Kirby Howell-Baptiste on Her Scene-Stealing Tornado in A24's 'Club Kid'

A24 paid $17 million for 'Club Kid' after a bidding war at Cannes — and Kirby Howell-Baptiste, who steals the film's pivotal scene, says she had no idea any of it was happening.

"I joke that I live under a rock," the British actor says of the weeks in which Jordan Firstman's coming-of-age comedy-drama became the talk of the festival. Her manager had to message her: "Are you aware of everything that's going on with 'Club Kid' in Cannes?" A makeup artist later told her the film was heading to Toronto.

Howell-Baptiste plays Edison, a chaotic party girl who appears for only a few minutes in the film but upends the entire story. Roughly a quarter of the way into 'Club Kid,' Edison arrives unannounced at the New York apartment of nightclub promoter Peter (played by writer-director Firstman), green braids and oversized sunglasses in place, with 10-year-old Arlo (Reggie Absolom) in tow. She reveals, in a matter-of-fact manner, that Arlo is Peter's son and that she has brought the boy from the U.K. to live with him permanently.

There is a complication. Peter is gay and confidently declares he has never slept with a woman. Not so, Edison asserts, while casually searching the kitchen for anything resembling drugs: a decade earlier, at one of his club nights, he had sex with her friend Leonine while so high on ketamine, cocaine, GHB and, in Edison's words, "probably" more that he had no clue what was happening.

"Nah, you fucked her, babes," Edison says. "Point is, that's your son."

The scene darkens from there. Leonine, Edison explains while sniffing white powder she found on the counter, struggled with mental health issues — "She was in and out of the loony bin… what do you call it, rehab?" — and recently ended her life. "Last week she goes and tops herself — she fucking killed herself, babe." Mid-revelation, Edison asks Peter whether they should "do a bump" of coke. Shaken by his unravelling life, he declines.

Who is Edison?

"She's a massive party girl — she never sleeps, she only parties," Howell-Baptiste says of how the character was described to her. "She's completely lost all social boundaries. The lifetime of drugs melted half of her brain away, and all her social cues and etiquette have gone."

The Londoner calls Edison "just a complete tornado" and believes the character is "an amalgamation of a few party people" Firstman has encountered. "But what I really love is that, although she's absolutely bananas, she does feel quite real and quite relatable. I think everyone knows that person, to some degree. At some point in your life, you have met that person."

Edison never reappears after the apartment scene, in which she leaves Arlo with Peter and — predictably — fails to return for him. As Peter frantically searches New York house parties to find her, further levels of her debauchery surface: she was kicked out of several places for being too much to handle.

"I wasn't part of those scenes, obviously, but what was really cool was that you got more of a picture of Edison," Howell-Baptiste says. "Even in her absence, you got more of a picture of what she was doing and how she was just belligerently running around New York, hoovering up drugs at everyone's party."

How the casting came together

Howell-Baptiste admits she had no idea who Firstman was when invited to audition in mid-2025. Not "really on social media much," she missed his Instagram breakout during the COVID-19 pandemic. She watched some of his videos, found him funny, and trusted the casting director Carmen Cuba, whose taste she calls "really exquisite." The role seemed fun, and, she says, "the character was a party girl and I felt like I could channel that pretty well."

On set in New York a few months later, she still lacked the full picture — she only watched the finished film in September. Her takeaway: Edison was written by someone "who knows how to party." The apartment scene was shot "almost verbatim" from the audition script, with some ad-libbing. Howell-Baptiste added the British slang "tops herself" herself.

"And afterwards, everyone was like, 'What do you mean "tops herself"?' Because, obviously, we're in a film that's written by a gay man. There's so much about it that celebrates queer culture, and topping has a completely different meaning there," she says. She offered to cut the word; Firstman's team kept it in. "It made the cut — and I think it's really fun and adds even more confusion when it comes to American audiences being like: 'What is going on with this girl?'"

Firstman's main note concerned Edison's voice: alongside the British accent, he wanted her "very hoarse, like she's been up all night and almost always lost her voice." Howell-Baptiste channelled former Spice Girl Mel B. "She always had this slight hoarseness singing that I always thought was very cool, so that's where my mind went," she says.

What does this change for Howell-Baptiste?

She shot her key scene — plus an even shorter one in which Edison and Leonine first meet Peter in the club — in the fall of 2025, then moved on to other jobs, including Season 3 of the British TV drama 'Sherwood.' Firstman messaged her during that shoot to say 'Club Kid' had been accepted into Cannes. "I was like, 'How incredible,' but that was sort of it for me for very long time," she says.

The film went on to win the Cannes bidding war, sell to A24 for $17 million, screen in Toronto and premiere at the BFI London Film Festival, where Howell-Baptiste took the stage at the Royal Festival Hall with Firstman and Absolom. She stayed for the screening and the laughs, cheers and tears of a hugely enthusiastic audience.

"I filmed in a complete vacuum — I just did one scene with three other characters and filmed the party scene, which was just one night," she says. "So it's all come as a really pleasant surprise to me — it's lovely."

Her credits — 'Killing Eve,' 'Barry,' 'Hacks' — were already long. Now she holds a crucial, spectacularly funny role in one of the standout films of the year, and she learned about nearly all of it after the fact.