In Prime Video’s Paper Girls, Sofia Rosinsky, Fina Strazza, Riley Lai Nelet and Camryn Jones star as four very different 12-year-olds in 1988 who are thrown together thanks to the same job: delivering the newspaper on their bicycles in the wee hours of the morning. During one route the day after Halloween, a series of bizarre events send them forward in time to 2019 and into the middle of a time war. Eventually, the girls become very close, but it’s a long journey to friendship that takes place over the course of season one.
Rosinsky tells POPSUGAR that the showrunners tried to mimic this dynamic with the actors, too. “We were asked not to speak to each other before actually getting into Chicago and meeting for the first time,” she says. “When you see the Paper Girls at the beginning just getting to know each other, we were also just getting to know each other off-screen.”
“Our very first meeting was awkward because they had a photographer there to capture our first moments together,” Strazza says, but adds that after the initial awkwardness, they started to bond together very quickly. “We learned how to ride bikes in tandem and together. And we got ice cream pretty much every weekend as a bonding thing.”
“A lot of the times it felt like there were eight girls rather than four,” Nelet says of working on the show. “It was us and then the characters that we play.”
Jones adds that many bonding activities helped them work on their group dynamic. The most fun one? “We played laser tag on the second floor of a hotel with our producer one time, and it was amazing,” she says. “We were doing flips and we were running and we were chasing each other and I was hiding under a table and I grabbed somebody’s leg just so I could shoot them.” If laser tag served as training for the show’s action scenes, even better.
Paper Girls is based on the comic of the same name, which published its first issue in 2015 and wrapped in 2019. Strazza says that readers can expect to see a lot of their favorite moments from the comics in the show, but also some brand new ones. “I think [readers] will be satisfied as well as pleasantly surprised,” she says.
Throughout season one, all four girls meet older versions of people from their current lives and find out major information about who they become as adults. None of them are prepared for what they learn.
“Erin has this really specific expectation set for herself,” Nelet says of her character, who meets an older version of herself, played by Ali Wong, in an early episode. “And when she discovers that adult Erin isn’t exactly what she had imagined, it really hits her in the face with reality. I love to see her realization and coming to terms with who you think you’re going to be and who you actually are.”
Strazza says that her character, KJ, has the opposite experience. “It gives her this sense of comfort to see that her life didn’t go as planned,” she says of KJ finding the older version of her. Young KJ feels trapped by her mother’s expectations, and she loves that older KJ found a way out.
Jones has many scenes with the older version of her character, Tiffany, and she says it was “so cool” to work with Sekai Abenì, who plays Tiffany in her twenties. “She became like another big sister to me by the ending of filming,” she says. “She would come over and we would practice our big scenes,” she says. In one scene where both Tiffanys drink out of coffee mugs, they made sure to hold their cups the same way.
Rosinksy’s Mac meets an older version of her teenage brother, and their scenes together are particularly joyful. “For Mac, at first it’s quite shocking and pretty jarring to see her older brother is older now, but that soon melts away when she realizes that he still has that same teenage person he was years ago in him,” Rosinsky says.
All four actors can’t wait for viewers to meet the characters they’ve come to know and love. “I’m really excited for people to see all the chaos that ensues when the four girls are together,” Nilet says. “They just have this tornado feeling when they’re together, something always goes wrong. And they’re just loud. But then somehow they always still manage at the end of the day to find this eye of the storm where they can be comfortable with each other and support one another.”
Strazza adds, “It feels like as the stakes grow higher, their friendship and bond grow stronger.”
All eight episodes of the first season of Paper Girls are streaming now on Prime Video.
