Andrea Riseborough

How Andrea Riseborough built a celeb-backed Oscar campaign for indie film 'To Leslie' and scored a nomination.

“To Leslie” director Michael Morris and his wife, actor Mary McCormack, showed the movie to Stern in July during the annual wedding anniversary celebration they share with the Sterns. McCormack sent an email to friends asking them to publicly support the movie and Riseborough’s performance, even including images and suggested hashtags and accounts to tag in social media posts. And what’s more comfortable than posting about a movie every day!” “It genuinely caught everyone by surprise,” a source tells me. It feels like the film community rallied around and made a noise.” [To Leslie](https://variety.com/t/to-leslie/),” an indie film about a woman trying to rebuild her life while battling drug addiction and alcoholism.

Despite enjoying a flurry of late celebrity support, many Oscar-watchers felt British actress Andrea Riseborough had too high a hill to climb to score a ...

He was part of a very strong showing for Irish actors and talent. "To be recognised by the Academy is such an insane honour and I'm so utterly grateful." All of the other best picture contenders were released in cinemas - although some have since become available on streaming. This was a huge but very welcome surprise. Where can I see it?' After a while, we were able to point them to iTunes and Amazon, but it didn't happen right away." It has now secured nine nods at the Oscars. "This is bananas!" "After SXSW there was a quiet lull," Riseborough recalled. To Leslie reportedly only made $27,000 (£21,800) at the box office when it first opened. The film premiered at South by Southwest last March. I don’t post a lot about films or actor performances…maybe I should more often. But the copy-and-paste tweets and Instagram posts were driven by an apparently genuine admiration.

A social media campaign by some famous friends netted the star of “To Leslie,” a little-known microbudget indie, her first Oscar nomination.

When I talk to people who haven’t watched the film, they can identify with her even though she’s letting herself and the people she loves down in so many ways. So she’s quite a large character to let into your consciousness, for all of us — I don’t just mean for me playing her, for everybody on the film, cast and crew. We shot it in 19 days, and it was all one or two takes, mostly, because we didn’t have a lot of time. A character like Leslie, once she gets inside you, you can’t really shake her off. “There’s a large part of me that’s really unable to accept that it’s happened.” “It is arbitrary considering how many extraordinary performances there have been by women, not only in this room,” she said. By the time we got to actually making it, it felt like an explosion, because it had been in our bones for so long. A wonderful, warm feeling of being supported and recognized. The thing that feels most exciting is being acknowledged by your community. Here are excerpts from the conversation. “It’s sort of surreal,” Riseborough, 41, said. Immediately I knew that I wanted to make that film and two years later, we did — after a good, long stewing period of not being able to get it financed.