TORONTO − Rebel Wilson is back in her spicy era.
The Australian actress and filmmaker celebrates decades of girl-group music in her fittingly titled new directorial effort, the musical comedy “Girl Group.” She pays special tribute, however, to the Spice Girls, one of her favorite groups growing up Down Under.
“Basically, the Spice Girls helped me out in a really dark time when I was a teenager,” Wilson said at a Q&A following the Sept. 11 world premiere of “Girl Group” at Toronto International Film Festival. “They’re like, ‘Girl power!’ and ‘Get out there and do it,’ and that was kind of at the time when I came out of my shell as a 14-year-old. Those girls gave me the courage to be out there and want to be bold and brave.”
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In addition to writing and directing, Wilson, 46, also stars as Tassie Young, a washed-up and usually drunk performer who used to be in the super-popular girl group Gurlfriends with her school chums. Going solo and partying ended her time with them, and years later they don’t want her around for a reunion tour.
Tassie hits rock bottom when she’s arrested for a DUI, but gets a second chance when she becomes the music coach for a crew of talented, disparate misfits. She sees their potential and enters them in a competition to find the next big girl group, though they first have to get past an exceptional squad of dancers called the Cream Team.
Wilson’s best-known role was as one of the Barden Bellas in the “Pitch Perfect” movies, but she’s been “obsessed” with girl groups since she was walking the “mean streets of Sydney” listening to the Spice Girls on her Walkman. She’d be “really getting into it and being like, ‘Stop right now,’ and some cars would stop and it’d cause an accident,” Wilson joked.
She even cast a Spice Girl in “Girl Group”: Melanie Chisholm (aka Mel C, aka Sporty Spice) appears as one of the reunited Gurlfriends, which also features a couple of Pussycat Dolls – Nicole Scherzinger and Ashley Roberts – as well as Shaznay Lewis from All Saints. Wilson loves all sorts of girl groups, both old school (the Supremes and the Ronettes) and new school (Blackpink and Fifth Harmony), and the movie includes “35 banging songs” from ensembles throughout the years.
To cast the youngsters Tassie takes under her wing, Wilson auditioned more than a thousand girls nationwide; the top 50 were flown to LA, and from those five were chosen. For their rival Cream Team, Wilson says she looked at “350 of the best dancers in London for only six positions.”
With “Girl Group,” Wilson wanted to highlight the “pressures” on young women these days, be that looking a certain way or fitting a certain mold. “We try to give each character something to kind of sink into,” Wilson says, and in developing the final cut of the movie, she showed it to young people.
She saw that Gen Z was especially interested in the characters that reflected varying talents and backgrounds, from an off-the-wall spark plug to a musical theater girl. “They related to each of the girls in a different way.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Rebel Wilson pays tribute to her beloved Spice Girls with 'Girl Group'
