River Gallo and Dylan O'Brien discuss identity and the universal relatability of 'Ponyboi'

"I've been thinking about it so much today, with how much you've been speaking about intersex identity and trans identity, and you saying it's speaking to a universal relatability of just that, yeah, we all can tap into an identity story because I do think that we all go through our own version of identity, especially in our upbringing," O'Brien expressed. "This happens to be a unique one, a widely unrepresented one, but yeah, I think it sort of proves that stories like these can be accessible in a wide, universal way, sort of in a way that this industry's always kind of fought against, you know what I mean? And we're fighting back with this." 

"I think at the end of the day, any good story follows some kind of like, hero's journey or archetypal blueprint, and it's about a character who discovers that they want something, and there's the challenge of trying to get what they want, and then, this discovery that maybe they had it all along, which is kind of what I was going for, in that traditional sense, and that's the universality of it," Gallo explained. "And through that we learn about ourselves, and we were just speaking about that identity crisis, that it is universal, even if people don't experience it through gender, maybe some people experience it through race, or through personal loss. We all don't come out of this life unscathed, even though some people like to think that that's not true; that is very true. In this story, particularly, I was really looking at and wanting to focus on that feeling of being, yeah, like, a misfit and an outsider, and on the periphery of becoming who you're meant to be, but feeling like you don't have the resources or the personal trauma, the past that's holding you back."

They continued to say, "And on this one particular day, for Ponyboi, breaking through all of that, and I feel like I've experienced in many instances in my life moments where like, it was this threshold watershed moment of like, okay, I mean, this movie and this premiere, this is one of them, actually. I know I'll be different on the other side of it, and it's been continuously showing me that I'm not who I thought I was, and who I am has been infinitely better because of this movie, because of working with people like Dylan, because of just following my intuition, following the fact that I had this desire and this dream, and just taking one step at a time to realize it."