Kirby Howell-Baptiste<\/a> of how Edison was described to her. \u201cShe\u2019s completely lost all social boundaries. The lifetime of drugs melted half of her brain away, and all her social cues and etiquette have gone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\tHowell-Baptiste\u2019s etiquette-free Edison is only in \u201cClub Kid\u201d for a few minutes, but manages to steal the crucial scene in question from under the nose of writer, director and lead star Firstman.<\/p>\n
\n\tRoughly quarter of the way into the film, she rocks up unannounced and chaotic, sporting green braids and oversized sunglasses, at the apartment lived in by nightclub promoter Peter (Firstman), with 10-year-old Arlo (Reggie Absolom) in tow. While wandering around the place like it\u2019s her own, she reveals \u2014\u00a0in a hysterically matter-of-fact manner \u2014 that not only is Arlo his, but she\u2019s brought the kid across from the U.K. to live with him permanently. Boom.<\/p>\n
\n\tBut Peter is gay \u2014\u00a0and confidently declares that he\u2019s never slept with a woman. Not true, Edison asserts as she casually roams the kitchen on the hunt for literally anything remotely looking like drugs she can swallow or snort.\u00a0He had sex with her friend Leonine a decade earlier at one of his nights while so high on ketamine, cocaine, GHB and (probably)\u00a0more that he didn\u2019t have a clue what was going on.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cNah, you fucked her, babes,\u201d Edison says. \u201cPoint is, that\u2019s your son.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tTragically, Leonine \u2014 as her apparent friend explains while sniffing some white powder she found on the counter \u2014\u00a0struggled with mental health issues (\u201cShe was in and out of the loony bin\u2026 what do you call it, rehab?\u201d) and recently ended her life. \u201cLast week she goes and tops herself \u2014 she fucking killed herself, babe.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIn the midst of making these life-changing and upsetting revelations in the most wonderfully insensitive manner possible, Edison inquires if Peter and her should \u201cdo a bump\u201d of coke (slightly shaken by how his life is quickly unravelling, he declines).<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201c[Edison] is just a complete tornado,\u201d says Londoner Howell-Baptiste, adding that she thinks the character is an \u201camalgamation of a few party people\u201d Firstman has encountered. \u201cBut what I really love is that, although she\u2019s absolutely bananas, she does feel quite real and quite relatable. I think everyone knows that person, to some degree. At some point in your life, you have met that person.\u201d <\/p>\n
\n\tEdison isn\u2019t seen again in \u201cClub Kid\u201d after the apartment scene, in which she eventually leaves Arlo in Peter\u2019s care and \u2014\u00a0predictably \u2014 fails to return to collect him as promised later on. But as Peter begins a frantic search to find her across various New York house parties, further levels of her comically debauched behaviour come to light, as he hears how she was kicked out of several places for simply being too much of a tornado to handle. <\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI wasn\u2019t part of those scenes, obviously, but what was really cool was that you got more of a picture of Edison,\u201d she says. \u201cEven in her absence, you got more of a picture of what she was doing and how she was just belligerently running around New York, hoovering up drugs at everyone\u2019s party.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/variety.com\/wp-content\/themes\/pmc-variety-2020\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tKirby Howell-Baptiste as Edison in \u2018Club Kid\u2019<\/p>\n
\n\tHowell-Baptiste admits she had no idea who Firstman was when she was originally invited to audition for \u201cClub Kid\u201d in mid 2025. As someone who\u2019s \u201cnot really on social media much\u201d she missed his breakout during the COVID-19 pandemic. But she checked out some of his Instagram videos and thought he was funny. Crucially, the casting was being done by Carmen Cuba, who she says has \u201creally exquisite taste\u201d and thought, while she hadn\u2019t seen the full script, the role seemed fun \u2014 \u201cand the character was a party girl and I felt like I could channel that pretty well.\u201d <\/p>\n
\n\tA few months later, shooting in New York, Howell-Baptiste still didn\u2019t have a full picture of what \u201cClub Kid\u201d was all about (she admits to only watching it in September), but her main takeaway was that Edison was written by someone \u201cwho knows how to party.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile the scene they shot was \u201calmost verbatim\u201d from the audition, there was a bit of ad-libbing, with Howell-Baptiste being the one who added the British slang term \u201ctops herself.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cAnd afterwards, everyone was like, \u2018What do you you mean \u2018\u201dtops herself\u201d?\u2019 Because, obviously, we\u2019re in a film that\u2019s written by a gay man. There\u2019s so much about it that celebrates queer culture, and topping has a completely different meaning there,\u201d she says. Despite offering to remove the word, she was told to keep it in. \u201cIt made the cut \u2014\u00a0and it think it\u2019s really fun and adds even more confusion when it comes to American audiences being like: \u2018What is going on with this girl?’\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIn terms of notes from Firstman, she says the main discussion was how he wanted Edison\u2019s voice to sound, with the request that \u2014\u00a0alongside the British accent \u2014\u00a0she was \u201cvery hoarse, like she\u2019s been up all night and almost always lost her voice.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tTo achieve this, Howell-Baptiste channelled former Spice Girl Mel B. \u201cShe always had this slight hoarseness singing that I always thought was very cool, so that\u2019s where my mind went,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\n\tHaving shot her key scene (and the even shorter scene in which Edison and Leonine first meet Peter in the club)\u00a0in the fall of 2025, Howell-Baptiste \u2014\u00a0whose long line of credits include \u201cKilling Eve,\u201d \u201cBarry\u201d and \u201cHacks\u201d \u2014 moved on to other acting jobs. Several months later, while filming Season 3 of British TV drama \u201cSherwood,\u201d Firstman messaged her to tell her that \u201cClub Kid\u201d had been accepted into Cannes. \u201cI was like, \u2018How incredible,\u2019 but that was sort of it for me for a very long time.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tOf course, \u201cClub Kid\u201d wound up being the talk of the festival festival, the breakout hit that sparked an intense bidding war eventually won by A24 for the princely sum of $17 million. Howell-Baptiste was oblivious to it all (\u201cI joke that I live under a rock\u201d) until her manager messaged her saying \u201cAre you aware of everything that\u2019s going on with \u2018Club Kid\u2019 in Cannes?\u201d Keeping with the theme, it was a makeup artist who later informed her that \u201cClub Kid\u201d was going to Toronto. \u201cI just wasn\u2019t aware of any of the buzz!\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThankfully, Howell-Baptiste was able to attend the premiere at the BFI London Film Festival and took to the stage at the Royal Festival Hall with Firstman and Absolom, staying to watch the film to experience the laughs, cheers and tears from a hugely enthusiastic audience. Now, she can finally enjoy having a crucial \u2014\u00a0and spectacularly funny \u2014\u00a0role in one of the standout movies of the year.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI filmed in a complete vacuum \u2014\u00a0I just did one scene with three other characters and filmed the party scene, which was just one night,\u201d she says. \u201cSo it\u2019s all come as a really pleasant surprise to me \u2014\u00a0it\u2019s lovely.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cShould we do a bump?\u201d It\u2019s a line said, in various forms, numerous times across the first half…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":678171,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[195632,93,61,60,195633,287144,270],"class_list":["post-678170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-club-kid","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jordan-firstman","tag-kirby-howell-baptiste","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678170\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/678171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}