The Girl Who Made It Look Effortless

There’s a scene in She’s the Man where Amanda Bynes, in full disguise, commits to something deeply stupid with a kind of earnest physical conviction that most actors twice her age couldn’t pull off. She was doing this—the Viola, the Shakespeare, yes, but also just Amanda Bynes going all the way into a bit with her whole body, utterly unself-conscious in a way that reads as genuine because it is. You can’t fake that quality. You either have it or you’re doing an impression of someone who has it, and she has it.

I’ve had a thing for her since The Amanda Show, back when she was a teenager making faces at a camera and somehow managing to be the funniest person in every sketch. That quality—the specific charm of someone who seems to be having more fun than everyone else in the room—translated directly into her film work. What a Girl Wants played entirely to her strengths: fish out of water, a lightness of touch, the kind of performance where the technical effort disappears. She made it look like she was just being herself.

What I Like About You ran for four seasons, which is a solid run, longer than a lot of better-reviewed shows. She’s not trying to be prestige television. She’s just watchable, consistently, in a way I’ve started to think is genuinely undervalued. There are actors who disappear into roles and actors who bring themselves into every role and make you want to watch them specifically—she’s the second kind, and the second kind is harder to do.

She just turned twenty in April. I want to see where this goes.