'The Musical': How Giselle Bonilla transmuted her theater-kid years into a bold dark comedy

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Set us as preferred 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.

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