Brit Heyworth Marling (born August 7, 1983) is an American actress, screenwriter and film producer. After majoring in economics at Georgetown University, Marling moved to Los Angeles with friends Mike Cahill and Zal Batmanglij to pursue screenplay writing and acting. She first gained recognition in 2004 with the documentary Boxers and Ballerinas and later became a Sundance star with the Searchlight movies Sound of My Voice (2011), Another Earth (2011) and The East (2013) which she co-wrote in addition to playing the lead role.
Early life
Marling was born in Chicago, Illinois to property developer parents John and Heidi Marling. She was named "Brit" after her Norwegian maternal great-grandmother. She grew up in Winnetka, Illinois and in Orlando, where she enrolled in the arts program at Dr. Phillips High School. Marling was interested in acting, but her parents encouraged her to focus on academics. She graduated from Georgetown University in 2005 with degrees in economics and studio art, and was her class valedictorian.
Career
Following graduation from Georgetown, where she met friends and future directors Mike Cahill and Zal Batmanglij, Marling spent her junior year summer interning for the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs as an investment analyst. She realized the lack of meaning a life spent there would have and later turned down a job offer from the firm, opting instead to move to Cuba with Mike Cahill to film the documentary Boxers and Ballerinas. The Cahill documentary gained Marling recognition in 2004, having co-written the film with Mike Cahill and Nicholas Shumaker and co-directed with Cahill.
Marling went to auditions and was offered roles in horror films, but rejected them. In an interview with The Daily Beast, she "wanted to be able to cast herself in roles that wouldn’t require her to play the typical parts offered to young actresses, the perfunctory girlfriend or a crime victim." She was discovered by talent agent Hylda Queally.
In the summer of 2009 she joined a group of freegans with friend Zal Batmanglij, living in tents and retrieving food from dumpsters, to explore how other young people were constructing a meaningful life.
Marling co-wrote, co-produced, and acted in the 2011 films Sound of My Voice and Another Earth, directed by Batmanglij and Cahill respectively. Both of these films were featured at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, with Another Earth winning the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for outstanding film with science, technology or math as a major theme. In 2012, she played Richard Gere's daughter in Arbitrage.
In 2013, she collaborated with Searchlight once again on her lead role in The East alongside Ellen Page and Alexander Skarsgård. Directed by Zal Batmanglij and co-written by Marling and Batmanglij, The East is based on the duo's experience as freegans and their concern with the side effects of drugs.
Despite her many roles in films she has co-written, Marling stated she "get[s] a lot more pleasure in acting in other people’s stories" since "one of the great pleasures of acting is surrendering to someone else's point of view of the world."
Personal life
She was previously in a relationship with Mike Cahill.
Filmography
Film
Television
References
External links
- Brit Marling at the Internet Movie Database
- Interview with Brit Marling about 'Another Earth'
- Brit-Marling.com â€" Presenting Brit Marling
