Alma Jodorowsky: Renaissance Woman

“I don’t remember at any point saying, ‘I want to be an actress.’ And I don’t remember wanting to do anything else,” Alma Jodorowsky says. It’s not hard to understand why. The 23-year-old granddaughter of the notorious director-actor-writer Alejandro Jodorowsky spent much of her childhood backstage, while her parents—members of Ariane Mnouchkine’s le Théâtre du Soleil company—performed Molière and Shakespeare. “It seemed like—that’s so cool, you get paid to just play?” she says. Now Jodorowsky is the one in the spotlight, most recently in a small but searing role in 2013’s Blue Is the Warmest Color. Later this year she’ll star alongside Cara Delevingne in Kids In Love, a British indie film in which Jodorowsky plays a free-spirited painter. Her character’s artistic struggles, she says, were easy to relate to. “What disturbs me about acting is that you have to be desired by someone else. You can’t just do your thing—you always have to wait for someone to want to work with you,” says the actress, who just released a debut EP with her pop band, Burning Peacocks, and is also, with her mother, adapting Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve for the Paris stage. “That’s why I do music and write. I’m into a lot of things so as not to become a vegetable on my couch.”