With a boisterous laugh, Giselle Bonilla recalls her introduction to Hollywood at the age of 12: on the set of “Freedom Writers,” the 2007 drama about at-risk high school students in Long Beach. She played a young version of Eva, one of the film’s main characters.
“I remember the first thing we shot was an initiation scene where I get the s— beat out of me,” she tells De Los, sitting at a coffee shop in Silver Lake on Sept. 11 (more on this date later). “They put this candy blood in my mouth, and I thought it was so fun.”
In retrospect, Bonilla, 31, finds great irony in how that initial foray into professional acting fictionally materialized her Mexican immigrant parents’ worst nightmare.
“We don’t come from money. They hustled all their lives and put my sister and I in private education, because they had this irrational fear that I would join a gang … then the first thing I ended up booking as an actor was getting initiated into a gang,” she says grinning.
Since that unique formative experience, Bonilla has traveled a winding path in and out of the industry, which ultimately led her to direct her first feature: the dark comedy “The Musical,” in theaters Friday.
The movie’s antihero, Doug (Will Brill), is a middle school theater teacher plotting his revenge against his ex-girlfriend Abigail (Gillian Jacobs), also a teacher — and her new boyfriend, the more charming Principal Brady (Rob Lowe).
Doug’s plan? To secretly persuade his young students to put on a musical about the horrors of 9/11 and its aftermath that’s certain to cause controversy and get the principal in trouble.
“I feel like you can be more honest with comedy,” says Bonilla about why this genre appeals to her. “You can get away with everything that you’re angry about and want to yell about. If you make them laugh first, people tend to listen.”
Though the actual show is only a small element of the narrative, it turned off distributors, who argued they wouldn’t be able to market a comedy that involved such a delicate subject.
Still, “The Musical” is making it to the big screen as a self-released title thanks to its executive producers, who believed in the film enough to put in more money for a release.
“I’m going to make sure people watch it regardless,” Bonilla says about being very involved in the marketing. “Even though it didn’t sell at Sundance, we still found a way, which is how we made the whole movie. It was nonstop fighting against the universe just to make a comedy.”
Less than a week before production started, Bonilla lost the actors who were originally playing Principal Brady and Abigail. As her film fell apart, she reached out to the industry contacts she had made after working as an assistant for a few years. Miraculously, the screenplay piqued Lowe’s interest. He came on board, essentially saving the project.
As a student at the AFI Conservatory, Bonilla had directed a short film version of “The Musical” that writer Alexander Heller, aware of her affinity for comedy, had conceived for Bonilla to direct. The core group of artists who made the short also worked on the feature.
And though she has always pushed for diversity on screen — including in her short films “Virgencita” and “Bullfighter” — for “The Musical,” Bonilla believed the adults had to be white.
“It would be way more damaging if I had pinned a brown person to be behind the staging of a musical about 9/11,” she explains. “It was very clear to me that this was a comedy about white liberalism and how people weaponize tragedy for their own agenda.”
When it came to the kids in Doug’s class, Bonilla wanted to reflect the multicultural mosaic that is the Los Angeles Unified School District. To be able to see herself in “The Musical,” Bonilla wanted a Latina girl as the child with the most ambition to succeed in the arts. That character became Lata: played in the feature by Melanie Herrera in her first acting credit.
“She’s a dancer. But she’s very precocious and has a really confident, type-A personality,” Bonilla says of the young actor. “Melanie gives Reese Witherspoon in ‘Election,’ like, ‘I will do whatever I have to do for the part,’ and I recognized that in myself as a kid.”
An L.A. native raised in North Hollywood, Bonilla started doing improv at a young age encouraged by her father, Art Bonilla, who grew up in Tijuana and has worked as an actor in the U.S. for over 40 years.
Her mother, originally from Sinaloa, does workers’ compensation insurance, which provided a stable income and allowed her partner to pursue acting.
“It was tough seeing him struggle and not have any agency over work,” Bonilla says of her father. “He’s such a great actor and he’s really funny, but he’s always getting cast in these very small bit parts as a gardener or an immigrant crossing on the border.”
Unsurprisingly, when Bonilla began auditioning for roles as a teenager, similarly one-dimensional and stereotypical characters from a “troubling perspective” came her way.
“They always make the main character in those stories a white person,” she says. “And then we’re painted as these puppies that just keep getting beat up. I didn’t want to contribute to that.”
Bonilla’s interest in being on the other side of the camera solidified after playing an illiterate South Central high school student in the Byron Allen sitcom “Mr. Box Office.” She attended Pasadena City College, where she studied film production, then used the residuals from the show to help pay for her tuition at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Attending film school on the East Coast was, as she puts it, a necessary experience, because she grew up rather sheltered.
“I’m a first-gen Mexican American woman and I was supposed to live at home until I get married,” she explains; but it also exposed her to the concept of impostor syndrome.
“I always had this impostor syndrome at NYU, because that was where I first really confronted wealthy people,” she explains. “I had never been in a predominantly white institution before. And that was really eye-opening.”
It was only when COVID restrictions were lifted that Bonilla decided to apply to the AFI Conservatory, where she regained her confidence and met her now close collaborators.
She has, however, never forgotten her biggest and earliest supporters. Since she started directing, Bonilla has cast her father in many of her short films. And in “The Musical,” you can see both of her parents in the audience during the culminating school show.
“My dad is the one that yells at Rob Lowe at the end in slow motion. He’s pissed that I cut his line, but it was a union film, and we couldn’t afford to give my dad a line,” she says. “But he will be the first one to tell you that he’s not an extra. He did a ‘cameo!’”
Bonilla’s next project takes inspiration from her memories attending a Catholic school run by nuns in Sun Valley, where a teacher was discovered to be a pedophile. She describes it as “an erotic thriller told from the perspective of virgins.”
Once again, she’ll tackle an unsavory topic and figure out how to bring it to fruition; then distribute it come what may, because she refuses to be boxed in by the industry’s expectations.
“Identity stories are very important. If someone wants to do that, they should be able to do that,” Bonilla says. “But I don’t think our opportunity as Latinos should be limited to painting ourselves as victims against the supremacists.”
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