There's a lot of reasons why a director might not cast an actor in their film, and as wild as it sounds, being "too pretty" is certainly one of them. In fact, when scouting actresses to play the young writer's assistant Alley in her directorial debut Gonzo Girl, Patricia Arquette nearly dismissed the film's eventual star Camila Morrone for that very reason.
"At first, I responded to her reading," Arquette says of Morrone's audition tape. "But then I thought, 'Is she too pretty? Will people not take her seriously? Will women not like her subconsciously? Will men not take her seriously?' Then I thought, 'Oh my god, this is terrible reverse discrimination that I am having myself.' This kind of weird bias like, 'Oh, sorry you're just too pretty. You can't also be a great actor. You can only have so many talents in life.' And I thought, 'No, she really gave the best reading, and so I have to really challenge my own bias.'"
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Thankfully, Arquette bucked whatever internalized misogyny lurks even in the staunchest of feminists (she famously advocated for equal pay for women when she won her Oscar for Boyhood in 2015) and cast Morrone. The pair — who stopped by Parade's office studio during the Tribeca Festival to discuss Gonzo Girl ahead of its American premiere — now seem as thick as thieves. However, after Arquette cast Morrone in her film, it took the pair three years to actually meet in person.
"We didn't meet till our first day on set," Morrone says, as she looks back on her side of the casting story. "It was the first few months of the pandemic, and I remember being in my basement and asking a friend to just read with me. We did a couple takes. And I was like, 'I don't know, are any of them good?' He was like, 'Yeah, I think you should send it in.' And so we sent, and I didn't hear anything for a few weeks. I was like, 'I definitely didn't get it,' because usually, when you get something, you hear pretty fast that they liked you. On my birthday, June 16, I got a call. At like 8 a.m., my agents were like, 'You're the lead of a Patricia Arquette movie,' and I just remember crying hysterically...Three years after I got the job, we're finally on set in rehearsals."
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Waiting three years to make a film is not uncommon, especially with independent films and even more so when you've got a global pandemic and Hollywood strikes to work around. Arquette latched onto Gonzo Girl and decided to make it her directorial debut because it re-connected her to her roots. The film is based on a novel by Della Pietra and is loosely based on Pietra's experience working as the assistant to gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. In the film, Alley, a stand-in for Pietra, moves into the writing commune of famed journalist Walker Reade (Willem Dafoe) to work as his assistant. There she's met with his eccentric writing techniques, an entourage of groupies (including Arquette's Claudia) and an endless supply of drugs.
"He was really pivotal to me growing up as a writer and as a free spirit," Arquette says of Thompson and why she signed on to the project. "I came of age in the '90s, and there's a lot of aspects of the story that I thought were interesting for me in my own life: addiction, co-dependence, beauty in the '90s, being in the orbit of a celebrity, being trapped by your own success, this kind of mentor relationship that they have. And also there was room for really good acting."
Perhaps the most tantalizing acting role in Gonzo Girl is Walker Reade, which Dafoe devours with abandon. While Morrone was "completely intimidated" by the Oscar-nominated actor in the lead-up to the shoot, that fear quickly dissipated on set.
"You meet him, and he's so warm and generous as an actor," she says. "Willem is very free. He's very playful. He's very silly. He's goofy. He could laugh at himself."
Dafoe would come to set early to let the crew light him and would leave his phone in the trailer to be present. Morrone remembers filming a wild scene where the two are in a changing room, while he shouts increasingly outlandish things at the sales assistant. "He's just improvising all these different things," she recalls. "Every moment is alive and different."
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Patricia Arquette and Camila Morrone attend the "Gonzo Girl" premiere during the 2025 Tribeca FestivalJamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival
Working opposite Arquette and Dafoe, Morrone, who had only starred in a handful of projects, was determined to absorb as much as she could from the filmmaking veterans. One lesson that Arquette aimed to teach her was to let loose a bit more and not be so tied to performing a scene "the right way."
"You, beginning your career and being pretty green, were really professional and showed up, and you knew all your lines and everyone's lines," Arquette remembers. "But sometimes you'd be like, 'In the script, it says, "Pick up this on this line."' I'm like, 'Do you feel like picking it up in that line? Do you feel like avoiding the conversation with [Dafoe's character], so that's why you start doing the dishes? If not, do it at a different point in the scene.' Like, I don't care what the script says. I don't care about that. What is your body saying? What are your instincts saying? Don't get so stuck on the script. Challenge it."
"I'm very type A," Morrone agrees. "She's like, 'Where'd you get the idea?' I'm like, 'It's in the script.' She's like, 'Well, f--k the script. Do whatever your character is gonna do. You know your character better than anyone.' I've taken that note with me and been less rigid about, 'How do I make it perfect?'"
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Morrone's type A personality even seeped into her fake drug use on set. The movie features so many drugs that the she and Arquette joke that most of their budget went to fake cocaine, but it was the prop pills that did Morrone dirty.
"I got very ill from taking placebo pills because I was trying to be a good actor and actually chug the pills," she remembers. "After we did it like 15 times, I was like, 'I shouldn't have taken the pills.' Patricia was like, 'Start spitting them out. Stop swallowing them.' Then we lost an hour while I was having a moment."
On an independent film set, there's not always time for perfection, if that's even something to be aspired to. Gonzo Girl filmed in less than a month and required an all-hands-on-deck mentality from start to finish. Arquette says being a first time director includes a "steep learning curve" especially on a compact shooting schedule.
"You're never stopping. You're never coming down. You're never going to your trailer," Morrone recalls. "Once you start, you're just running through three weeks of trying stuff and moving, and you only get a couple takes each scene, so it creates another kind of adrenaline."
"Every day [on the shot list] we would have 'if time permits.' All these little shots," Arquette adds. "And every day, I'd grab our [assistant director] Spencer [Taylor]. I'd be like, 'Let's do that. Grab a camera. Let's run outside. Change your clothes. Let's do this.' It always felt like Mission: Impossible."
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The cast and crew would pull clothes from their own suitcases to augment the wardrobe and run to local vintage shops to grab things in between takes. Arquette used a $50 carnival mirror to shoot an acid trip sequence to save on special effects. Morrone says that Arquette even offered to do her laundry on set. "I've done other people's laundry on films," Arquette adds.
When asked if she'd direct another film, Arquette seems hesitant. "Until I sell [Gonzo Girl] to a distributor and put it out in the world, I feel like I'm in an eternal birth process," she says. "I cannot give birth to this movie until it's done and out, and then I'll decide [if I want to direct] again. Right now, I feel like I'm trapped in this endless labor."
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