SEPTEMBER 12, 2014

Quvenzhané Wallis’s Secrets:

Work Hard, Play Hard,

Think About Polar Bears

ROBERT MAXWELL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By MOLLY YOUNG

Quvenzhané Wallis’s career started with a little fib: that she was 6 years old. It was the minimum age to audition for the lead role in “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” and she was just shy. It worked. She landed the part and shot the movie in a soup-swampy Louisiana bayou town called Montegut, a short drive from her family’s home. A lesser child actor might have evaporated into the film’s momentous plot, but Wallis — with her watchful gaze, physical grace and talent for banshee-level shrieking — suffered no such fate, becoming the youngest person ever nominated for an Academy Award for best actress. Now 11 and in the sixth grade, she has built up a tiny but luminous list of credits that includes “12 Years a Slave” and a remake of “Annie” due out this December, in which she plays the title character.

Like any employable artist, she has a gift for mingling God-given abilities with old-fashioned discipline. “I work with my acting coach to help me get into character and do pronunciation drills and tongue twisters to help me deliver lines,” Wallis says. “I envision the script as a story in my mind, memorize the entire thing and have it play out. It helps me figure out where my character needs to go.” To play Annie, Wallis added singing and dancing lessons to this routine. She always goes to bed early before workdays and downs a proper hot breakfast in the morning: a bowl of oatmeal, maple-and-brown-sugar flavor.

To maintain equilibrium, she says, it’s important to toggle readily between the zealous concentration of work and the playfulness required to get through arduous days on set: “You have to be serious, but you also have to make your own time to have fun,” Wallis says. “I tell jokes, I laugh with the people on set, I play with the director. Then I try to pay attention and see what I have to do.” To weep on cue, Wallis relies on an old trick: “When I need to cry, I think of very sad things, mostly about animals. My favorite animal is a polar bear. They’re going extinct, and I really don’t want that to happen.” She can also burp on command.

Perhaps equally important for an emerging celebrity, Wallis is a public-relations savant. She fist-bumped George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America” (he visibly blushed) and plays the diplomat in interviews. Asked recently whether her three siblings covet her success, she deflected the question with poise: “They each have their own thing, ma’am.”