In HBO Max’s new comedy Unpregnant, there’s a scene where Haley Lu Richardson’s Veronica Clarke sticks her head out the window of a moving SUV (driven by Barbie Ferreira’s character Bailey) and debunks lies around abortion. They’re in the middle of a high-speed car chase involving an anti-choice adult who is yelling out abortion myths, such as having one reduces your chances of getting pregnant later. “That’s not true, I googled it!” Veronica screams. “And frankly that’s a very problematic falsehood to be spreading!”
That chaotic moment is a microcosm of the film: an adventurous buddy comedy that manages to impart facts about abortion without being preachy. Unpregnant follows a teenage girl who chooses to get an abortion, but it’s not a movie about the actual choice — it’s not a will-she-or-won’t-she plot — instead, it’s about access to healthcare, and friendship, and making your own decisions.
Haley, who recently starred opposite Cole Sprouse in Five Feet Apart, plays Veronica, a type-A, Ivy League-bound high school senior who gets pregnant after having sex with her boyfriend, who used a broken condom. Though she knows she wants an abortion, the reality of getting one is harder than she realized: the movie is set in Missouri, where the closest provider that doesn’t require parental permission is 1,000 miles away in Albuquerque.
Isolated from her friends, family, and boyfriend Kevin (who wants to get married), Veronica turns to high school outcast and former best friend Bailey (Barbie) for help. Over the course of the film, they unpack stereotypes around abortion and each other. It’s a coming-of-age tale with a rare abortion storyline that isn’t traumatic; the most traumatic part, ironically, is the raucous journey they have to take to get to legal, safe healthcare.
“The choice to get an abortion is extremely clear to Veronica almost immediately. [It’s] the only option that's right for her and where she's at in her life,” Haley tells Teen Vogue. “[The movie] is more so about the shame that she feels in going to her mom, going to her friends because of these pressures and external expectations that people are going to think she's a failure or that she's not perfect anymore. I liked that that's where the struggle came from with her, and it wasn't a struggle to know what she wanted to do.”
When Haley first read the script, it struck her as “ambitious,” the way the movie balances a serious storyline with a humorous sheen. She says it made her nervous, the idea that this kind of story could “go wrong” in the way it navigates teen comedy, friendship, and social issues.
While filming, she found herself thinking about a previous movie she worked on, 2016’s The Edge of Seventeen, which starred Hailee Steinfeld. “Obviously, The Edge of Seventeen is talking about completely different things, but the tone is similar in the fact that her character was going through something really real,” Haley says. “She was experiencing depression and her dad had died, but it was in these extreme teen comedy scenes. I was thinking about her while I was doing some of these scenes on this movie, thinking like, how the frick did Hailee do that? How did she do that so seamlessly and beautifully?”
Part of the answer is in empathy, which Haley says she channeled with Veronica. The character is often tightly-wound and worries about other people’s perception of her, and it affects the way she sees the world. At one point, Veronica says she’s not the type of person who has an abortion, to which Bailey responds that she's exactly the type. The extension of that argument, of course, is that there is no type, and that there shouldn’t be a stigma around the choice.
“It's such a protective mechanism that she's made for herself so as to not be vulnerable and to keep up that perfect image that she feels like she needs to be for everyone around her,” Haley says. “I have a lot of empathy for why she would feel that way and that's why I hope this movie starts the conversations to lift that shame around talking about this.” She also encourages families to have difficult conversations. If Veronica had felt comfortable going to her mom for help, maybe her story would have been different.
“I just really hope that families watch this movie, even families like Veronica's family, that aren't as open to talking about sex and sex education and pro-life and pro-choice and these types of situations,” she says. “[I hope] they’re like, ‘Oh wow, we need to have these conversations together, and we need our kids to know that we love them no matter what and we'll always be there for them period.’”
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