How To Build A Girl Along Came Dolly

Beanie Feldstein dances to her own music in How To Build A Girl, an adaptation of Caitlin Moran’s hilarious and heartfelt semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel. TF goes on set to witness director Coky Giedroyc and stars Feldstein and Paddy Considine making all the right moves…

- Jamie Graham

A red-haired Beanie Feldstein is dressed in a top hat, theatrical skirt suit and fishnet tights with a rucksack on her back and maracas in her hand. She is spilling out of a VW van on a Watford housing estate in the hushed early hours. When she speaks, gabbling her goodbyes to a band in the van, it’s with a Wolverhampton accent, and the dialect coach on location radiates approval. Director Coky Giedroyc, meanwhile, shakes her head. “One more, without the airplane,” she says, removing her headphones and looking to the sky. Beanie – or Bean, as she prefers – bounces back into the VW to go again.

Why is Californian girl Feldstein in the arse end of Watford, speaking in a Wolverhampton accent? Because she’s playing 16-year-old Johanna Morrigan, the on-screen avatar of award-winning author, journalist and broadcaster Caitlin Moran, in the much-anticipated adaptation of Moran’s 2014 sorta-memoir How To Build A Girl. A remarkable true-life adventure, it tells of how Johanna, living with her family in a council house in Wolverhampton, breaks into the London-based, male-dominated world of music journalism in the early ’90s, reinventing herself as Dolly Wilde to smash through every class ceiling her top hat encountered.