myself to transition into theater acting while continuing to do film and TV. Obviously I was kept very busy in the film and TV world, which I'm so grateful for. But I think as you're getting older, and since I started acting when I was so young, I was never really given that education in theater. There's something about that sense of community. The show cannot continue without every person being at their best, including backstage and everybody else that's working on the production.
And also, I just love theater. There's something just so dynamic and wonderful about getting to experience an actor in that setting as opposed to in this more perfect, polished universe of film and TV. I think it's a challenge and it's really hard and it's supposed to be, and that's why the reward of it is so great. It feels like I'm earning my stripes in such a wonderful and great way.
CA: Oh my god, 100%. You idealize all these ideas about the movies and TV shows that you've grown up on that explain what New York is, and I think it's so much better. When you try to create something that isn't authentically your experience here, it can be disappointing. But I think that's what's so cool about New York is everyone's lives are so different and every block is so different and every experience that you have in every neighborhood is different. People say, like, "From moving from Brooklyn to the East Village, to the West Village, to Chelsea, to uptown, I have a completely different life in New York." So I'm actually about to move coming up on my first year here, and I'm scared, but I'm realizing that a new life is going to be born out of the new neighborhood that I'm living in.
CA: We're all so bonded. With a smaller cast, it's like a tight-knit family. I loved working with Ella and Chris so much. I had the best time. Ella is now one of my best friends from working on that show. We bonded immediately. I think it's scary, especially in a show that revolves so much around that female friendship dynamic, you're like, "What if we don't hit it off right away or we aren't as close as we want to be?" But with Ella, from the moment I met her, it was instant comfort. I am so sad that I don't get to work with her anymore. I learned so much on that show. It really actually prepared me for what I'm doing now in such a real way.
I was given such an education that I didn't even know I needed, and just learning the simplest phrases and the way that things are referred to and talked about in the schedule. I didn't even know that the directors leave on opening night until I did Dilaria. When I was told that, I was like, "What? What do you mean they leave? What are we going to do without them?" Because in film and TV, your director is your guide, they're your shining light. They talk you through everything. I need the adults. Where are the grownups? I'm just a kid. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. I need someone to tell me what to do.
CA: It's definitely different. It's not something that I was used to. Theater is a marathon. It's different than film and TV — if you have a really big scene that you're shooting, you are giving all of your energy and all of your life force to that scene, and then you're able to rest and recoup afterwards. As opposed to theater where you have to find a performance that can be consistent and easily attainable every night. You can't push yourself too far because if you do, the next show is going to suffer. You have to give just enough without giving too much.
CA: Yeah, it's a different experience. Not being able to go through the rehearsal process together, not growing the show together. I'm developing my own Shelby in an isolated universe, basically. It isn't in connection with all the other actors, and I think that's challenging for everyone. I have so much understanding for the fact that just as much as it's a big adjustment for me, and this is a really big moment in my life, it's also a really big adjustment for all the other actors as well.
It's so beautiful, Danya Taymor, the director, she likes to just say things and call them out so that we can all talk about them. She was talking about how this change is really big, and then she was also talking about how beautiful it is that just adding this new piece has changed so much about the show and that scenes that I'm not even in have adjusted. One new actor would be a technically small change in a company that large, but it creates a ripple effect. If you're able to embrace that, it hopefully creates a beautiful ripple that creates a new show that people can come back and see again and experience for the first time.
CA: I think that the goal is to bring a little bit of yourself to every character that you play, and there's a little bit of me in Shelby. My heart lives in her and my experience and the way that I move through the world has become part of that character. I think it's really interesting for me and then also for the creatives to see what parts are just Shelby's nature — those similarities will never change using the same text and a lot of the same blocking — and then what things are different based off of my lived experience and Sadie's lived experience and how those come out differently in the role.
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I love Sadie's performance in the show. I went and saw it many times, and I think she's brilliant and just a wonderful person and also an amazing actor. Being able to share that with her and have this little kind of connective cord between us where there's so much of this character's mind and backstory that we can share and understand, that's such a special and unique experience. There's really no other way to articulate the journey you're going through with the character unless you're sharing it with someone else who went through that exact same experience. But by nature, we're different people and we're from different places and we have different hair and everything's different. It's a different experience for the audience when they're watching it.
CA: No, we first met on Fear Street when I was 16, maybe 15. I was young, and she was young too. We clicked right away, and we've been friends ever since. She's the best.
CA: Totally. I originally auditioned for Raelynn [in John Proctor], which is how I ended up doing Shelby. At the time, Sadie and I were like, "Oh my God, it would be such a dream to be able to work together on this." When that didn't work out — and Amalia [Yoo] is so wonderful and she's the perfect Raelynn — at the time they had told me, they were like, "You and Sadie just have…" We grew up together. We have these kind of similar tendencies, and there's some similarities in us. People were like, "No, you're such a Shelby." I was like, "Really?" No, I'm totally a Raelynn." And they were like, "No, no, you are a Shelby." I was like, "Okay." Looping back when Sadie was leaving the show and them asking me to join, it feels so right and so wonderful. I think the only sad part is that Sadie and I don't get to work together on it.
CA: I'll be times two. You're seeing double. We both come into the scenes at different times.
CA: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think the play is so awesome and I can't wait to see what Kimberly [Belflower] does with it. I'm just grateful to be a part of the theater journey for it right now, but obviously you never know.
CA: That are spicy.
CA: I'm like, "Hello, my agents, shouldn't I be in a pleasant rom-com?" No, I love complicated characters. I think that women are complicated and I think that people are complicated and I think that I'm complicated. When a character is written with so many different layers of the onion, that's something that I relate and connect to. Growing up I always loved seeing characters that had more than one thing going on.
We're in such a beautiful time with female creators and writers and directors that are making these really complex female characters. I've worked with a lot of women in my career, which I think is really cool. I've worked with incredible male filmmakers as well, but a lot of the projects that I've worked with are created or written by or directed by women. There's something in that where there's an understanding of this female experience. And the characters are all really different. You can't really compare Dilaria and John Proctor. But what you can say is that there's an understanding of how difficult it is to grow up right now.
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CA: That's why I think the play is so awesome, because all these characters are complicated and it isn't just one-sided. There's people who start the play and really dislike Shelby. She's slept with her best friend's boyfriend and she's done all these things wrong, and we're looking at her and not really fully understanding the whole picture. That applies to every character in the show, to Ivy, to Nell, to Beth. Everyone is doing the best they can with what they have. It isn't alienating or painting anyone to be the bad guy, because they're not. They're just growing up and trying their best to handle and process the difficulty of growing up in that time and what that looks like and how the feelings are very complex and unique.
CA: Yeah. But also not what it means to be a human being. By nature as humans we're making mistakes and we're learning from them and we're growing and we're changing and we're evolving constantly. The expectation that any person is perfect is unrealistic. Especially young people who are starting in this industry from a really young age and are flooded with a lot of information and a lot of stimulation and a lot of just everything all at once, if they're not given grace to grow and learn and change, I think that it's really sad and we're doing them such a disservice. It's so important that we can all just be nice to one another and not be so quick to jump to judgment.
CA: I think it's a really weird balance. I was a fan of things where I felt so passionately. I love people that feel connected and are really invested in the material that I participate in. I think that's awesome. I love my fans. I love anyone that is willing to sit down and spend time watching something that I love as well, and developing unique opinions and unique perspectives and noticing small things and just feeling like they can connect to that universe. I've watched Sex in the City my entire life. I've watched every episode from young to old. Before I moved to New York, that was it. I think if I saw Sarah Jessica Parker on the street, I'd freak out and be so excited that I see Carrie Bradshaw. These characters are real people in the TV universe, but these are not the humans that we're interacting with out on the street.
That's a really complicated feeling as a person to experience. I understand the urge to feel the same way about an actor as you do their character, but it's really important that we're learning to separate those two things. I happen to be really outgoing. I really like when people talk to me. I think it's really sweet. I am very chatty. (That doesn't mean that every day of my life in every moment I really want to start a long conversation.) But some people aren't like that. I think that just being respectful of those boundaries is really important and listening and hearing and treating everyone like a human being, the way that you treat any other stranger on the street.
It just takes time. Social media has created this idea that we all know each other. I mean, I do it too. I'm looking at someone's Instagram and I feel like I understand everything about their lives. But that's only one side to really who a person is, and I think that there's so much more, and we have to be mindful of that.
