Even before the opening credits of Greg Berlanti’s “Fly Me to the Moon” unspooled at the film‘s New York City premiere earlier this week, a star was already born. Her name is Anna Garcia, it’s her very first film role, and TikTok already loves her. Thank Scarlett Johansson for that.
In the film, Garcia — best known for a slew of funny bit parts on shows like “Hacks,” “Party Down,” and “Superstore” — plays Ruby, the kicky assistant to Johansson’s Kelly, an ad whiz hired to help sell NASA to a bored public in the lead-up to the Apollo 11 launch. Ruby joins Kelly at NASA for what, at first, sounds like another big campaign the duo can easily execute, before some major complications enter the screwball setup. For one, they both fall for NASA (and its men); for another, they’re drafted into a conspiracy to shoot a fake moon landing, just in case the actual moon landing falls through.
As the Nixon-hating Ruby (she did lots of research on the matter), Garcia is peppy and opinionated, keeping up with both Johansson and the increasingly wild high jinks the gals gamely take on. In a film filled with major stars — Johansson and Channing Tatum, Woody Harrelson and Ray Romano — Garcia still stands out. And it happened the old-fashioned way: an audition tape and a keen-eyed co-star.
Garcia first auditioned for the film in the summer of 2022. She didn’t know much about the project beyond broad strokes: It was for Apple, Johansson was starring and producing, and the role was a character named Ruby. Her audition pages “had one line, and it was like, ‘Assistant to Kelly, bubbly,’ but that was it,” Garcia recalled in an IndieWire interview.
After her first audition, Garcia said, the casting team sent her some notes and asked her to retape her audition with them in mind. No problem. Another few weeks went by. Then, casting director Ellen Lewis — the Ellen Lewis — called.
“She’s amazing, but I’d never auditioned for her before,” Garcia said. “She was like, ‘Who are you? Are you a normal person? Where did you come from?’ And then, immediately after that, I had a director session with Greg Berlanti. Then I was like, ‘OK, I crushed that. Hell yeah, I booked this.’”
And then they asked Garcia to do a chemistry read with Johansson. In two days. On Zoom. “I was like, ‘No, no, I did so good, and now I’m going to fuck it all up,’” she recalled. “Because it’s Scarlett! I was just so nervous.”
In Garcia’s mind, the eventual chemistry read went, well, it was hard to say. “I called my team after and they were like, ‘How’d it go?,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know. I hope it was good,’” she said. “I had never gotten that far in any process for anything. I was just scared shitless. I remember Scarlett being so insanely good, over Zoom. And I sort of browned out. I did improv for a take. I was like, ‘Is anything landing?’ I was so in my head, I had no idea. I literally left being like, ‘I don’t know what just happened.’”
More than a week went by. “I felt like I was living in an alternate reality where I couldn’t focus on anything,” Garcia said. “I was floating through time and space. And then, I found out I booked it. There’s this Thai place that has a fake Hollywood sign off Serrano Ave., and I was driving by, and my agents called me. I swerved off the road. I cried in my car for two hours next to this fake Hollywood sign outside of a Thai restaurant. I booked it and then freaked the fuck out.”
But that’s only one part of the story. “So that was my story,” Garcia said with a laugh. “That’s my side.” On one of her last days shooting the film, Garcia and Johansson were filming a scene in a car, just the two of them. Garcia remembers Johansson turning to her and asking the million-dollar question: “So, do you want to know how you booked this role?”
Did she ever! The way Garcia tells it, this is what Johansson told her: “So she was like, ‘Long story short, we saw a lot of people for this role. We got so many tapes, we were working with casting, we were working with our individual networks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ And it was months and months, and the role of Ruby was the last role to cast. They had cast everyone else, and they were like, ‘We need to fucking find someone.’ They had seen people over the course of the past few months, and they had a couple chemistry reads, and there was one girl that Greg really liked, but Scarlett didn’t, and one girl that Scarlett really liked and Greg didn’t.”
It was, in short, getting down to launch, and there was no Ruby to be found. So Johansson and fellow producer Keenan Flynn went back to the audition tapes to see if there was anything — anyone — they missed. “Scarlett told me she found mine, and she was like, ‘Who is this girl?’ and Keenan also found it that day, and they sent it to each other, and they were like, ‘Let’s see this girl!’” Garcia said. “I saw Keenan recently, and he was like, ‘Scarlett was on the Anna Garcia train. She’s the reason you booked this role.’”
The first scene the pair shot together actually leads off the film and showcases how their chemistry and rapport work in practice. Kelly is trying to pitch a car campaign that hinges on the family-friendly nature of the Ford Mustang — now, with seatbelts! — to a group of men who seem less than willing to hear about cars from, of all people, a lady. She puts on a little ruse by pretending to be pregnant, while Ruby buzzes about with all the necessary stats, and no matter what these gentlemen are thinking, it’s the women in charge here. The same was true when the camera stopped rolling.
“There was an actor that day who had two lines,” Garcia said. “Two lines, and he didn’t know either of them. He had his script in his lap, a little piece of paper, and he was literally ‘word, word, word’ as he looked down, couldn’t get through a sentence. I remember Scarlett and I were like, ‘What the hell is happening?’ It was sort of this bonding moment of like, ‘Well, at least we’re not this guy.’ … She knew this was my first movie, my first big anything. We were kind of the only two women around. I think she saw that and knew that, and I really felt taken care of by her, in many ways.”
Garcia did, however, have lots of fun with her other (yes, mostly male) co-stars. When they get to Florida, Ruby naturally falls in with a pair of younger engineers, played by Noah Robbins and Donald Elise Watkins. While most of the film’s romantic subplot follows Kelly and Cole Davis (Tatum), Garcia and Robbins make off with their own cute little love story.
“I am devastated, because they did cut some of mine and Noah’s scenes, but it’s totally OK, because… they trimmed [the movie] in a way where the story’s still there, it’s still really cute,” she said. “Apple, release the tapes! Noah is the best, because I was so nervous for this experience and had insane imposter syndrome, as I am, and I love to say this, deeply unfamous compared to everyone in the movie. I had known him for two days, and I was already crying, being like, ‘Isn’t this crazy?’ He was like, ‘Oh, my God, who are you?’”
And then there’s Jim Rash, who stars as Kelly’s favorite commercial director, the prickly but vivacious Lance Vespertine, who she eventually drafts into service to shoot her fake moon landing. The “king of improv” set a tone that carried throughout the shoot.
“The movie is his, he runs away with it,” Garcia said. “Greg really let us all have space to [improvise], we would [shoot] it as written a handful of times, and then we would try new things. If the energy feels up, it’s because we were able to be on our toes, trying things. Noah and I, we would do a scene and he would be like, ‘Well, that’s not going to make it in the movie,’ and then, it made it into the movie.” (This is the case with a sequence in which Garcia, Robbins, and Watkins infiltrate the fake moon set to futz with its camera set-up, all three of them making a meal out of funny costumes and prop cigarettes.)
And while the movie might find much of its humor in the fake moon landing, much of its heart is found in the reality of the situation, including shooting at NASA for two weeks to bring veracity to the story of the (very much not fake) Apollo 11 mission.
“There was one day where we were shooting a reception, a happy moment near the end of the movie, and we had to completely stop filming, because they were like, ‘A rocket’s going to take off,’” Garcia said. “Everyone stopped what we were doing and walked outside and watched a rocket take off. Donald put me on his shoulders so I could see over the wall, and we just all watched a rocket take off. We were like, ‘Well, that’s the craziest thing we’ve ever seen in our whole lives. Back to work!’”
Garcia, who is also a budding writer and director (check out her YouTube series “The Pembrook Brothers”), loved the experience so much that it was hard to get her off the set, even on the days she wasn’t shooting.
“Anytime I have an experience on set, it’s a learning experience,” Garcia said. “When I wasn’t shooting, I would go and watch, I would stay late. I played pretend producer and just sort of followed everyone around and learned a lot. The most I learned from Greg is that you can be the head honcho, and you can be so nice, and everyone can like you, and you don’t have to be mean. You can be lovely and kind and still get the result you want.”
Garcia intends to take that lesson with her. She’s got another project on the horizon — she can’t say what just yet — but she was able to shadow as a director on that one, continuing to add to her skill set. She’s mostly focused on comedy, but she’s a big admirer of the kind of high-quality work that studios like A24 and networks like Apple are putting out. So, what’s next?
“The truthful answer is that I would love to keep working,” she said. “I have always had this big dream for myself that I’d get to be in this industry and work. I’ve been focusing on acting right now, and I’m writing a project of my own, so I’m like, whatever comes my way. I’m excited to work on projects with people I like and admire. I just love this job, and I love working with people, so I’m like, ‘Please! I promise I’m not bad.’”
She laughs again, bubbly as ever. From the start, this big-first-movie experience has changed things for Garcia. Even a couple of years removed from that first “you got it!” call, she can still picture it.
“I sat in my car FaceTiming every person in my life for two-and-a-half hours,” she said. “Snot running down my nose, told my family, my sister started crying, she’s always been my biggest advocate. My parents, they were like, ‘What? Huh?’ It was just really happy. I will never forget sitting outside of that Thai food restaurant with the fake Hollywood sign. Every time I drive by it, I do a little kiss to it or a little salute to it, because I’m like, that’s my spot.”
Sony Pictures and Apple Original Films will release “Fly Me to the Moon” in theaters on Friday, July 12.
