In Senior Year, Rebel Wilson stars as a 38-year-old woman named Stephanie, who decides to go back to high school after spending the previous 20 years in a coma. Yes, she wants a diploma, but her main motivation is to fulfill her lifelong dream of being named Prom Queen. As Wilson tells Netflix, though, her real-life high school experience was far from her Senior Year fantasy.
Wilson attended the Tara Anglican School for Girls in Sydney, where there were no school mascots and no class superlatives (though she was named “Wannabe Yankee,” aka “Wannabe American,” as a Youth Ambassador for Australia after high school). At Tara, she started as a “day girl,” going to campus strictly for classes, before becoming “a boarder” and living on campus full-time. “It was pretty much like a slumber party with all my friends every night,” she says.
Wilson enjoyed school, though not necessarily for the same reasons as her on-screen alter ego. In Senior Year, Steph’s focus isn’t on academics but on being popular. In real life, Wilson admits she was “a pretty popular girl” — she was elected Deputy Head Girl by her classmates and known for playing sports and starring in school plays — but popularity wasn’t her sole focus. In fact, she was a mathlete.
“I know, you might not think that about me, but maths just always came really, really easy to me,” she says. In fact, she even competed nationally. “I did the math Olympiad in high school, I got the highest standardized score on the Australian mathematics competition when I was 14,” she says. However, the prize — “book vouchers for more academic books” — was a bit disappointing. “[It] wasn’t the coolest, but it wasn’t not the coolest.”
Ironically, Wilson, a writer, confesses that her worst subject in school was actually English. She didn’t like reading all the books. “It goes to show, what you are in high school — what you’re good at — doesn’t necessarily define what you’re going to do in your life,” she says. That was certainly the case for the Senior Year star. Back then, she had no inkling that she would become a comedian. Still, if you looked hard enough, there was one sign of her future path. “My senior yearbook quote was, weirdly, ‘Behind every joke is a sliver of truth,’” she says. “Which is weird because, at that time, I was thinking I was going to become a lawyer.”
