Brianna
Hildebrand

I grew up in College Station, Texas, and I was strictly into music. Writing songs, playing guitar — that was all I ever really thought about doing. Acting wasn't on the radar at all. Then I entered this talent competition, kind of on a whim, and one thing led to another. I moved to LA at seventeen. I'd filmed a web series and one short film, and that was genuinely the extent of my experience when I auditioned for Deadpool.

I just auditioned. Went in, had a callback — Tim [Miller, the director] was there — and a few days later I found out I had the role. I was terrified when I turned up on set because I was the only newcomer to a feature film of that length. Everyone else knew what they were doing and I was very much figuring it out as I went.

That was actually one of the best things about it. The information I had was: she's a teenager, she can see the future, and she dies quickly. That was pretty much it. So I could give her my own biography, make her whoever I wanted her to be. All the character development I could make up myself.

There's a lot of me in her, honestly. I had a really angsty teenage experience. I talked to Tim a lot about it, but most of my ideas he just rolled with because there wasn't much established canon to fight against. She became this version of a teenager I completely understood — super apathetic on the outside, very sure of herself, not interested in performing for anyone. I love her for that. She's so unlike me in my normal daily life, but she comes from somewhere real.

It meant a lot. I'm from Texas, I'm from a very religious family — and growing up I felt like I was the only one of my kind. Not seeing yourself in media when you're a kid, especially when you're already feeling like you don't quite fit anywhere, is a specific kind of lonely. So to be part of a character who just — openly, without any drama or anguish — has a girlfriend, in a massive Marvel movie, that felt important.

Negasonic doesn't have a coming-out arc. She doesn't suffer for it. She just has a girlfriend and they're cute together and that's that. I think that normalisation is more powerful in some ways than making it a whole storyline. Kids who feel like they're on their own somewhere can watch this and think — okay. It's fine. It's actually fine.

She's grown and matured, but she still has so much of that essence of a punk kid. She's not trying to please anyone. The wardrobe evolved — which I was very excited about — and she's more capable, more confident. She still thinks Deadpool is exhausting. That part hasn't changed.

What I love about her is that she doesn't do the thing where she gets less cool as she gets more powerful. Some characters become earnest as the stakes go up. Negasonic just gets more over it. And I respect that deeply.

I hope so. It's one of my favourite things I've been part of. Me and Alexandra [Shipp] play these true crime obsessed teenagers who are trying to go viral, and their method is — extremely chaotic. It's a horror comedy but it's really a film about female friendship and ambition and how those two things can get completely out of control when you're a teenager who thinks the world owes you an audience.

There's something very specific about that experience — being young and female and wanting to be taken seriously and being absolutely feral about it. I think [director] Tyler [MacIntyre] understood that. It's not a film that judges the characters. It's kind of celebrating them, while also being horrified by them.

It was the best. We had already kind of known each other from being in the same Marvel world, but Tragedy Girls was the first time we actually worked together, and there's a chemistry between us on screen that I'm really proud of. When you watch it, it feels like these two people have actually been best friends forever. That matters in a film that's entirely about what best friends are willing to do for each other — which, in this case, is quite a lot.

Always. Music was my first love and it still is in some ways. It's a completely different creative process than acting — it's much more solitary, much more internal. Acting is collaborative almost to a fault sometimes. Music is just you and whatever you're working through. I need both, I think. They scratch different things.

I got my first guitar at twelve. I performed at the Grammy Museum in LA before Deadpool happened. I don't think that part of me goes away. It just lives alongside everything else.

I hope they just relate to her. I hope they see her and think: yeah, I feel like that all the time. I wish I could act like that. Because it's really hard to be a teenager, especially a female teenager. There's so much pressure about other people's opinions, about performing yourself correctly for everyone around you. Negasonic doesn't do any of that. She's fully herself and she does not care.

It took me a long time to get to a place where I care less about what people think. I'd tell my younger self to just — relax. Everything isn't the end of the world, even though it really feels like it is when you're fifteen. Negasonic kind of already knows that. She's ahead of us all.