Whitney Peak Isn't Waiting for Permission Anymore

It’s the hottest day of the year in New York when I meet Whitney Peak for our interview. Despite the chaos that might come from the impending Fourth of July weekend and the fact that we’re sitting on the back patio of a café in the heart of Midtown Manhattan, it’s nearly quiet outside. Peak, as I learn, is a good sport—most people aren’t willingly sitting outside in temperatures inching toward the triple digits to answer an eager journalist’s questions. When I apologize profusely for keeping her outside in the heat, pulling out icy water bottles and handheld fans I brought specifically for the occasion, Peak smiles, tosses her fiery-red tresses into a ponytail, and rolls up the sleeves of her oversize band tee. It’s just the kind of person she is, constantly rolling with the punches.

The obvious seismic shift that would send anyone into orbit is the one we’re gathered here today to discuss. Next month, Peak stars opposite Joseph Zada in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. The film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’s 2025 prequel novel follows a young Haymitch Abernathy (Zada) in the Second Quarter Quell, a scaled-up anniversary version of the annual Hunger Games, in which there are twice the number of adolescent tributes as usual. Peak plays Lenore Dove Baird, a rebellious Covey folk singer and Haymitch’s hometown sweetheart. It’s the type of emotionally charged role that launched former Hunger Games heroines Jennifer Lawrence and Rachel Zegler into the cultural mainstream.

At 23, Peak occupies the position Hollywood likes to describe as the “next big thing,” a phrase that follows young actors long before they even believe it themselves. She anchored HBO’s reboot of the beloved early aughts teen series Gossip Girl, became Chanel’s first Black fragrance ambassador, and led Disney’s Hocus Pocus 2 before she even stepped into the world of Panem. On paper, it’s a career trajectory that eager rising talents spend years building up to—luxury campaigns, blockbuster film franchises, and digital fandom—each element a careful step in the crescendo of starlet momentum.

Everyone around Peak, myself included, is convinced that her life is about to change. She isn’t.

“My team’s been telling me that since Gossip Girl,” Peak says, slyly smiling in between sips of her iced strawberry matcha. She uses the condensation rimming the plastic to-go cup to cool the beads of sweat underneath her bangs.

She says it with such sincerity that it becomes almost difficult to argue. At the time of our conversation, Peak hasn’t been consumed by press-tour mania yet. The movie’s global premiere feels like it’s in some distant future, another thought for another day. Instead, Peak launches into telling me about her latest project: finally finishing decorating the apartment she’s lived in for four years. With various upcoming roles and shoots on location in Germany for Sunrise on the Reaping, Peak barely has had time to actually enjoy the city she calls home. It’s the first time in a long time she’s staying put and having a proper New York summer before the press tour picks up this fall.

“By month three [of being back in New York], in the past, I would have been freaking out. I usually have such a problem with staying still,” Peak admits.

For years, there was always an underlying hum in the back of her mind, urging her to think about the next audition, the next role, the next career move. But after wrapping Sunrise on the Reaping, she found herself craving the exact opposite. Instead of chasing the next thing, she’s letting herself stay put. These days, that looks like wandering New York neighborhoods she’d long meant to explore, going to concerts with friends, and teaching herself to knit baby clothes for the child of a friend—a fitting project for someone about to become a godmother.

“It sounds pretty boring, but that’s what my life is outside of work now,” she says with a laugh. “I still have that itch to create, but I’ve just been pouring that into other things.”

That groundedness feels like a conscious, intentional choice. Even before Hollywood entered the picture, Peak had an uncanny ability to meet life’s biggest moments with a shrug and keep moving. For someone standing on the edge of blockbuster fame, Peak seems remarkably uninterested in becoming larger than life. In many ways, her nonchalant attitude toward the industry is largely how she’s navigated it from the beginning. After moving to Canada from Uganda at the age of 9, her childhood dreams didn’t revolve around being an actress. In fact, she didn’t even realize it could be a real job. “I just thought people lived inside TVs,” she jokes.

Her path into the industry feels like a series of happy accidents. At 12, she was scammed by a childhood acting agency, costing her family hundreds of dollars and seemingly closing the door on her dreams. Instead, she picked up shifts at Wendy’s while searching online for background acting jobs that could help make ends meet. For the preteen, being on set felt like a dream. She got paid to skip school, snack between takes, and soak up the atmosphere.

Then came the moment that changed everything. A production needed someone to play the younger version of one of its lead characters. Peak looked the part, and in an instant, she was plucked from the background and placed in front of the camera. Soon after, agents began reaching out, eager to represent her. There was just one problem: She had to convince her family first. Peak took matters into her own hands, secretly hacking into her mom’s email and posing as her to respond to agents. With the help of her sister, she filmed audition tapes in secret and sent them off without the rest of her family knowing. The gamble paid off. Enter stage left: Gossip Girl, Hocus Pocus 2, and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, all under her belt by the age of 18.

“I miss that fearlessness I had when I was a kid,” she recalls, nostalgic for a time when decisions felt inconsequential and responsibility had yet to infiltrate her everyday life. Adulthood has a way of making every choice feel monumental, each decision carrying the weight of what comes next. “When you’re a kid, nothing seems that big and serious,” she says when I mention it. “What I want to be more like is my younger self.”

That innate fearlessness is a quality she’s still trying to recover. It’s also one that almost cost her the role of Lenore Dove.

“I turned it down at first. How crazy is that?” Peak says, widening her eyes and leaning in as she walks me through her audition process. Her agent forwarded her an email, and Peak decided it wasn’t for her. The role was too large, too scary, too overwhelming for her mind to wrap itself around. “There are things that feel so far away from you at times, and you don’t give permission to dream those dreams,” she admits. Peak goes on to drive home the point that in blockbuster productions, Black women aren’t centered as heroines, often being reduced to minor side characters that don’t push the narrative forward. “I didn’t see myself as the romantic lead. I’ve rarely seen women that look like me portrayed in that way, and it felt so inaccessible,” Peak explains, remembering the first time she got her hands on the script. “I remember telling my team, ‘I know who they’re going to cast, and it’s not going to be me.’”

The role also required singing, another aspect that heightened Peak’s anxiety about auditioning. Her character comes from a long line of nomadic folk singers whose musical poetry drives the story forward in their home of District 12. Unlike her Hunger Games predecessor Zegler, who’s a bona fide Broadway star, Peak says singing isn’t in her wheelhouse. “I was like, ‘Yep, there’s my out,’” she says. “‘Can’t do that. Don’t know how to!’”

At the insistent encouragement of her friends and agent, Peak submitted a tape and made peace with the fact that she wasn’t going to land the part. In hindsight, she says, the way she was thinking feels so ridiculous. “Why was I thinking that way? Why have I been trained and been raised to think that Black women don’t fit in these spaces? I was writing myself off before I even gave myself a chance,” Peak questions. The irony, of course, is that the role she’d already convinced herself she wasn’t right for ended up becoming one of the biggest opportunities of her career.

We then reach the point in our conversation where Peak can’t say much more. Like any media-trained franchise star, she’s well-versed in the art of sidestepping spoilers. While Lenore Dove looms large over the novel, fans of Sunrise on the Reaping know that she spends much of it off the page. She’s a character whose absence is as meaningful as her presence. Peak flashes a knowing smile when I ask whether the film expands on that. “I can’t say,” she teases.

It’s the fan in me asking, after all. Like many older Gen Z readers, I came of age alongside The Hunger Games, a series that shaped an entire generation’s understanding of dystopian fiction. Peak did too. She remembers borrowing the books from the library and devouring the original trilogy. She laughs as she admits she and one of her friends were unapologetic Finnick Odair stans.

Filming for Sunrise on the Reaping took Peak to Germany, where Director Francis Lawrence emphasized practical location shooting rather than the disorienting green screens most people would expect of a blockbuster of this size. The film’s pivotal reaping scenes were shot at a former coal-and-steel industrial site, and the expansive German countryside served as District 12’s picturesque meadow, where Peak chased around professionally trained geese for a handful of weeks. The geese, she tells me with particular delight, had handlers and highly attentive herding dogs tasked with corralling them into different shots. Some were even specifically raised for the production. “That’s budget and production,” Peak jokes. “You arrive on set, and there’s nothing fake about it. You’re in District 12.”

Walking onto set felt like stepping into summer camp. The project was spearheaded by longtime franchise director Lawrence and a trusted set of collaborators who have been working together since the franchise’s second film, Catching Fire. Although Peak’s sequences could be accomplished in a matter of weeks, most of the cast of Sunrise on the Reaping were shooting for months on end. Her first-day nerves soon gave way to the realization that she was, as Peak puts it, “in really great hands,” partly thanks to Zada. “I’ve been talking him up in every interview I do, and he’s like, ‘You’ve got to stop doing that,’” she says. “He’s just such a force as Haymitch, and I’m so excited for everyone to see him step into this character.”

To play someone as committed and strong-willed in her beliefs as Lenore Dove, Peak admits she first had to find it in herself. It’s here where the line between the actress and her character becomes a bit blurred. Lenore Dove’s certainty—her willingness to speak, create, and spark a rebellion—stood in direct opposition to Peak’s quieter nature before she stepped into the role. Most actors take something away from a breakout role, but for Peak, the experience invited introspection, and she reflected on the anxieties that almost prevented her from getting the role in the first place. “You have to be an active participant in your own life, in your community, instead of just watching the world go by,” she adds. “For me, a big part of this [project] was about pushing myself to have those difficult conversations with myself [and] the people around me and to take up space.”

She’s careful not to inflate her experience of playing Lenore Dove into a grand, almighty tale of transformation. In the midst of our interview, she frequently catches herself when her answers begin to sound too serious or existential, undercutting moments of deep sincerity with a joke or an embarrassed laugh. Still, she concedes that Lenore Dove changed something here. Peak admits she doesn’t know what the finished film looks like or how audiences will react to her character on-screen, but she left the set with more confidence in her own abilities than when she arrived.

The next few months feel like a “wait and see” scenario. Peak knows that the film—and, by extension, herself—will belong to audiences soon. Surrendering has become one of Peak’s quieter forms of self-preservation in the lead-up to the film’s premiere. She deleted social media, rarely reads what’s said about her online, and doesn’t spend time trying to gauge the anticipation building around her. It’s a habit she’s picked up since her Gossip Girl days playing Zoya Lott. At first, she used Instagram like any other 17-year-old: joking with her friends, documenting her move to New York City, and posting things without considering that thousands of strangers might be dissecting her every move.

“You realize there’s a responsibility that comes with this industry when there are tons of people looking at you,” she notes, referencing the way that women are often expected to give up their autonomy and offer unbridled access to their lives in order to promote their projects. “It just wasn’t fun for me anymore.”

Peak began thinking more carefully about access and how much of herself she made available and dissectible to the public. She’s come to terms with the fact that strangers’ interpretations of her don’t deserve any authority over how she sees herself. It might sound obvious in theory, but in the big Hollywood machine that chews you up and spits you out, Peak’s rejection of it all feels brave. Peak doesn’t sound wounded about being misunderstood. In fact, she’s surrendered herself to its inevitability. Rather than exhaust herself attempting to correct every projection launched onto her, she’s learned to let people be wrong. “I really like who I am now,” she says matter-of-factly. “I know what I’m capable of, and I’m so much more willing to take risks because of that.” The dissonance is striking.

For actors, so much of their career can be simply boiled down to being gawked at, and few projects have put Peak more in the public eye than her ongoing partnership with luxury fashion house Chanel. Shortly after Gossip Girl’s release, the maison tapped Peak to be its first Black fragrance ambassador for Coco Mademoiselle. “Chanel has been the soundtrack of this period in my life,” she notes. “They’ve really encouraged me to come out of my shell in so many ways.” The relationship has allowed her to flourish in her style in ways she’s never thought possible. Relying on beautiful dresses and classic tweed skirt suits as an extension of her cool alter ego, she becomes Whitney Peak, the done-up, jewel-dripped Hollywood actress, rather than Whitney Peak, the girl who only wears faded T-shirts and baggy Bermuda shorts. “Fashion allows me to play. I get to decide how I want to feel that day based on what I’m wearing,” she adds. It’s one of the few places Peak’s visibility offers her freedom rather than restriction.

She launches into a tangent about the incredible work of Matthieu Blazy, the house’s creative director, whose whimsy and joy have attracted a new legion of women inspired by the house not only for its aesthetic but also for the values it represents. Peak, notably, is one of them. A couture dress, she points out, is only possible thanks to the countless hours of another person’s artisanal training and handiwork. Being able to choose the work of art she wears to sit front row at a fashion show is not a privilege she takes lightly. “Every time there’s a show, I’m just in awe,” she says, recalling the brand’s viral Métiers d’Art show that she attended in New York. “It felt like I was in a movie. If that’s the last fashion show I ever go to, I’d die happy.”

Peak’s outlook feels increasingly rare in an industry obsessed with the finished product. Where Hollywood often prizes the performance of fame, Peak remains more interested in the work itself—the artisans behind a couture gown, the collaborators on a film set, the quiet satisfaction of making something with intention. The accolades, the headlines, and the attention that comes with starring in a blockbuster franchise all feel secondary to the honor of getting to create in the first place.

Our two-hour conversation comes to an end as the afternoon heat finally begins to relent. The tan lines on our shoulders have deepened, and soon, Peak will return to the quiet New York summer she’s carved out with her chosen family. After that comes the whirlwind: premieres, photographs, carefully considered red carpet dressing, and Sunrise on the Reaping. What follows, neither of us can say. For the first time in a long time, though, she seems comfortable with that uncertainty.

Maybe that’s what fearlessness looks like at 23. She’s not the child who hacked into her mother’s email in a determined bid to make her dreams come true without knowing the full consequences. She’s a woman who understands exactly what’s at stake and chooses to move forward anyway. It’s no longer the confidence of believing nothing can go wrong. It’s trusting yourself enough to know that even if it does, you’ll find your way through. For Peak, reclaiming that fearlessness isn’t about returning to who she was. It’s about carrying the best parts of that 12-year-old girl into whatever comes next.

Photographer: Jaša Müller
Stylist: Lauren Eggertsen
Editor in Chief: Kat Collings
Creative Director: Natalia Sztyk
VP of Creative: Alexa Wiley
Hairstylist: Naeemah Lafond
Makeup Artist: Tyron Machhausen using Chanel Duo de Baumes in Intense Glow
Manicurist: Nori
Set Designer: Lane Vineyard
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Producer: Luciana De La Fe
DP: Alexandra Mettler