Chloe Fineman on Absolutely Fabulous, Teen Movies, and Her First Leading Role
Words: Ione Gamble | Photographer: Morganne Boulden | Photo Assist: Reveka Pasternak | Makeup: Mollie Gloss | Hair: Davey Matthew | Stylist: Gabriel Held | Videographer: Marie Koury
Chloe Fineman didn’t grow up with a natural affinity towards high school films. “Now I watch these movies and I'm like, ‘I love these.’ But then when I was a teenager – even in middle school – I was just watching Absolutely Fabulous. I had no interest in teen movies. I just wanted to be an adult.”
It seems surprising, then, that her first leading role sees her taking the helm of a teen movie. But the comedian and actor, best known for her repertory role on Saturday Night Live, isn’t playing a lovestruck outcast or popular cheerleader. She's depicting Santa Monica – a stripper in her late twenties who takes on an unconventional job from a high school student to save the club she works at and adores.
Summer of 69, directed by comedian Jillian Bell, follows Abby, a senior in high school and Twitch streamer who wants to bag the boy she's had a crush on for her entire life. Aiming to seduce him before they leave for college and never see each other again, but with no idea how, she happens upon the club Diamond Dolls, and wonders: who better to teach her about sex than a stripper? To prepare for the part, Chloe “immediately watched every stripper movie ever made including my all time favourite Showgirls”, but quickly realised to authentically portray a dancer, she’d need to get good on the pole. “Luckily LA has more strip clubs and pole classes than gas stations so I started learning right away. Within a week I found an amazing coach, Amelia Jin, who was so amazing that we hired her to come to Syracuse and be on set with us.”
The movie was filmed in an actual strip club also named Diamond Dolls, and Chloe recalls the experience of shooting very fondly. “What I loved about Hustlers, and what I really felt filming at Diamond Dolls and what I hope we capture in our movie, was the family vibes – the sisterhood – and how totally unfiltered everyone is,” she says. “And it’s hot. And camp. And fun to see on camera.”
“I was a slut. I was, I really was. I was obsessed with Sex and The City. I wanted to lose my virginity as fast as possible.”
Undoubtedly, we are in a moment where sex work has achieved prominence onscreen, from the Oscar winning Anora, to rumours that Euphoria season three will centre around Maddie (played by Alexa Demie) and the strip club she works at. While Summer of 69 takes a more lighthearted approach to the subject matter, the film also doesn’t shy away from the reality of stripping. Santa Monica isn’t an infallible badass sex worker, nor is she a damsel in distress. Rather, her and her co-workers are a group of friends facing the same anxieties as anyone else staring down the barrel at the realities of adulthood. “I think anything that helps de-stigmatise any group is a great step forward – strippers are literally you and me – just literal humans whose stories matter just as much as anyone else's.”
The best teen films are the ones you want to transport yourself into, and Santa Monica’s 70s inspired wardrobe, featuring huge red platforms, cherry adorned tank tops, and oversized sunglasses, feels like what we’d all want our big sister figure to wear. When you’re a teen yourself, these films often become a stand-in for a less than ideal actual reality you find yourself in – and I'm sure many viewers wish we had Chloe Fineman guiding us through the thorny work of finding yourself.
“I was a slut. I was, I really was. I was obsessed with Sex and The City. I wanted to lose my virginity as fast as possible”, Chloe tells me over FaceTime, when I ask what her own high school experience was like. Growing up in San Francisco, a place she describes as “very sex positive”, it makes sense that the girl who had her friends call her high-school boyfriend and tell him he was to deflower her as soon as possible would be playing a fairy godmother attempting to make a socially awkward, sexually inexperienced teenager's dreams come true (but not in a creepy way).
Before this, Chloe’s turns on the big screen have looked like being directed by some of the industry’s most lauded auteurs – Francis Ford Coppola, Noah Baumbach and Damien Chazelle – but Summer of 69 is the first time she’s been on a set dominated by women. “It was like a dark awakening” are not the first words you expect to hear out of a performer’s mouth when asking what it was like working with a female director for the first time. But it quickly becomes obvious that her debut leading role was an awakening of the best kind, the type that shows you the way you want to work for the rest of your life.
“You feel so safe, so comfortable. I can ask any question. I also felt free to be weird and funny. I just felt myself. One day when we were shooting, a bunch of executives came, and it felt like when you're with your girlfriends and you're in your underwear being silly and it's the best feeling in the world. But then suddenly, if there's, like, the male gaze, everything becomes different and scary and weird.”
She says taking the helm of Summer of 69 was scary. “When you come in as a supporting part, you get to kind of like pop and you know you make your big splash and try to serve the story in an entertaining way. The dream scenario is you stand out, or make the movie better with your thing. But in a lead role, you have a full arc, and you have to have heart and convince people to care about somebody for an hour and a half. It was fun to get to be like, ‘What's the heart of this?’”
Chloe’s day-to-day life far more closely resembles the cosmopolitan dream she grew up coveting than that of a high school dramedy. Of course, there's her day job on Saturday Night Live, a show that feels more in the public consciousness than it has in years following the show’s fiftieth anniversary and a slew of viral sketches emerging this season. “Domingo was really great because that was all of us just having fun – the stakes were really low. None of us knew it would become what it became. I have videos of all of us just hanging out and being annoying, and then this sketch kind of took off.” She attributes a lot of the success of this season to “the stuff that felt easy”, as well as saying she feels closer than she ever has to the cast.
“The people I really admire in the world – you see it in New York or London, and you're like, ‘This person doesn't give a fuck what they're doing.’ Not for a guy, they're not doing it for their friends, totally for themselves.”
“We really are bonded, and we really get along. It really feels like we're equals, we're friends, and we hang out. It's really special.” Working brutal winter hours for much of the season, and barely seeing daylight as a result, she describes the final few episodes of SNL as “these weird three weeks where everyone sits outside, sunbathes and thinks of ideas. The show tends to be a little wackier, like the last episodes are where you can get your weird ideas on the show.”
But on the more Absolutely Fabulous side of things – Chloe has been spending her evenings and weekends emceeing galas at the Guggenheim, hosting her very own Architectural Digest tour from her apartment in the West Village and attending premieres in Hermes. “I am addicted to fashion. It's an ever-evolving journey. I definitely dress for myself. I think, like an oversized pantsuit isn't trying to turn anybody on, but I dress for myself.” She tells me, “The people I really admire in the world – you see it in New York or London, and you're like, ‘This person doesn't give a fuck what they're doing.’ Not for a guy, they're not doing it for their friends, totally for themselves.”
She’s fast becoming a quintessential New York fashion girly, though it's an identity she wears endearingly lightly. Chloe says she's never felt more herself than when emulating Rachel Zoe and living out a mid-noughties boho dream, adds that her biggest fear is being basic and jokes that her “friends always said I had more phases than the moon.”
After spending last summer filming Summer of 69, she keeps tight lipped about what this summer break will bring. Describing her dream project, she says, “the corny answer is making something with my friends and doing something with my sister. But then also, I really want to beat someone up.”
