The Girls on the Bus follows four very different women who bond while covering the Democratic primary election. Lola, the young up-and-comer, is a social media journalist who gained a following after she survived a school shooting and began using her voice to speak about gun violence. Now, she has a massive following and wants to find a way to use that following to change the world for the better.
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In the latest episode of The Girls on the Bus, Lola is forced to face her trauma when an article about the anniversary of the shooting and where the survivors are now is front page news. Lola has been trying to move past this event and make a name for herself beyond being a survivor, but when this article hits newsstands she confronts her family about their involvement. Natasha Behnam brings a depth of emotion to her portrayal of Lola that not only makes the trauma simmering just under the surface feel palpable, but Lola’s hopes for a better world and desire to help it improve feel genuine in her performance.
Related Is The Girls On The Bus Based On A True Story? The Girls on the Bus is an original Max political drama series that focuses on four female journalists on the campaign trail of a female candidate.
Screen Rant interviewed Natasha Behnam about Lola’s journey in episode 7 of The Girls on the Bus. She explained why she loved exploring Lola’s family and her friendships, especially with Grace. Behnam also discussed what she brought to the character of Lola and the research she did to portray such a complex character.
The Girls On The Bus Explores “What Happens When We Get Triggered”
Image via HBO
Lola has played her history very close to the vest with pieces bubbling to the surface when she is triggered. This was especially noticeable in the church during the funeral, but when an article centered around the shooting is front page news she must face it head on.
Natasha Behnam: I’m so excited to let the audience in on Lola’s world, and I think it’s such a beautiful depiction of what happens when we get triggered and we have unresolved trauma. It doesn’t take much for Lola to sort of fly off the handle.
She sees this magazine and through it, we get to meet her family, which is really important and vital and beautiful, and it’s sort of the first time in the series that the audience gets to be let into what happened to her, how it affected her, and why she’s so angry all the time, why she sort of flies off the handle. I’m just really excited for everyone to finally get to see what has been going on with her.
In this episode, Lola’s family is introduced because they spoke to the reporter who wrote the article much to her chagrin after she had turned down interviews. Lola’s dynamic with her family is charged due in part to her desire to move past the shooting and find a way to find meaning in her life with the platform she has created. The introduction of Lola’s family was charged because of not only her anger regarding them talking to the press but the unresolved trauma she has tried to move past.
Natasha Behnam: I think it was very real. I mean, what are the family dynamics? When Lola is the youngest child, she’s been through this horrific trauma, she feels like nobody understands her. Of course, she’s going to lash out most to the people closest to her, which are her family, and the ones that were there when she went through it. And the fact that her family spoke to this magazine when she didn’t want to do it is just naturally going to be a reason for her to explode.
But I was so excited that we get to meet the Rahaii family and that we’re all… every single actor in the family is Iranian. We are one of the first and only Iranian-American families on TV. I think there’s maybe one or two others. And of course we got to speak Farsi in that scene, which felt really real and natural. Obviously for me, I’m a first-generation Iranian-American actor, and that’s how I speak with my family.
We go in and out of English and Farsi and the whole thing just felt so real, and I’m so grateful to Rina and Amy and all the creators of the show for letting me have that representation, letting me advocate for it, and being so willing to do that because I think it’s really important to just see a normalized real Middle Eastern family on TV that’s not about anything other than what the characters are going through that day.
Lola has a very optimistic persona, but she can be cutting with her idealism at times. The hardness that has been built up in the face of tragedy, trauma, and being in the public eye is just under the surface, simmering, until she is triggered and it bubbles up to the surface. Behnam broke down why Lola depends so heavily on this public persona she has cultivated.
Natasha Behnam: Lola’s backstory, which was given to me by the writers, was really important for me to ground her. I think without knowing her history, which I knew always from the beginning, but without knowing that you wouldn’t be able to understand her as well because she is this girl. She has this outer personality. She’s trying to find her way.
She found this sort of bubbly, excited, TikTok version of herself, which is, to me, a young girl coming of age just trying to find her way. But everything that is real to her is just underneath that, and she really tried to deal with this trauma after the shooting.
She talks about it in the show that she tried to speak about it and nobody really listened. So for me as an actor, it was amazing to build that world and hold both like, “Okay, this is someone who thinks nobody cares about this trauma, so I need to try something new, so let me try this way of existence and see if that works.” But all of it is just a desperate attempt to find her true humanity and a way to exist in a world that to her seems very, very dark.
“It Was Very Traumatizing” For Lola To Have Someone Else Tell Her Story
Image via HBO
Lola has been desperately trying to get her voice out into the world using her TikTok as a way to advocate for the causes she cares about while trying to balance her need to appease sponsors. However, this article, which she purposefully didn’t lend her voice to, tells her story without her.
Natasha Behnam: I think it was very traumatizing for her to have her story written by other people, and we get that a bit in the episode. She says, “These reporters kept coming to my house and they weren’t listening to me.” And I think she was a little bit scarred by that experience and feeling like other people were telling her story, but not really listening to her.
And then of course, her not really being able to face the truth of her own story. I think it’s a really complicated process for her. And now as she tries to find her way, she’s decided that she wants to become a journalist, to change that. She wants to become a journalist, to get the truth out there, to effectuate change, to be as authentic as possible. And it’s fun that she sort of has to face her demons along the way of doing it
This is especially triggering when she reveals to Grace the truth about how the press has silenced her before. Lola has slowly opened up to these women whom she has become friends with, sharing with Kimberlyn why the funeral triggered her and telling Grace more about the events surrounding the shooting. They don’t treat her as a victim or the subject of a story, but as a friend who deserves to be heard.
Natasha Behnam: It’s a beautiful part of the friendship we find between these four women. At this point in the series, they’ve spent so much time together and we’ve sort of seen them form these friendships and these bonds out of necessity and out of humanity, not necessarily because they wanted to at first, but because they just did. And I think that it’s really special that the first time Lola opens up about what actually happened, she’s opening up to Grace, Carla’s character, who in the beginning of the season was the most different from her, the most like we’re biting relationship, we’re not going to be friends.
And I think it just goes to show that what the series is about, which is found family, found friendship, that you can find love and camaraderie and friendship and safety even in places where you never expected to. And that’s what Lola finds with these women. They’ve become her family, they’ve become her friends. They’ve become the one that she is able to open up to in a way where she hasn’t been able to before. So I think it’s a really beautiful journey between the four of them.
I definitely think Lola felt lighter after sharing. I think being able to share that moment with Grace was a huge sort of relief. And the fact that Grace doesn’t come at her, Carla’s character, instead she affirms her and says, “You are so authentic.” I think in a moment of great vulnerability for Lola, that was a really important thing for her to hear, and I think gives her a little bit of hope back in a tough moment.
Natasha Behnam Explains The Importance Of Lola Being An “Idealistic, Optimistic Young Person” In The Face Of Tragedy
Behnam shared how she brought many aspects of Lola’s perspective of the world, her ideology, and her outlook. Lola could easily be a very cynical character, but Behnam knew it was important for Lola to choose optimism in the face of the pain she has been through in order to balance out the darkness and anger she lives with.
Natasha Behnam: A lot of those parts of Lola do honestly come from me and my perspective on the world, but not that I think that I’m special, but more just that I feel like in our youth, or at least to me growing up, it’s always been important to try to find the positives in the world. Obviously, I’m not blind to the world that we are living in. It is torture most of the time for so many people, and I think that it’s strategic and necessary to remain optimistic.
I think it’s a choice to continue to look for the positives in people and situations and to believe that we can change the world. And I sort of think I tried to bring that ideology to Lola to balance out the sort of darkness and the anger and the confusion that really was already in the character. And I just thought, “What if she is this sort of idealistic, optimistic young person who is leaning on, I have to believe that the world can change, I have to believe there’s good people or else there is nothing to live for.”
She’s been through so much pain. She has to sort of strategically choose that optimism. And I think the balance between the idealism, the optimism, the getting your hopes up, and then also the angry bitter chip on your shoulder of having experienced trauma is what makes us all human and hopefully makes Lola so relatable.
On the flip side, Behnam physically took Lola home with her in the form of her body holding onto the stress that she was portraying during Lola’s journey. Behnam explained how she needed to find a way to separate her feelings from Lola, but also recognized the beauty of how deeply she felt this character.
Natasha Behnam: What I found most surprising, which I don’t know if this is really what you’re asking, but it was something that I didn’t expect is how much of Lola I would actually feel in my own body. Because I lived in this character for six months, and we’ve been discussing, she has so much trauma and she’s really going through a lot, even though on the surface she plays it fun and light, she’s carrying a lot of pain.
And especially after this episode seven, I really found me as Natasha, I would get a little irritated or quippy throughout my day, or I was just like, “God, I don’t feel good.” And I started to be like, “I think that’s some of my character work with Lola.” And I had to become really definitive about where her feelings and thoughts and emotions stopped and where mine began because what was fascinating to me is the body doesn’t know the difference.
So if I’m carrying 12 hour days with her anger and her trauma in my gut, and when I go home, my body doesn’t know the difference, and it’s been under stress all day. So it was honestly very surprising and beautiful to then be like, “Oh, these characters, they really take up a part of us and we have to be so cautious to clean our energy essentially and really make sure we know the difference between them and us.”
When preparing to play Lola, Behnam researched survivors of mass shootings. She discussed why she felt it was important to read and hear these stories in order to portray Lola authentically in The Girls on the Bus.
Natasha Behnam: I did actually do some research on survivors of mass shootings and seeing if there were people who had come out and spoken about these things. But to be honest, it’s a very dark, dark world, and I have so much empathy for everybody who has experienced something like that, which absolutely should not be happening and is a horrific reality in the United States.
So it was obviously very difficult to be in that world, but I also felt like I had to just study if I was going to portray even a version of it in this TV show, I had to sort of understand or at least look at what some of these beautiful people, these survivors had to say about their experiences. And it was horrifying and touching and yeah, really important to just learn more about that.
About The Girls on the Bus
Four female journalists who follow every move of a parade of flawed presidential candidates, finding friendship, love, and a scandal that could take down not just the presidency but our entire democracy along the way.
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New episodes of
The Girls on the Bus
premiere Thursdays on HBO Max.
The Girls on the Bus
The story centers on Sadie McCarthy (Melissa Benoist), a journalist who romanticizes a bygone era of campaign reporting and scraps her whole life for a shot at covering a presidential candidate for a paper of record. Sadie joins the bus and eventually bonds with three female competitors, Grace (Carla Gugino), Lola (Natasha Behnam), and Kimberlyn (Christina Elmore). Despite their differences, the women become a found family with a front-row seat to the greatest soap opera in town – the battle for the White House.
Cast Natasha Behnam , Adam Kaplan , Rose Jackson Smith , Hettienne Park , Peter Jacobson , Scott Cohen , Kiva Jump , Max Darwin
Release Date March 14, 2024
Seasons 1
Creator(s) Amy Chozick , Julie Plec