Toronto is crawling with the movie stars you’d expect to see here, from Kevin Spacey to Colin Firth to Marion Cotillard. But there’s always room in the festival for a genuinely new face, and nobody at TIFF 2010 exhibits that quite as dramatically as Evan Sneider.
Sneider, a 31-year-old actor with Down Syndrome, is the star of “Girlfriend,” the sweet, beguiling and at times wrenching feature debut from writer-director Justin Lerner about a small-town young man with Down who romantically pursues a single mom.
Sunday night, after the first public screening of the film (and, in fact, the first time it had ever been shown on a big screen), Sneider stood in the Scotiabank lobby, signing autographs and graciously accepting congratulations and posing for photos with one fan after another.
It would have been heady stuff for any actor who’d come up in community theater and never before appeared in a feature film, but Sneider took it in stride and rarely appeared dazed by the crush of fans or the unexpected attention.
“I love watching myself onscreen,” Sneider told TheWrap in the theater’s green room before the screening. “I want to be in more movies, I want to be on TV, I want to do all kinds of acting.”
In “Girlfriend,” Sneider is the centerpiece of a film that co-stars Shannon Woodward (“The Riches”), Jackson Rathbone (“The Twilight Saga: Eclipse”) and Amanda Plummer. Lerner wrote the film for Sneider, a high-school classmate who’d also appeared in his short film “The Replacement Child,” which won two Student Emmys in 2007.
The film, shot in Lerner’s and Sneider’s hometown of Wayland, Massachusetts, and looking for distribution at Toronto, follows a young man with Down Syndrome who comes into a substantial sum of money and uses it to pursue a romance with the young single mother he’s had a crush on since they attended high school together.
It's about one man’s yearning for connection and romance in unlikely circumstances – and also, Lerner pointed out at a Q&A following the screening, about kindness in tough times, certainly a universal (and timely) theme.
The film’s trailer, below, received more than 200,000 views in its first week on YouTube:
TheWrap exclusively followed Sneider from the “Girlfriend” premiere through his first day of TIFF interviews, photo sessions and parties – the public debut of Toronto’s unlikeliest and most winning new face.
SUNDAY, 7:30 P.M.
Waiting in a Scotiabank green room before the first screening, Sneider says he's wanted to be an actor for most of his life, which led him to community theater in Wayland. Whenever he talks about "Girlfriend," he continually deflects attention to Lerner and to his co-stars.
