A little quality time with the stars of "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl"

Olivia Cooke, Thomas Mann, and RJ Cyler star in "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl." Photo by Anne Marie Fox. © 2015 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is an unconventional coming-of-age story about a high school student, Greg, his friend Earl, and a girl with cancer named Rachel. It features a young cast, a first-time screenwriter, and a director whose work has mostly appeared on TV. Yet the film has already drawn high praise in limited release: it won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival and already sports positive feedback from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. It's primed to become an indie summer sleeper hit in the same vein as “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Little Miss Sunshine.”

Film stars Olivia Cooke (Rachel), RJ Cyler (Earl) and Thomas Mann (Greg) sat down for a round table interview in advance of the film's national release on Friday. Below is an excerpt from the interview with the three stars; a second interview with director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and screenwriter Jesse Andrews will be posted tomorrow. Full audio from this interview is available here.

Q: What do you guys think of the film's success so far?

Olivia Cooke: It's crazy. We all knew going into it that it was the best script we ever read.

Thomas Mann: You can't prepare for the success, but just the opportunity to make the movie, I was so excited, it was a huge opportunity and a huge responsibility. We just wanted to get it right … I didn't think of it as a teen movie. It was fun, it's been overwhelming and it's been a very emotional ride. It's so close to us for such a long time and people are having their own personal experience watching it. It's just really amazing.

Q: How would you compare the experience between this and shooting your other movies?

Cooke: Wildly different. They all differ from each one. It all depends on the people, the crew, the material you have. My part in “The Signal” was relatively small and not as fleshed out as Rachel in “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.” So for me it was just a feast to get my hands on and to challenge myself and to try to do justice to the character and to just be a part of this amazing film.

Q: (To RJ Cyler) what was it like for you, being your first film?

Cyler: It was a lot of fun. For the first 30 minutes of this experience I was a little nervous, and then I met Thomas and then Olivia and it was just like “OK, I have no reason to be nervous because they're fun and they're genuinely good people.” We built a friendship before we got into filming so it made it extra comfortable to be on set and to be who I needed to be to make this character work. It was the perfect experience for me, as a first acting job type situation. So now it's like the bar's set so high, it's kind of depressing.

Q: There's only one way to go from here.

Cyler: Goddamit

Q: (To Mann) Teenage boys are the worst, but you find a way to keep that border where you're not being too annoying. How did you find that balance?

Mann: I know what you mean. I find self-deprecating humor … there's a fine line where it becomes so obnoxious. No one can feel sorry for you if you're too busy feeling sorry for yourself. I liked the fact that he was someone who was smart enough that he knew the person he should be and he had all the answers but he was too lazy or stubborn to make use of them and too afraid to leave his comfort zone. I don't know; I like the way he dealt with situations. I saw it as someone who knew what he should be saying but just sort of said what he was thinking. You can't judge someone for being honest, and I feel if I was just honest with the character people would relate to that. The person I was in high school I don't think I would have known what to do in a situation like this, so it was all about embracing the awkwardness and the selfishness of teenagers and kind of just having fun with the way he navigates this emotional time in his life and sort of discovering his emotions.

Yeah, his sense of humor was great, but it was so well written you didn't need to punch the jokes. It was almost like the less I did … (director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon) was always about doing less with the jokes and they usually ended up being funnier. Obviously there are times when it's sort of over the top, like when he's crawling across the floor. I thought there were moments you could go kind of big, but for the most part it had to come from a really honest and sincere place.

Q: Even the moments that are kind of over the top, they're still really natural. Teenagers tend to be a little dramatic, and you guys keep that line: You're dramatic without being overly dramatic.

Cooke: Everything's kind of heightened. My sister's 15, and everything's a massive deal. When she's arguing with my mum, all my mum has to say is one word and my sister screams, you know. That's the just the way teenagers are; they're going through all these hormones, they're going through all these changes their reactions to things are so much more severe than when you've dealt with things a few times and you know how to handle things. You're like Bambi (note:pronounced “Bumbi”), still trying to walk on your legs, you haven't found your footing yet. Like Bumbi.

Q: I just like how you say “Bambi.”

Participants take turns saying “Bumbi.”

Q: You had to shave your head for this role. Was there any type of hesitation?

OC: Auditioning for this role, it wasn't any mention the actress had to shave their head. I always thought it was going to be a bald cap, but then I shot Alfonso this really panicked email two weeks before shooting saying, “a bald cap's going to look so bad; with so much hair, it's going to look like an alien and I don't want anything I'm doing to take anyone out of the movie so can we just shave the head.” We spoke to my people, I'm on this TV show (“Bates Motel”), and the producer and he was fine with it and I was like oh, shit, I've really got to do it now. I thought maybe he'd say no and I'd look cool anyway just for suggesting it.

When it came to doing it, we shot it and we did it all in character. RJ and Thomas cut little pigtails of my hair, we shaved a mohawk into it and we were like “haha, a mohawk.” And I was shaving the front bit for the first time and feeling my scalp and Thomas was cleaning up the back. The whole part was trying to take control of the cancer before it took control of Rachel, and I tried not to cry and then this weird scream/cry came out, a sound I've never produced before, and I started crying and Alfonso started holding me as I calmed down. It's bizarre, it's a surreal experience when you're so used to having hair for 20 years and then not having anything in 15 minutes.

Q: (To Cyler) I read for all the big emotional moments in the film weren't rehearsed beforehand. What was that like? Especially for you being new as an actor, that can't be easy, not knowing what to expect.

Cyler: When you're in that moment in real life, say a situation happens, you can't rehearse how you're going to cry or how you're going to react to it. You're not going to say “I'm going to cry this and I'm going to drop to my knees here, and because she's doing really, really bad I'm going to make this scream that makes me sound like a Chihuahua falling down stairs.” It was a way Alfonso let us be free with these characters and be honest to the moment. That's what I look at it as, because I know it took me a while to get into that emotional state; I'm really not emotional, I know it may seem hard to believe. It made it way easier also to push out honest acting and emotions really; most of it was stuff I didn't deal with that happened early on in my life, because I don't cry, I just push it down and play Xbox. And all of it came out during these emotional times. It worked.

Q: (To Cooke) You're doing more and more movies; how do you balance that out with working on the “Bates Motel”?

Cooke: “Bates Motel” is four months out of my year, so I've got eight months to do anything I want. And luckily “Bates Motel” has put me on the map, especially in America. I've been able to do movies … I get to do really good scenes that I showcase to people in the industry who watch it and then I get shortlisted for things and I get to be exposed to scripts I wouldn't be exposed to without the show. I don't know what to say; I'm lucky to be doing more and more interesting movies. Even though it's been a relatively short time it feels like it's took me a while to work up, to do a few for them first before you do stuff for yourself.

Q: Like “Ouija”?

Cooke: Not mentioning any names.

Q: (To Cooke) This is probably a question you get a lot, playing a girl with leukemia. But how do you play that? It's easy to get over dramatic, but how did you do that while keeping it level.

Cooke: The main goal with Rachel is that you never wanted her to be seen as a victim. Greg's character even says at the end ...

Mann: Originally there was a line at the end that was like “I didn't want to see her that way.”

OC: But you do get a gist of that in the end. But you never want to play the tragedy; it's an awful thing she's going through, but Rachel is such a strong character, she's the stronger one out of the Greg and Rachel relationship. She wants to nurture Greg and make sure he realizes his full potential.

I went to meet a girl at the children's hospital at UCLA, and she had the leukemia that Rachel has and she'd gone through rounds of chemo and was getting a bone marrow transplant. I sat with her and talked to her and I noticed physically she was just so still, she had no hair. Automatically you're kind of like a newborn baby, you don't really have any identity, it's much harder to see how a person is. Your hair, it tells so much about yourself, especially for a girl, but she had all these One Direction posters on the wall and she was obsessed with pop culture and had all these crushes. Even though I always knew, it reinforced the fact that you have this illness but don't lose your sense of self, you don't lose your personality, you don't lose what you like and dislike. We, Alfonso and I, sat out this chart of chemotherapy and the stages of cancer that spans Rachel's character so we could draw on that for physical and mental debilitation or when she's healthy, we can draw on that. It helps, it really informs the character.

Also, you don't know a lot about Rachel, but we set up a huge backstory with what she wants to do after school. So that informs me and my performance. And shaving the head was a massive thing; I don't think I'd be able to get that same performance if I hadn't done that.

Q: It gave you something to sacrifice.

Cooke: Yeah. Obviously, I can't experience the cancer, thankfully, but it was the least I could do to try to get into the role.