British actor Kirby Howell-Baptiste revealed she modeled her brief, chaotic cameo as the boundary-free party girl Edison in Jordan Firstman’s feature directorial debut Club Kid on former Spice Girl Mel B. Speaking in a Variety interview published Saturday, Howell-Baptiste detailed how she approached the single apartment scene that upends the entire plot of the comedy-drama, which A24 opened in limited U.S. theatrical release on Friday, November 6.
In the film, Firstman stars as Peter, a hard-partying gay New York nightclub promoter forced to confront sudden adulthood. Roughly a quarter of the way through the 122-minute movie, Howell-Baptiste’s character arrives unannounced at Peter’s apartment wearing green braids and oversized sunglasses, accompanied by 10-year-old Arlo, played by Reggie Absolom. Edison casually informs Peter that Arlo is his biological son and that she has brought the boy from the U.K. to live with him permanently.
“She’s a massive party girl — she never sleeps, she only parties,” Howell-Baptiste said of how the role was pitched to her. “She’s completely lost all social boundaries. The lifetime of drugs melted half of her brain away, and all her social cues and etiquette have gone.”
How the Apartment Scene Unfolds
When Peter insists he has never slept with a woman, Edison rummages through his kitchen counters looking for drugs and explains that he conceived the child a decade earlier at one of his club nights with her friend Leonine while heavily intoxicated on ketamine, cocaine and GHB. While sniffing white powder off the counter, Edison matter-of-factly tells a shaken Peter that Leonine struggled with mental health issues and died by suicide the previous week, before asking if he wants to do cocaine with her.
Edison leaves Arlo at the apartment and fails to return for him as promised. Although Howell-Baptiste only appears on screen for a few minutes (including a brief earlier glimpse where Edison and Leonine first meet Peter at a club), her absence drives the next leg of the story as Peter searches across New York house parties and hears stories of her getting thrown out of multiple venues.
“[Edison] is just a complete tornado,” Howell-Baptiste said, noting she believes the character is an “amalgamation of a few party people” Firstman has met. “But what I really love is that, although she’s absolutely bananas, she does feel quite real and quite relatable. I think everyone knows that person, to some degree. At some point in your life, you have met that person.”
“Even in her absence, you got more of a picture of what she was doing and how she was just belligerently running around New York, hoovering up drugs at everyone’s party,” she added.
Improvising Slang and Finding the Voice
Howell-Baptiste, whose television credits include Killing Eve, Barry and Hacks, said she was unfamiliar with Firstman’s pandemic-era Instagram breakout when casting director Carmen Cuba invited her to audition in mid-2025. Without seeing the full script, she checked out Firstman’s social media videos and filmed her New York scenes in the fall of 2025 before watching the completed movie in September 2026.
While the apartment scene was shot almost word for word from her audition pages, Howell-Baptiste improvised the British slang phrase “tops herself” when describing Leonine’s death. The crew immediately questioned the wording on set.
“There’s so much about it that celebrates queer culture, and topping has a completely different meaning there,” Howell-Baptiste explained. She offered to cut the phrase, but the filmmakers kept it in to heighten the confusion for American viewers.
Firstman’s primary direction on set focused on Edison’s vocal delivery, asking that alongside her British accent, she sound “very hoarse, like she’s been up all night and almost always lost her voice.” To hit that register, Howell-Baptiste looked to 1990s pop royalty. “She always had this slight hoarseness singing that I always thought was very cool, so that’s where my mind went,” she said of Mel B.
Festival Run and Upcoming Awards
Months after wrapping her scenes, Howell-Baptiste was filming Season 3 of the British drama series Sherwood when Firstman messaged her that the movie had been selected for Cannes. Produced by Alex Coco and Galen Core with financing from Topic Studios and Stay Gold, the film co-stars Cara Delevingne as Sophie, Diego Calva as Oscar, Colleen Camp as Evelyn, Vicki Pepperdine and Miss Benny, according to RogerEbert.com.
Club Kid premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival on May 15, 2026, where it competed for the Caméra d’Or and the Queer Palm, before screening at the New York Film Festival. Following its November 6 theatrical debut, the film holds an 81 out of 100 score on Metacritic based on 27 critic reviews (including praise from Variety critic Guy Lodge, who called it a “surprisingly old-fashioned heartwarmer”) and has grossed $175,398 at the box office. Next, the movie will compete for Best Feature and Breakthrough Director for Firstman at the Gotham Independent Film Awards on November 30, 2026, followed by Best International Independent Film at the British Independent Film Awards on December 6, 2026.