Today we’d like to introduce you to Lily Richards.
Lily, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Ever since I was a small kid, I have always loved telling stories. I was born in Denver but moved to Los Angeles at a young age. I wanted a change of pace after high school and decided to go to Emerson College in Boston where I continued to pursue my love for story. Emerson was the perfect decision because I met so many incredibly talented young creatives. I was an Acting major so a mandatory part of my curriculum was improv class. I remember sitting in a long-form improv class my freshman year and being absolutely blown away by the improvisations we would come up with. Here was a room full of people who didn’t necessarily identify themselves as writers coming up with these fantastic lines and stories.
I quickly added a playwriting concentration to my major and wrote a one-act psychological thriller my sophomore year that was put up by a theatre company in Boston. It was inspiring to have my first writing endeavor be validated with a production, and it was incredible seeing my work brought to life. After graduating, I moved back home to Los Angeles to pursue acting.
My first year in LA I found myself auditioning for a lot of frustrating projects. 70% of the casting notices I found for female roles included nudity and female characters who only functioned to serve as a plot device for the male protagonist. If I found casting notices for LGBTQ women, they were even worse. The lack of multidimensional roles for women got old really fast. A lot of my friends from college expressed similar difficulties and I felt it would be crazy not to utilize our talents and create our own work. I decided it was time to write, direct, and star in my own project.
That’s how “Twenty” first began. “Twenty” is an LGBTQ web series focusing on the lives of women in their twenties. I got a group of my actor friends together who were all on board even though we had absolutely zero money to pay them. Our crew for Season 1 was a Director of Photography, an Assistant Camera Op, and my girlfriend (who was also producing the show) with an H5N sound recorder. We were incredibly low budget but what we lacked in equipment we made up for in enthusiasm.
We didn’t know what to expect when we released the first season on Youtube, but we got incredibly lucky and the show blew up almost overnight. I started receiving messages from women all over the world telling me how much “Twenty” meant to them and how it helped them overcome their own personal struggles with identity. Soon we started receiving messages from parents too saying how the show has helped them connect with their LGBTQ children. It quickly became clear to me that the show was filling an important gap and providing content for an entire group of people who were not being properly represented in film and television.
We ran a successful crowdfunding campaign to raise money for Season 2 and now have 27 episodes under our belt. The “Twenty” Youtube channel now has over 53,000 subscribers, 8 million views, and has been translated into over fifteen languages. We were also nominated for Best Indie Series at the 2018 Streamy Awards.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Our biggest obstacle while filming “Twenty” was attempting to accomplish everything we wanted to with a limited budget. However, I feel that sometimes creativity flourishes best within limits, and having financial limits taught us how to think outside of the box. In Episode 3 of Season 1, we have an incredibly important scene that takes place in a night club. Without the budget to rent a nightclub, we decided to cover our entire kitchen in black plastic bags. We stuck tea candle lights onto the bags with tape and bought a rotating colorful lightbulb and plugged it into our lamp so that it created a nightclub lighting effect. Watching the episode back, our kitchen is completely unrecognizable in the scene.
Twenty The Webseries – what should we know? What do you do best? What sets you apart from others?
I think the most important thing you can do as a writer, director, or actor is help other people to see a story from a perspective they might not have before. “Twenty” is a show starring queer women with a phenomenally diverse fan base of men and women from all over the world who identify all across the spectrum. At one point, we were voted the second most popular web series in India. Seeing the reach that “Twenty” has had has proven to me that there is a bigger need for queer female-driven content worldwide.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
I feel like I have always had a hard time quantifying success because you are so often taught to look at success in a purely monetary way and when you work in a creative field that is often hard to do, at least when you are first starting out. I find that I try to jump from milestone to milestone as quickly as possible and I am never fully satisfied as I can always see what I can do to improve. Recently I have been trying to get better at celebrating my successes and not being too hard on myself. I have started to define success as being able to do what I love and having it supported by my coworkers and the world at large. Being paid for doing what I love is a success, and gaining a massive international audience for my project that was created entirely off of wanting to see a change in the way queer women are represented in media is a success. The biggest success of all is receiving messages from people around the world telling me how the show has impacted their life. Being able to use “Twenty” as a platform to affect change is a massive success.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.lilyclairerichards.com
- Instagram: Lily Richards IG: @lilyclaireee Twenty The Webseries IG: @twentythewebseries
- Twitter: Lily Richards Twitter: @thelilycr Twenty The Webseries Twitter: twentytheseries
Image Credit:
Nydia Hartono, Caitlin Combe
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