Instant Message

Andrea Bowen, Costar of Desperate Housewives, Finds a Vehicle to Help Educate Teens About HIV in the Lifetime Movie, Girl, Positive
by Chael Needle

When I first got the script I liked it a lot because I thought it had a very strong message...[the movie] opens your mind to the virus and the disease,” actress Andrea Bowen says, explaining what attracted her to the Girl, Positive project premiering this month. The movie, a Lifetime Original, tells the story of an average high school girl as she faces the possibility that she may be HIV-positive. “People have developed a stereotype as to who [HIV/AIDS] affects. They think it only affects gay men, and that’s really just not the case at all.…it can affect anyone. This character is like your girl next-door.”

Girl, Positive follows Rachel Sandler, a high school senior who plays soccer, drives her best friend to school (when her car is not on the fritz), fills out college applications, and has found a satisfying relationship in her first “real” boyfriend, Greg. She is, as Bowen suggests, a girl-next-door type—but one living in an era of MySpace, Web cams, and instant messaging. She excels at school but is not adverse to partying on the weekend. She can probably text her friend without looking at her cell-phone key pad but cannot tell her mother that she is sexually active, or on the pill, or even that she has a tattoo. She can offer intelligent answers in her Modern Biology class and deftly defuse a sports-equipment room tryst with her boyfriend with a “no glove, no love” comment.

But, like many young adults born in the nineties, while she knows of HIV/AIDS, and maybe knows some of the basic facts about risk, she doesn’t know the realities of HIV/AIDS. Safer sex education in school, as the film points out, has often been reduced to condoms and bananas, and teachers have been charged with pushing abstinence and fear—a sorry state of affairs when half of all new HIV infections occur in people under age twenty-five, and one-fourth of these new infections are contracted by people under the age of twenty-one.

“We aren’t really the kinds of kids who get AIDS,” Bowen’s character says when she meets up with Sarah Bennett (Jennie Garth), her substitute biology teacher, who shares a worry that she freaked out Rachel’s fellow class members. The day before, she had led the class in a you-stand-up, now-you’re-infected demonstration of how the virus could be transmitted sexually across a close-knit community such as theirs. Though Sarah contracted HIV as a young woman, she doesn’t speak from her experiences; when not dodging a potential romance or suffering through side effects from a switch of HIV meds, she volunteers at an AIDS clinic downtown run by Ariel (S. Epatha Merkerson) and gives information to the students from this safer vantage point.

Rachel approaches Sarah, searching for information to launch an AIDS blog, but her interest is actually a cover for a more personal concern. An anonymous instant message recently popped up on her computer screen, asking her if she were HIV-positive and telling her why she might be: Her first (and only other) sexual partner, Jason, a gridiron hero who crashed his car and died last year had been high on injected heroin; he was also HIV-positive. Rachel heads to the clinic for pamphlets. Once there, she surreptitiously takes a Rapid HIV antibody test, but, like a cyber-age Cinderella, hurries away and leaves the results behind.

Bowen agrees that Rachel’s “not us” response is representative of young people’s thinking, boy or girl. “I don’t think they know a lot about [HIV/AIDS],” she says with clarity. “Everyone thinks of course, especially when you’re a teenager, [that] you’re invincible. You think you can’t get hurt. [The filmmakers] interviewed a lot of teens, and most people said they didn’t realize that you could get [HIV] this way,” she says, referring to male-female couplings. “They didn’t know how you got it.” Bowen hopes that viewers take away knowledge about transmission routes—the film mentions all, and dramatizes two possibilities (sex, needle sharing)— and the awareness that infection is preventable. HIV is “something you can protect yourself from,” she says, confident that young people can take action to lessen risks if education is in place.

Bowen had little time to research her character or the pandemic, finding out she was going to do the film two days before she was whisked from the Wisteria Lane set to the wisteria-covered streets of New Orleans, the film’s shooting location. She might not have been able to add that much more anyway to knowledge—about risks and options both emotional and physical—that has been threaded throughout the film. The writers, producers, and the director, Peter Werner, she says provided her and the cast with a wealth
of research.

And her past experiences as an actress on Broadway for ten years (as Young Cosette in Les Misérables at age six, she was the youngest actress ever to play the role) had already provided her with a kind of on-the-job training in AIDS awareness. “I was involved from a very young age with the organization Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS....I had met several people living with this disease, and have just known about it from very little, so that kind of helped as well” in bringing Girl, Positive to life.

Bowen, who is seventeen, had many chances to be a part of the curtain-call appeals for funds and other events to benefit Broadway Cares as she originated the role of Marta Von Trapp in the Richard Chamberlain-helmed revival of The Sound of Music and the role of Adele in Jane Eyre, both on Broadway. The Columbus, Ohio-born actress, who is now based in Los Angeles, has also graced television shows such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (her turn as a girl who escapes her abductor is not to be missed!), One Tree Hill, and Boston Public (in a recurring role), and has appeared on the big screen in Highball, Eye of the Dolphin, and The Ice Age. Audiences perhaps know Bowen best in her role as Julie Mayer, the wise-beyond-her-years daughter of Susan (Teri Hatcher) on ABC’s hit Desperate Housewives. As part of the cast, Bowen won a SAG Actor Award for “Best Ensemble in a Comedy Series” in 2005 and 2006.

During our interview, a week before the Housewives season finale, Bowen looked ahead a few months to the start of season-four filming when asked about upcoming projects. “I’m told I have some very fun storylines coming up. That should be good. It’s really hard to work on anything while you’re doing the show. Basically what I’m working on is Desperate Housewives and that’s it!”

And while audiences expect Desperate Housewives storylines to milk situations for madcap and mayhem, they also have come to expect Julie, Andrea Bowen’s character, to be a counterweight of sense and good judgment, especially to her mother’s loopy rollercoaster romances. The casting, in other words, makes sense, though Girl, Positive’s Rachel—who weaves through carefree joy, complacency, disbelief, anger, panic, shame, and concern like one of her soccer drills—is an acting challenge of a different sort, one to which Bowen rises.

The hardest scene in the movie for her to act, shares Bowen, comes when her character is retracing the possible moment of infection in her mind, rifling through her bedroom for old journals in panic mode and then sitting and hyperventilating on the floor. “First of all, earlier that day, I had shot a much lighter scene—wasn’t quite as hefty,” she says, laughing, but then adding that the day had also been stressful because of a severe, throat-closing allergy attack. “To end that day with that kind of powerful scene was difficult—because it was just this big release of emotion. After our director yelled cut, I couldn’t stop crying. Once you get to that point, sometimes you can’t stop yourself! Everyone was like, are you ok? I’m like, I’m fine, I’m fine,” she relates, reliving the swing from down to up with a lilt in her voice. “It was such a joy working on the movie. Everyone was so understanding of those scenes because I did happen to cry a lot during the movie!”

The characters’ lived experiences allow for unforced conversations about HIV and AIDS, and Girl, Positive avoids the info-speak that can mar any movie or television show that tries to reflect the realities of living in the age of AIDS. Perhaps the most ingenious narrative device in the movie, written by Nancey Silvers (Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy), however, is a school video blog, helmed by Rachel’s friend Randy, a gay teen. As Valentine’s Day approaches, snippets of questions asked and answered introduce each act of the movie and the viewer is privy to perspectives from teens out of earshot of parents, teachers, or even peers. In an age when many teenagers have ways to communicate and express themselves through cell-phone videos, YouTube, and a seemingly endless supply of emoticons, the film deftly shows that the lines of face-to-face communication are not always free-flowing.

As Bowen notes, the blog, which evolved out of the filmmakers’ research, makes the movie “have more of a documentary feel,” and the honesty of the statements from “real teenagers,” actors or not, creates a “neat dynamic.” “I thought, How are they going to do this? Are they going to script it? I didn’t want them to!” recalls Bowen, seeing the chance for “life as teens know it” to be underscored all the more. Composed of scripted and unscripted responses to issues such as high school life; contraception, STDs, and pregnancy; drugs; talking and (mostly) not talking to parents about sex; and HIV transmission routes, among others, the video blog keeps pace with the film’s plot points—especially as the image of Jason as “Mr. Perfect” becomes more densely pixelated to reveal a portrait that challenges the school community’s preconceptions about “who gets HIV.”

Viewers will be given an opportunity to reflect on their own relationship and responses to HIV risk in another way when, during the premiere broadcast on June 25, Lifetime will air two PSAs produced for the occasion. The first features Bowen and Jennie Garth encouraging viewers to learn more about the epidemic in the U.S.; in the second, S. Epatha Merkerson highlights how HIV affects women of color. Partnering with the organizations Advocates for Youth, the Elton John AIDS Foundation, and Cable Positive, and in anticipation of National HIV Testing Day on June 27, Lifetime will provide additional information and resources on LifetimeTV.com.

“Knowledge. And communication,” Bowen says immediately when asked what she feels is most standing in the way of teenagers taking the threat of HIV seriously. For one, “there’s not enough knowledge in schools about HIV. I think right now it’s kind of a big thing to push abstinence when I don’t know if that’s a realistic thing to think of. Teenagers are going to have sex; it’s just part of growing up and it’s the way it is. And I think it’s very important that if they’re going to be having sex, that they need to do it very safely. They need to know how to protect themselves...I think that is standing in the way of getting the word out there. Also, communication. It’s a very hard topic to talk about with your parents, and talk about with your teachers. So mainly, teenagers go to their friends who again don’t know very much about it either,” she notes, explaining the context in which misconceptions are apt to spread.

“Just try to have a very open form of communication with your parents,” she suggests, “or with somebody who’s smart and who knows about it. If not that, do your own research. Having sex comes with a lot of responsibilities, and obviously sex isn’t the only way to get the virus, but it’s one of the main ways to get it. Just knowing all the different ways you can protect yourself from it is very important.”

Late in the movie, when Rachel is getting her blood drawn for an antibody test as her mother (Rhoda Griffis) looks on, the doctor asks her if anyone else should be tested. Her mother, single and dating, steps forward, surprising the viewer with a compassionate solidarity with her daughter. Bowen liked the truth of that scene: “It’s not only teenagers who don’t know about HIV. It’s affecting everybody. And everyone should be smart. Everyone should be tested on a regular basis, and protect themselves from HIV.” She praises the film for showing that “adults were learning from this as well,” as well as showing the “scary side of what it would be like to have AIDS. And so [the film] forces you to feel like, wow, I really should protect myself. But Jennie’s character also shows that, if unfortunately you do get HIV, you can lead a pretty normal life as long as you remain healthy. I think it’s nice that it shows that parallel there, the good and bad sides to AIDS.”

Last June, Bowen personed the Disney Cars booth with Tony Hawk [A&U, September 2002] at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation’s Time for Heroes Celebrity Carnival and enjoyed the fun event, which, like the film, reinvigorated a passionate commitment to the fight against AIDS. Girl, Positive’s director loaned her Common Threads, an Oscar-winning film about the Names Project/AIDS Memorial Quilt, during the shoot, she mentions. “It was just so powerful to watch. It’s such a horrible, horrible disease to have and I want to do anything I can to help find a cure for it because it really does affect a lot of people. It grew so quickly. From the start of it, it basically doubled within a year and then tripled and then quadrupled and kept growing and growing and affecting more and more people. We just need to stop it. We really need to find a way to stop it so it will definitely be something that I plan on focusing a lot of time and energy on in the future.”
And that’s a message that deserves an instant reply.

Chael Needle interviewed Lamman Rucker for the January cover story.

June 2007