By Andie Hagemann
Growing up is hard to do, but the new innovative hybrid docuseries Growing Up, debuting exclusively on Disney+, seeks to alleviate those embarrassing and challenging moments of adolescence.
Created by Brie Larson and Culture House, the series explores the challenges, triumphs, and complexities of adolescence through 10 compelling coming of age stories. The series uses narrative, experimental, and documentary filmmaking to follow one casted individual, ages 18-22, as they tell their story. They represent a wide range of lived experiences, giving audiences emotionally powerful narratives that offer an engaging look at teenage-hood and the diverse social, familial, and internal obstacles young people face on their path to self-discovery and acceptance. Each 30-minute episode features one young person, or “Hero,” and their experience growing up. All 10 episodes debut on Disney+ Day, Thursday, September 8, on the streaming service.
“It all started with a thought while I was driving, where I realized that I was living with shame about who I was,” says Larson, who also serves as an executive producer and directed the “Clare and Isabel” episode. “I was noticing how I was presenting myself in the world, either shielding certain parts of myself or living in fear. I thought, ‘If I’m feeling this way, other people must feel this way.’”
Larson brought on Nicole Galovski as showrunner and executive producer to help bring the illuminating project to the screen. “We highlighted the topics that we knew we wanted to address—what was really affecting young people—and we started to research and do a lot of Instagram reaching out and looking at local newspapers for young people who had stories within the kind of range of topics represented in the series,” Galovski says.
“[Growing Up] is about sharing, and at the same time, it’s about celebrating and recognizing that we have more similar than different,” Larson says. “It set us on this glorious path meeting so many wonderful young people as well as our incredible directors.”
In Growing Up, viewers will meet the fascinating Heroes—Alex Crotty; Clare Della Valle and Isabel Lam; Amiri Nash; Athena Nair; Sofia Ongele; Emily Flores; Sage Dolan-Sandrino; Gavin Arneson; Vanessa Aryee; and David Puma—as told through the lenses of directors Galovski and Kishori Rajan, Elegance Bratton, Smriti Mundhra, Yara Shahidi, Ashley Eakin, Sydney Freeland, Bernardo Ruiz, Ekwa Msangi, and Rudy Valdez.Additionally, the directors each have a shared lived experience with their respective Hero.
“As a longtime documentary filmmaker, it was such a pleasure to jump into something like this, and I got to direct an episode with Gavin,” Ruiz says. “Gavin had done so much work already, in thinking about his life and his story so my job was to shape those elements that I felt were most potent.”
Adds Ruiz, “Without spoiling anything, Gavin and I have similar histories—we both lost our fathers when we were teenagers. For me, I think telling a story about the processing of grief, but also how someone can rely on people and resources to grow and become stronger, felt very important.”
For Della Valle, participating in the group sessions with her fellow Heroes was a cathartic experience, and she hopes viewers will hold similar conversations with their friends after watching the series. She says, “I hope they’ll say, ‘I was watching the show, and they said this thing, do you feel that way, too?’”
Lam feels participating in Growing Up illuminated how relatable each story is, despite each Hero’s differences. “When we first got on set, and we met all the Heroes, we knew nothing about each other,” Lam says. “But once we started spending some time together, it was amazing how each of us could pull something from each other’s stories. By the end, you feel like you have a place.”
From the directors to the Heroes and the crew, filming Growing Up was a transformative experience, according to Larson. “I’ve never had an experience where people felt seen, transformed, and connected to what it was that they were doing,” Larson says. “I remember finishing this, thinking, ‘Even if no one ever sees this, I feel like there was a lot of healing that happened here and a lot of connections.’ We realized how much we all have in common, and no one can escape the growing up experience.”
She continues, “I cannot say, sitting here as an adult, that my growing up is done. I have so much love and gratitude for our incredible Heroes who had the courage to say things that I’m not sure if I would have had the courage to say—and do it in a way that brings so much love, joy, and celebration to things that are painful, but part of life.”
