Breakout 'Ma' & 'Booksmart' Star Diana Silvers Is Just Glad Hollywood Knows She Exists

Before this year, Diana Silvers had never appeared on the big screen. But the 21-year-old actor has been all over cinemas in 2019. She’s had a small role in M Night Shyamalan’s Glass, a larger role in Olivia Wilde’s beloved Booksmart, and finally a starring role in Ma, a Blumhouse psychological horror movie unexpectedly directed by The Help’s Tate Taylor. Silvers will also appear in Taylor’s next film, Ava, an action thriller starring Jessica Chastain as the titular assassin. It’s quite the breakout year for a screen debutante.

“I remember feeling like, ‘Ok, I’ve got these two films now, and hopefully when they come out people in Hollywood will believe in me more, and I’ll keep working,'" Silvers offers. “You have no time to worry about the films once you’ve stopped working on them. I’m always just thinking of my next audition, and trying to get back to work, to get back on set. There was a little lull between Booksmart and Ava, which was the movie I worked on in the fall quarter of last year, so I had lots of time to think about this.”

So, does she feel more ‘believed in’ in Hollywood, now? “Oh, what I meant when I said that probably wasn’t really so grand,” she laughs. “But now that I’ve got these two movies that have come out, now people here are aware that I exist.”

Silvers owes her burgeoning career to Instagram, where a selfie was discovered by IMG Models when she was still in high school. Despite the fact that social media was so important in her career, Ma made her question all the data she’d put online – so much so that she deleted her Facebook account. “[Ma] talks about how much we share ourselves on social media, and how easy it is to find out what people are doing, where people are, and who people are,” she says. “It’s interesting. It makes me think: what could potentially happen from unwanted encounters or interactions?”

Silver plays the lead character Maggie in Ma, a girl who moves to a new town with her mother (“She’s really interesting for a genre film character,” Silvers says, “she has a relationship with her mother that’s complex and well developed”). Her new gang of friends fall in with a local vet’s assistant – the titular character, played by Octavia Spencer – who offers to buy them alcohol, lets them hang out at her house, and then grows a little too obsessed with these teenagers, the film a study of the high school social experience, and how its aftereffects can linger for a lifetime.

“It’s such a huge shift in Octavia’s career,” Silvers enthuses. “This is her first lead, and she’s playing a role she has not played before, as essentially the quote-unquote villain. To me, she’s incredible in this film. She goes through so many changes, down so many paths, has so many different and conflicting emotions, it’s such a ride to go on with Octavia.”

Reading the script for the first time rattled Silvers (“It was like turning the page, wondering, ‘Oh no, what’s going to happen next?’”), but watching the finished Ma felt more like “watching a home video”, she laughs. “Because, during filming, it was actually very funny. It was a really fun experience making this film. Everyone was having a blast.”

The good times only continued when Silvers moved on to making Booksmart, another film with a young cast having fun on screen. Silvers plays Hope, who starts out seemingly like the mean girl but, in the film’s unpacking of teen movie tropes, eventually reveals herself to be anything but, largely via an awkward sex scene with Kaitlyn Dever’s character, Amy.

Making the film, Silvers says, “was like summer camp: it was all these young actors, coming together, for a summer, and working on something that was such a fun experience”. She had “no expectation” for Booksmart once she’d finished her time on set (“It’s like sending a child off to school, you have to just let it go,” she laughs, “as an actor, there’s nothing more you can do, it’s no longer in your control”), but has been heartened by how it’s been embraced by audiences.

Now, she’s just looking for her next gig, glad that Hollywood knows her name. And, she’s aware that her next gig may not be nearly as good as the times she had with Ma and Booksmart. “I’m aware that my future experiences may not be as much fun,” she admits. “They both had such big, supportive casts. When I think back on these experiences, I’ll remember how great I felt on both sets, how welcome I felt on both sets. The bar was set pretty high for me working on these two films.”