Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me Margaret gets a big screen adaptation 50 years later

For nearly 50 years, legendary YA author Judy Blume was reluctant to surrender the rights to her 1970 classic Are You There, God? It's Me Margaret.

But that all changed in 2018, when producer James L. Brooks (Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment) and writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig (The Edge of Seventeen) approached the author with a pitch.

"She was very nervous that someone would turn the film into something very glossy and pretty, where all the edges were sanded off," Craig explains of Blume's long-held reticence. "When I sat down with her, she had just seen my first film, The Edge of Seventeen, and she expressed that that made her feel confident that I was going to embrace all the flaws and nuances. That gave her confidence that the film would have the same honesty that she is so known for."

EW has your exclusive first look at the film, which stars Abby Ryder Forston (Ant-Man) as Margaret, Kathy Bates (Misery) as her grandma, Sylvia, and Benny Safdie (Licorice Pizza) and Rachel McAdams (Spotlight, Mean Girls) as her parents Herb and Barbara.

The book has long been revered as a coming-of-age classic, following Margaret Simon, a sixth-grader struggling with a crisis of faith due to her parents' interfaith marriage, along with other adolescent trials like buying a bra, menstruation, and more. These highly personal themes led the novel to be often censored by school libraries and parent organizations, which only made Craig want to adapt the story more.

"It's amazing to me that something that half the population goes through — growing breasts, having your period — could be censored," she says. "It's absolutely insanity. I still can't wrap my brain around it."

Craig calls Blume "the author that made me want to pick up a pen for the first time," explaining that her connection to the book is nearly lifelong as the first of Blume's titles she ever read. "I was and still am a diehard Judy Blume fan," she notes. "It was one of those experiences as a kid where you just are like, 'Someone gets me now.' I need to read absolutely everything this person does because somebody out there sees me. It was like she had a little window into my very personal, complicated thoughts and feelings and desires and was putting it all down in print. She says the unsayable. What's so amazing about her is it feels like she told you the truth that all the adults tiptoed around."

For Safdie, who stars as Herb Simon, Margaret's Jewish father married to her Christian mom Barbara, the book was a revelation. He'd read the Fudge series to his two sons, but he didn't encounter the novel until he was offered the role. "I was like, 'This is one of the most incredible books I've ever read,'" he tells EW. "Even though it was from a different time, it still felt so present and real."

Part of that was because Safdie has never been asked to play a role like this before, one so close to his own life. "I am a father, I am Jewish, I am a husband," he says. "These are things that I do every day, and I don't ever really get to put that out there. Nobody ever looked at me in that way."

The book was contemporary when first published in 1970, but it now functions as a snapshot of a specific moment in time. Craig decided it was important to keep the story in the era it was first written, not to convey anything about the '70s, but rather to broaden the universality already present in the themes.

"While certain details have changed over the years, the experience of growing up is really universal," she explains. "It's the same across the decades. There's something about an 11-year-old or 12-year-old girl today, watching a girl in 1970 go through the exact same experience that she's going through today. It feels so comforting to know that you're part of a long lineage. It takes that 'you're not alone' feeling and multiplies it exponentially. Because everyone every year before you has gone through this, and [they will] every year after."

While much attention is lavished on the puberty aspects of the story, Are You There, God? It's Me Margaret is also a tale of identity and searching for meaning in the universe — a part of the novel Craig says struck her profoundly when she was revisiting the book as an adult. "It's about this kid who's trying to figure out if there's something greater beyond us," she says. "It's making sure that she's going to be okay in this time when she feels so alone and uncertain. There's something about these two things that you would never think would go together — a girl who's praying for boobs and then asking, 'Does God exist? And do I believe it? And what do I believe?' She's asking life's biggest questions inside this coming-of-age journey."

That also enhanced the story's relevance in a more unfortunate way, with its themes of antisemitism, as Margaret wrestles with the intolerance of her maternal grandparents and the warmth of her father's side of the family.

For Safdie, bringing those portions of the story to life was the most challenging part of making the movie. "It's something that you feel every once in a while, but how do you make it affect you and make it feel real?" he says. "That was something that was hard, to actually get in and try and portray that. Buried amongst all of the story is this idea of family and sacrifice. That moment of having to hold back and be open-minded against your own heart was tough."

Fortunately, Safdie had the joy of working with Bates. He recounts telling her a story about how his dad first showed him Misery when he was only 8 ("So inappropriate," he laughs). The two also bonded over their experiences working with Adam Sandler.

For Craig, it was an opportunity to give audiences a new side of Bates. Not an easy task with an actor who's had a remarkable, decades-long career. "You see Kathy in a character that you have never seen her in before," she adds. "She is so glamorous and vibrant, and she's just juicy. She's so funny and the grandma that everybody wants."

Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret opens April 28.

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