Hunter Schafer Takes the Lead

Six years ago, on the first day of shooting the pilot for Euphoria, Hunter Schafer had a moment of panic. A 20-year-old runway model with no acting experience at the time, Schafer was tasked with something that even veteran actors sometimes struggle with: crying on command. “I’m, like, number two on the call sheet, and I have to deliver,” she recounts over Zoom, her upbeat tone turning solemn. It’s nighttime for Schafer, who’s been shooting Blade Runner 2099 in Prague and now looks ready for bed—blonde hair pulled back, milky complexion without a trace of makeup. A lone blemish dots her chin, which she hides behind her hand when she catches a glimpse of herself on our video call.

So what exactly did the first-timer do to prepare for her maiden on-screen cry?

Before she answers, Schafer draws discreetly from a bright green vape and exhales. “I locked myself in my hotel room all day because I thought that’s what really serious actors do,” the North Carolina native says with a self-deprecating giggle. “I didn’t end up crying in the pilot when I was supposed to, because I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Schafer and I are sitting down nine time zones apart to discuss another first: her lead role in the art-house horror film Cuckoo. Schafer’s turn as Gretchen, a grief-stricken 17-year-old forced to spend the summer in the Bavarian Alps, served as her induction into the movie world, though two films she shot subsequently, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness and last year’s Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, reached American audiences first. Cuckoo’s writer-director, Tilman Singer, believes Schafer’s relative inexperience actually benefited her performance.

“There’s a certain freshness coming from it, from not being a super technical actor who’s done all these things before,” the German filmmaker says in Los Angeles, where he’s attending a special 35mm presentation of the film at the historic Vista Theater. “It’s more of an exploration. I think it’s astounding where she is as an actor, how good she is. It’s insane.”

Watching Cuckoo, wherein Gretchen suffers every kind of injury—physical and psychological—and understandably cries a lot, one might find it hard to imagine a time when Schafer would have struggled to conjure tears. If anything, the 25-year-old had to restrain herself from going too far emotionally when playing the moody, butterfly knife–wielding Final Girl. “A fear I have is that I’m going to go to a scary place in my head, and I won’t have anybody there to catch me,” says Schafer. “Before the biggest crying scene in Cuckoo, when Gretchen fucking fully breaks down, I needed to hold someone’s hand off-camera while I went to a really vulnerable place. And Tilman was right there.”

Singer corroborates Schafer’s memory. “There’s something important about having that safety when you go down a dark path. So it sort of became our thing. We called it a moment. ‘Let’s have a moment.’ ” Over the course of making the film, whose wild, fantastical plot lives up to its title, the bond between director and star became implicit. “We didn’t even have to talk about it,” says Singer. “The hand just came out, and I would sit down next to her, hold her hand, and watch her face. Then, at some point, there was a slight nod. And then I knew: Let’s go.”

Another way Schafer has honed her acting skills without formal training is by utilizing her art background. Before she was discovered as a model and actor, she attended a visual arts high school and planned to study design at London’s Central Saint Martins. In her downtime on location, one can often find Schafer storyboarding her character’s backstory with watercolors gifted to her by Shiseido (for whom she is a global brand ambassador).

“When I was a kid, I would draw comic books when I got home from school,” says Schafer. “I did this one in middle school called Sol Confero, which is a stupid name for a sun thing.” (Sol Confero roughly translates from Latin to “I will bring the sun.”) The protagonist of the story carried a torch and was entrusted with reuniting the broken pieces of the sun. The Promethean theme of bringing light to dark places is, coincidentally, a through line connecting Schafer’s notable roles. It’s in Jules’s misguided attempts to anchor Rue’s sobriety in Euphoria, and in Tigris Snow’s standing in as the moral compass for her increasingly tyrannical cousin, Coriolanus, in Hunger Games. In Cuckoo, we see this in Gretchen’s bullshit meter, which makes her the only one attuned to the sinister goings-on in the quaint Alpine village her father has brought her to with his new family.

For her latest project, Blade Runner 2099, Schafer has spent a considerable amount of time on the television sequel’s elaborate sets fleshing out the interior life of her character, about which she’s not at liberty to say anything at the moment. “It takes a few hours to paint these scenes, but I’ve realized on the other side of it that I spent three hours inside of this world that I never would’ve gotten to had I not sat down and picked out each little detail.”

The industry peers Schafer admires most—Michaela Coel, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Lena Dunham—are world-builders like herself, with a hand in every part of the creative process, from writing to directing to, of course, acting. Coel, in particular, with whom Schafer worked on A24’s forthcoming feature Mother Mary, has built a body of work that she yearns to emulate. “I love the way she looks at the world, and what she has to say,” Schafer says, encouraging me to watch Coel’s first comedy TV series, Chewing Gum. “I loved her book, Misfits: A Personal Manifesto. I’m very happy to call her a friend now.”

Perhaps Schafer sees something of herself in Coel’s Chewing Gum character, Tracey, who longs to break free from the strictures of the religious household in which she was raised. As the oldest of four children born to two Presbyterian ministers, Schafer grew up with religion as a formative influence. Though she has in the past described Presbyterianism as a “chill” form of Christianity, Schafer still took some distance from the church after coming out as trans and “finding my own place in the world,” as she puts it. Until recently, she hadn’t needed to close that distance.

“I felt the pendulum start to swing back a bit—not to Christianity,” she clarifies, “but to a sense of spirituality that I’m still figuring out.” When asked where she’s uncovered divinity, she says, “I know it sounds silly, but the closest I’ve gotten to meditating was from dancing. I love techno because there’s something really spiritual and severe about it.” Though there’s a nascent techno scene in Prague, where Schafer will be working the rest of the year, Blade Runner’s long workdays have made exploring the Czech Republic’s capital difficult. And as soon as that series wraps, the long-awaited third season of Euphoria will begin filming, in January 2025.

Schafer seems just as surprised as anyone about the HBO teen drama’s return, which was announced in July. “It’s so wild because we’ve been in this limbo for a couple years now of, like, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to get a season 3.’ It was taking so long, and everyone is growing up and getting busy,” she says, disbelief evident in her voice. “The further you get away from it, the more out of reach it feels. It’s really surreal. I’m still processing, honestly.” Her excitement about Euphoria is also mitigated by the loss their show family experienced during the series’ protracted hiatus. “I think people’s absence will be felt, and I’m a bit…I’m nervous for that,” she says, referring to the passing of beloved cast member Angus Cloud and executive producer Kevin Turen. “But I think, in another sense, it’s a beautiful opportunity to spend time in the world where you got to know and love those people.”

Although she has yet to read new scripts, Schafer’s looking forward to catching up with her character Jules. It’s rumored there will be a time jump in the story so that when season 3 finally airs, viewers will see the Euphoria ensemble entering adulthood, not unlike the actors playing them. And while Schafer has made a name for herself playing mercurial teenagers, she’s not so concerned about how to handle the fast-forward, both in fiction and in real life.

“I feel like a lot of adults are still anxious teenagers in their head, with that sense that hovers over your teenage years where, even if nothing is really wrong, the littlest things can seem like life or death, or that sense of loneliness—those are universal feelings,” she says. It’s a bit of a letdown for Schafer to relinquish the fantasy that one day she’ll have everything figured out, but, perhaps, there’s also a new sense of possibility in the unknown. “I think that’s just what it means to be a person.”

Hair by Ali Pirzadeh at Streeters; makeup by Sam Bryant for Shiseido at Bryant Artists; manicure by Trish Lomax for Manucurist.

Produced by Farago Projects; Producer: Brisa Chander; Production Coordinator: Keri Hannah-Pettigrew; First photo assistant: Antonio Perricone; Second photo assistant: Isabel MacCarthy; PostProduction: Graeme Bulcraig at Touch Digital; Fashion assistant: Antoni Jankowski; Hair assistant: Tommy Stayton; Makeup assistant: Shelley Blaze; Tailor: Sophie Stonyer.