Molly Gordon is a modern leading lady in ‘Oh, Hi!’

Conventional wisdom now has it that Hollywood no longer creates and nurtures young stars in the way it once did. Which is to say that if the system won’t do it for her, Molly Gordon will simply make herself a leading lady.

Known for supporting roles in series such as “The Bear” and “Winning Time” and features such as “Booksmart,” “Shiva Baby” and “Theater Camp” (which she also co-wrote and co-directed), Gordon is finally stepping up to her first leading role in a film, for the new “Oh, Hi!” with a performance that is equally heartfelt as it is unhinged.

It premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, after which it was acquired for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics. Gordon shares a story credit on the film and is also a producer, as she takes a stronger grip on creating the roles (and career) that studios may not yet be providing her. Smart, witty and vulnerable, she can come across as a modern iteration of the urbane persona of Diane Keaton.

“I don’t think I’ve gotten to really show this emotion or this darkness or gotten to be this crazy,” says Gordon, 29, of her “Oh, Hi!” turn. “It would’ve been cool if it came with someone else giving me that opportunity, but it just didn’t really feel like that was going to happen. So hopefully this shows people that I can do other things. But if not, I will keep trying to make my own things.”

The movie stars Gordon and Logan Lerman as Iris and Isaac, taking their first out-of-town trip together to a romantic rental house in the country. After some zesty, playful sex inspired by the adult toys they discover in a closet, Isaac reveals — ill-advisedly — that he doesn’t see theirs as a committed relationship while still handcuffed to a bed. She takes this as an opportunity to convince him otherwise, leaving him chained up as she pleads her case for why they would make a great couple. He threatens to have her arrested, she calls for backup from her friends (Geraldine Viswanathan, John Reynolds) and complications ensue.

Entering a fashionable Los Feliz bistro in a sunshine yellow scoop-neck minidress, a forest green ballcap for local NPR station KCRW perched atop her head, Gordon greets me with an endearingly awkward exchange — to stay seated to shake hands or stand up and hug? — to rival any high-’90s romantic-comedy heroine.

“I’ve been calling it a rom-com gone wrong,” says Gordon, “because I don’t know how else to explain it. She thinks they’re in a rom-com but they’re not in a rom-com.”

“Oh, Hi!” enters a summer of debate about the modern romantic comedy, with Celine Song’s “Materialists” and Lena Dunham’s “Too Much” pushing the form in some new directions.

The premise of “Oh, Hi!” is something of a Trojan horse, as its girl-takes-boy-hostage concept creates a platform for conversations and considerations on the difficulties of dating. With her mix of winsome appeal and knowing air, Gordon feels of a piece with such established rom-com stars such as Meg Ryan, Reese Witherspoon or Kate Hudson — yet with just enough smartphone-era savvy to also feel particularly now.

“I think the world is in such a heightened place that it feels like maybe the right rom-com of our time,” she adds. “In this moment, nothing feels normal. It’s not like Meg and faking an orgasm at the deli anymore. Life is just crazy. It’s just a different moment.”

Born and raised on the westside of Los Angeles, Gordon moved to New York City for college but soon dropped out to pursue acting full-time. In the years since she has typically split her time between the two cities, but has most recently been spending more time in New York, especially since her parents moved there after losing their home in the January fires. Perhaps in a rom-com premise all its own, Gordon is in what she describes as “a new chapter in New York.”

Gordon’s mother Jessie Nelson is a director and screenwriter whose credits include the features “Corrina, Corrina,” and “I Am Sam,” while her father Bryan Gordon is a prolific television director. (He once worked with a young Lerman in an episode of the short-lived series “Jack & Bobby.”)

“Oh, Hi!” writer-director Sophie Brooks and Gordon are longtime friends who found themselves both back in their parents’ houses during the early stages of the pandemic and commiserating on relationship troubles and uncommunicative exes.

“She’s so funny and dynamic and she has this inherent charm and likability to her onscreen that feels like a leading-lady energy,” says Brooks, 35, of Gordon’s onscreen presence. “She also has this range of being able to do really sentimental, sincere scenes and also being incredibly funny and absurd and big.”

Viswanathan, 30, was sitting in a sushi spot on Sunset Boulevard that she and Gordon often go to together as she took a call recently to talk about her friend. The two have been close ever since meeting while shooting the 2020 movie “The Broken Hearts Gallery” and Viswanathan recalled also being surprised when Gordon mentioned that “Oh, Hi!” was her first time leading a film.

“She said to me once: ‘This industry is like a swinging spotlight that shines its light on people at various times,’ ” said Viswanathan, who also appeared in this summer’s “Thunderbolts*.” “And I just think that was one of the most profound pieces of wisdom and advice that I’ve gotten from anybody in the business. That’s the perfect way to think about it, because the spotlight — it moves around. She just feels like such a seasoned pro.”

Alongside Viswanathan, Gordon is also close with such multi-hyphenate talents as Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri, forming a cohort of smart, talented women who have all been navigating Hollywood on and off-screen together.

Gordon likes to keep up with the Hollywood trades, reading scripts and tracking projects she has nothing to do with out of a mix of amateur enthusiasm and professional curiosity. She projects a composure and clear-eyed point-of-view that may come partly from growing up around the industry but also from her own studious interest in how the contemporary entertainment business works, right now, from how films get green-lit to how celebrity gossip gets circulated

Last year Gordon found herself the target of unexpected scrutiny when tabloid photos emerged of her with her “The Bear” co-star Jeremy Allen White, stoking fevered speculation from the show’s passionate fandom. “Oh, Hi!” also includes Gordon’s first nude scenes, with pictures taken from a preview screening popping up online before the film had even opened. It has taken all her sharpness and confidence to steer around these pitfalls of rising fame.

“I think the internet is really gross and scary and I’ve become my most depressed when I start to view my art through that or I read too much of that stuff,” says Gordon. “That’s the hardest part about making things in 2025. But then I also talk about this with my sounding board of women, it’s like you have to kind of be a little bit on the internet to know what people want and it helps your art. Especially with comedy, you want it to be so of the time. But then sometimes I’ll read stuff and I’ll be like, ‘Oh, now I’m thinking about making a movie through this lens of a review or a bad comment.’ It’s just hard to find that balance. So I try to not look at it that much.”

As to whether she is currently in any kind of relationship with anyone at all, Gordon says succinctly, “I don’t ever want to talk about my personal life. Remember Jack Nicholson with the sunglasses sitting courtside at the Lakers? Let’s all go back to that.”

The nature of the story in “Oh, Hi!” meant that Lerman spent long stretches of the production handcuffed to a bed, sometimes for hours at a time. Between shots, Gordon would make sure he had water or fetch him snacks.

“She really was looking after everybody in this production and really wanting everybody to do their best work,” Lerman, 33, says in a phone call from his home in Los Angeles. “It was infectious. And I think it flowed through to everybody else, every other department, just how much Molly loved this movie.”

Brooks notes how when Gordon was in a scene, their dynamic was one of actor and director, but between shots, “she was an incredibly active producer, really dealing with nitty-gritty things.”

During one pivotal early scene, in which the two main characters have a romantic dinner outside, complications almost forced a revision due to budget and scheduling issues. But it was Gordon who backed up her director.

“It was written as outside — I wanted it to be outside,” Brooks remembers. “And there was this day where kind of everybody was pushing me to move it inside. And she was like, ‘Sophie, you don’t want it inside. You want it outside, it should be outside.’ And she was right. I was so grateful to her in that moment that my producer was like, ‘No, that’s not what you want. let’s keep it as you intended it.’ ”

Viswanathan recalled a time when she and Gordon were going up for the same role and worked on their self-taped auditions together. (Neither got the part.) Gordon’s notes and direction were decisive and convincing, and so Viswanathan is not surprised to see her moving further toward creating and shepherding her own projects.

“It’s a very precarious landscape for women with roles like [‘Oh, Hi!’s’ Iris],” said Viswanathan. “But that’s kind of the magic of Molly. She’s just the most likable person. It was something that she had to constantly find the balance for: how crazy to make her, how sympathetic, how comedic, how dramatic. It’s a difficult tone. So watching her navigate all of it on no sleep was really a marvel.”

As an actor Gordon will soon be seen alongside Hugh Jackman and Emma Thompson in the 2026 live-action-animation hybrid “Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Movie” (for which, she emphasizes, they all play people). Gordon is also co-writing the screenplay for a remake of the ’80s comedy “Outrageous Fortune” about two struggling actresses for Searchlight Pictures which she hopes to be allowed to direct herself.

“What I have in my head is going to be big,” says Gordon, likening the idea to “The Nice Guys,” the Ryan Gosling-Russell Crowe action-comedy. “And so I’m going to have to convince people and do the song-and-dance. And I’m ready to do it.”

Before that she will direct and star in the high school reunion comedy “Peaked,” which she also co-wrote, for A24.

“The movie kind of explores the age that I’m at right now, which is kind of: Where do we fit? I’m not a mother but I’m not the naive 22-year-old. I’m in this nebulous place of like: Where do we put her?” says Gordon. “Which is kind of why I started writing my own stuff.”

Has she answered that question for herself yet?

“Where do I fit? I think it’s a constant question,” says Gordon. “I’m lucky to have that mirrored back in all my friends who see the world in a similar way that I do. But I’ll be on my journey of where do I fit probably till I die.”

Interview finished and on her way to the door, Gordon navigates her farewell having already reconfigured the blocking of who sits and who stands in a small-scale piece of directing, producing and performing all at once. That’s at least one problem solved.