"Versatility" could be Kylie Jenner's middle name. From her multi-hyphenate career status to her chameleonlike approach to beauty and fashion, there's nothing, it would seem, that Jenner can't do. Unsurprisingly, the star's creative and confident spirit was displayed front and center for our August cover shoot, which dripped with Schiaparelli earrings and a truly amazing Saint Laurent ring. There was plenty of gorgeous beauty inspiration as well. To celebrate, we're spotlighting Jenner's amazing glam team and everything that went down behind the scenes below.

It wouldn't be a true Kylie Jenner cover shoot without a subtle nod to her iconic King Kylie era, and what could be more nostalgic than ultra-blue hair? Jenner's hairstylist, Iggy Rosales, says the super-bright-blue wig moment was all about having fun with color and creating something bold and poppy. To create the wig's voluminous and wonderfully undone bob shape, Rosales made sure to constantly blast it with wind so the strands never fell too perfectly or appeared too precious. In fact, when I asked Rosales to share the most essential products he brings along with him on set, he credits said wind machine (or his leaf blower), a really good wig, and his assistant Kennedy. "Not a product and unfortunately not available at Sephora," he laughs.

As far as Rosales's inspiration for all of Jenner's hair looks on set, he credits photographer Aidan Zamiri and his unique approach to shooting. "He works across so many different formats, from film and digital to point-and-shoot cameras, and each one captures hair and movement differently," he explains. "I wanted the hair to have enough personality that it could almost change depending on how he photographed it." Regardless of which hair look Jenner wore, Rosales wanted to create a special kind of looseness that would suit Zamiri's style of work.

If you were on set that day, you'd also notice a lot of experimentation and play. "Alexandra and Mackenzie Grandquist were styling, [Ariel Tejada] was on makeup, and Zola Ganzorigt was on nails," says Rosales. "We'd see what Kylie was wearing, what Ariel was doing, what Zola was doing, what Aidan was seeing through whichever camera he'd picked up, and then we'd start messing around with the hair. Pigtails on, pigtails slightly destroyed, blue wig on, wind machine, blue wig off, hair out, more wind. If it worked, great. If it didn't, there was always another wig."

Despite the variety of looks Rosales created for Jenner, he confesses that the star's "undone little pigtails" were his favorite. "We blow-dried Kylie's hair into a soft, polished wave, gathered it into two pigtails, and then loosened everything up," he tells me. "We wanted them to feel effortless, with lots of movement, almost like they were naturally falling apart after being caught in the wind."

For makeup, Tejada wanted to make sure Jenner first and foremost felt like herself. "We added a slightly deeper waterline to define and bring out her eyes while keeping the complexion relatively light and fresh so her natural skin could really come through. It was all about enhancing her features rather than overpowering them," Tejada tells me.

"Aidan and his entire team had such great energy during this shoot," compliments Rosales. "Everyone on set—Kylie included—just had fun with it. Those are always my favorite experiences as an artist, when it doesn't feel like there's all this pressure to get one very specific thing. I think that's when I'm having the most fun creatively, when everyone is throwing ideas around, and nobody is too precious about anything. I think that energy always translates to the final photos."

"We definitely all collaborate as a team," Tejada agrees. "Kylie really does enjoy being part of the creative process, so we all bring our own ideas and touches to create the final look together. I love working that way because, ultimately, I always want my clients to feel confident, comfortable, and like themselves."

Andrew Garfield is having a "weirdly unbusy" day, or so he tells me when he phones in from the grocery store, where he's doing his post-flight foraging. He's just returned from a trip to New York, packed with downtown sushi spots (he recommends Bar Miller), Cats: The Jellicle Ball ("Have you seen it? You gotta make time for it," he says after I tell him I live here), aimless Central Park strolls, and press-junket stops. "Can you hear me okay? You're catching me in transit a little bit, so if things get cut out… I just landed on a plane to L.A.," he says in a flurry of apologies, somehow made sophisticated by his velvety British accent. I assure him I can hear him just fine and that I understand the need to multitask. He's on a generational run, after all.

Garfield just wrapped his stint as Roy Horn, one half of the Las Vegas big-cat magician duo Siegfried & Roy, in Apple TV's Wild Things, which will debut in early 2027 (hence why his hair is now chin-grazingly long). His NYC trip included pit stops at news outlets and magazine headquarters to promote The Magical Faraway Tree, a fantasy film in which he stars alongside The Crown's Claire Foy, and now he's preparing to take on the press gauntlet of his two upcoming projects: Paul Greengrass's The Uprising (I'd just white-knuckled my way through an early viewing) and Luca Guadagnino's controversial Artificial about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, which comes out later this year.

I've always been drawn to Garfield's interviews just as much as his work. Whether I was reading a beautifully built profile about his worldly musings or watching a 15-second video clip, the 43-year-old actor is a gravitational force. Los Angeles born and Surrey grown, the star flits effortlessly between cracking brain-rot jokes ("I'm aura farming," he very Americanly tells a confused Foy in Vanity Fair's Lie Detector Test), dodging compliments (very British), and philosophizing about the world as he knows it and the role he plays—both literally and figuratively. With bookish charm and deep, knowing eyes that silently tell you he understands, Garfield cleaves open conversations about the mundane until the core matter spills out. He's heartbreakingly raw about grieving his mother, Lynn, whom he lost to pancreatic cancer in 2019. When asked about The Social Network and Artificial, he champions the human shrapnel wrought by power-hungry tech oligarchs. In 2026, he's still touched by the fact that he has "any association at all in anyone's consciousness" with Marvel's Spider-Man. In short, he's helplessly allergic to small talk. He'd rather get down to the stuff that matters.

He's making his way through the aisles now, which I can only tell because our conversation is peppered with—but never disrupted by—polite "Excuse me!"-s and "Pardon me"-s. "I love New York," he tells me, a smile staining his voice. "Whenever I'm there, I'm just very happy." It makes sense, seeing as he spent years in the Big Apple while filming The Amazing Spider-Man franchise and the award-winning musical Tick, Tick… Boom! and performing on Broadway in Death of a Salesman and Angels in America, the latter of which earned him a Tony. After this laundry list of critically acclaimed projects that occupy just a fraction of his IMDb page, it shocks me that the A-lister still runs his own errands. But his ability to simultaneously and thoughtfully delve into the throes of his upcoming films informs me of three things. One, Garfield really is all the good things you hear about him from fans and industry insiders alike. Two, he has the distinct and deeply endearing ability to turn his to-dos into the backdrop for thought-provoking conversation. Three, stars, they really are just like us.

It only takes a few minutes of casual conversation with the veteran Spider-Man to realize why something as simple as an errand run is so high on his priority list. It's the same reason why he finds himself drawn to the sprawling grounds of Central Park and why he told Esquire UK Editor in Chief Teo van den Broeke that he giddily agreed to snap a shot of two oblivious girls at Glastonbury when one handed over her phone—not for a selfie, but for him to capture them on the festival grounds. You see, after more than 20 years in the industry (and becoming an award-winning actor at the 2008 BAFTAs for his lead role in Boy A at just 24 years old), Garfield is all too used to the impromptu photo ops, burning spotlights, and ceaseless media attention that comes with fame. While most fresh-faced 20-somethings a few years post-grad are running up tabs at pubs, navigating new careers, and maybe still living at home, Garfield was dipped in Hollywood gold and subsequently thrust into the very scrutinizing public eye. So when he gets a chance to meander about the aisles, fade into throngs of NYC tourists, and be the nameless photographer behind an Instagram shot, he can finally breathe.

It's these rare moments of blissful regular-personhood that he has chased over the last year while wrapping consecutive projects and pouring his blood, sweat, and tears (literally) into The Uprising. It's the snippets of normalcy—like time spent with his nephews and the serenity of meals cooked at home—that he holds dear, but while his idea of heaven has graduated from glittering awards to quiet nights at home with a good book, that's not to say his ambition has taken a back seat. In fact, The Uprising adds an impressive new notch to Garfield's belt and tells a story just as profound as the ones padding his personal library.

After long pining for a chance to work with Greengrass, the director behind blockbusters such as The Bourne Ultimatum and harrowing action films like United 93, Garfield clinched the role of Ploughman in The Uprising, which premieres on September 11. "He's on that very short list of filmmakers that I've longed to work with," Garfield says of the project's spearhead. In it, Garfield portrays a farmer-turned-insurrectionist who incites the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 against King Richard II—a true story of rebellion instigated by the Crown's tyrannical taxes on England's working class, cruel labor laws, and residual tensions from the bubonic plague. Within the first few scenes of the film, Garfield's character gives the name "Ploughman" to a corrupt tax collector with a simple explanation: "I am what I do." As it turns out, this plain introduction is one the actor could have used himself over the course of his abundant career.

Having started acting professionally at age 21 after graduating from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, Garfield has a longer career than the years of his childhood and adolescence combined. He compares his relationship with his vocation to "standing on a seesaw." In a healthy way, the act of storytelling feeds his spirit. "In an unhealthy way, I don't know who I am unless I'm making things that feel expressive of my own soul," he says pensively. "I think that there's something beautiful about that level of devotion. But there's also a dark side to it."

Choosing a project and inviting new characters in requires a hard-earned level of discernment that Garfield has honed over decades in the industry. But when the star read Ploughman's story, he didn't just realize it was a good fit. The cultural relevance hit him squarely in the chest. "There was something universal in what the character and these people are going through, which is the question of, What happens to the human soul when it's pushed beyond what it can take?" he muses. "The feeling of 'Either things change, or today is a good day to die'—how do you get to that place?"

This level of introspection is normal for Garfield. Sure, he admits that he was partially attracted to the story due to its connection to his own ancestry (his maternal heritage comes from Essex, England, where much of the Peasants' Revolt began), but what he couldn't escape was the stark parallels in disenfranchisement between two eras separated by a millennium.

"It doesn't get any more profound than that—when the human soul is treated with such a lack of dignity. And we see it around the world right now," he says solemnly. "I'm so fascinated by what it is to be in a revolution. Can you have a revolution without violence? Is that possible? Is that naïve?" These weren't just questions Garfield asked himself as he prepared to take on the role of a poverty-stricken farmer beaten down by life and loss. They're also questions worth considering with every newscast and war update today.

This is evident in a live taping of writer Josh Horowitz's podcast, Happy Sad Confused, in 2024, where Garfield called for the support of Palestinians amid the ongoing war in Gaza. The actor has also voiced concern about Donald Trump throughout his tumultuous terms as President of the United States, critiquing humanity's general inability to be honest about the bad parts of themselves and the inclination to engage in celebrity worship—a camp in which he's included himself.

"Look who's in the White House. It's an idiot celebrity, and we enabled that. It's not just the people who voted for him; it's the whole culture. We started worshipping things that are empty and false, and you know, here we are," he stated in a 2017 interview with The Times. He spoke openly in a recent interview with Esquire UK about the perils of confronting the unconscious "shadow self," per Carl Jung, and how we all could use a bit more of these ugly self-assessments—especially when it concerns government authority. "But then the argument is that if we weren't all less rejecting in the first place, less 'That's not us,' then Donald Trump wouldn't have been voted in twice, and Nigel Farage wouldn't be anywhere near a position of power," he told Esquire. It's a tale as old as time, Garfield tells me, as he details how 14th-century commoners regarded then-14-year-old King Richard II as a "conduit for God"—and Lord help anyone who went against him. It's a soft reminder that this story, and its bloody message, isn't an ancient one.

"That kind of prevailing attitude is going to keep people so scared of stepping out of line," Garfield explains. "It's an incredible tactic of oppression and fear-mongering." When our modern-day news often reads like an AP world history textbook, the star found this narrative imperative to tell and be heard on all sides. "It feels like a really important story now for all of us to reckon with, no matter where we are on that spectrum—whether we're benefiting from a system of oppression or not," he continues.

The range of emotions Garfield and his castmates display in this film radiates off the screen, permeating the room in hair-raising ripples of fury, heartbreak, and hope. He likens soft moments of dialogue to the sanctity of prayer and says those rare moments of stoicism required a special kind of presence on set. "It takes concentration, preparation, and then a lot of surrender," he states, emphasizing the importance of "letting go" not just in the filming process but also in the project as a whole.

While his gut-wrenching performance in The Uprising is a testament to Garfield's prowess, the actor's personal experiences also quietly shaped the character. "As an actor, the raw material of what you're using is you," he explains. Ploughman's grief over the loss of his family, taken in one fell swoop by the bubonic plague, runs parallel to his own grief following the death of his mother. He was incredibly vulnerable about this world-altering event in a 2021 appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, in which he touched fans' hearts with his wisdom on life after loss. "We never get enough time with each other, right?" he told the attentively listening host. "So I hope this grief stays with me because it's all the unexpressed love that I didn't get to tell her." In 2026, he credits the film's overarching theme of surrender to loss—and, more notably, how one continues on after waving the white flag—as what made the experience so transformative.

"I think about when my dad went bankrupt, and he realized that he was still loved. His big fear happened, and he realized, 'Oh, I still have my family. They're not going anywhere,'" he says, pausing in a moment of reflection. "I think there's something quite profound—and difficult, of course, but very beautiful—about entering that very raw space of having nothing to lose."

Garfield understood that it would take some world-building to ease himself into the smoggy atmosphere of 14th-century England, especially since he'd completed his stint as the temporarily ousted Altman just two weeks prior. I call that transition whiplash; he laughs knowingly. There's something almost biblical about going from a film called Artificial to a story that's so human, I add. "It feels like the two extremes of what it is to be a person," he agrees.

Music played a vital role in Garfield's transformation during that two-week intermission, which is unsurprising for someone who started their career in theater and dabbled in musicals like Lin-Manuel Miranda's Tick, Tick… Boom! "I was listening to a lot of songs of revolution, like Nina Simone and Billy Bragg," he explains, "but I was also listening to a lot of English folk music." Perhaps he was directly referencing the upbeat outcries of Simone's "Revolution, Pts.1 & 2" or Bragg's "Take Down the Union Jack," but something in these sonic cues inspired a spiral about what it actually means to be English. "Is there such a thing as being indigenous to the United Kingdom? And what's the indigenous spirituality? It's not Christianity," he says in a bubbling stream of consciousness. While he may not have all the answers now, he knew one thing to be true by the time he wrapped The Uprising: Given the choice between being a battered revolutionary and becoming a tech leader, he'd choose the former. "It was much more pleasurable being part of the Peasants' Revolt in medieval England, which says something, I suppose," he laughs.

You see, Garfield desires to immerse himself wholly in the psyche of the characters he plays—to adopt their mannerisms, understand their thoughts, and embody their essence until the lines between self and subject blur. Usually, this leaves the actor with a sense of understanding, even if the character has a villainous streak. But after playing the role of Altman in the summer of 2025, Garfield walked away from the project more confused than ever before.

"I really wanted to understand what it takes to 'win' at that level—what you have to sacrifice," he explains. "When you're at the forefront of creating new technology—the human costs, the people losing their jobs—what does it take to keep moving forward, knowing it's part of what you're creating?" It's a question that's lingered in Garfield's mind since taking on the role of Eduardo Saverin, the ejected cocreator of Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg in the 2010 film The Social Network. "I think I was playing the more human person in that relationship by playing Eduardo," he speculates. "It left a kind of unmet curiosity in me that was dangling around—like, 'Ah, fuck! I still want to understand what it takes to win'—because Eduardo famously didn't 'win' the capitalist game in that particular moment."

This fascination didn't stem from any desire of Garfield's to adopt a tech-bro mindset, per se. Rather, he craved the chance to explore a spirit so opposite to his own. Ask, and you shall receive. Nearly 15 years after The Social Network debuted, a script for Guadagnino's film about Altman, a satirical Silicon Valley film for the modern day, came across Garfield's desk. But what he found on the other end—the "winning" end—was a dull emptiness that couldn't be filled with material things or excessive liquid assets.

Recently, the film has been shrouded in some controversy. Its original distributor—Amazon MGM Studios, which has invested in OpenAI—dropped the project. It was later reported by Deadline that Neon acquired U.S. rights to the film. It's also worth noting that the AI giant has no connection to the project, and Garfield and Altman have never met. Though Garfield admits to having "a lot of very healthy fear" around taking on the character, he figured he'd discover Altman's essence somewhere along the way. "I'm a competitive person!" he exclaims, trying to find a semblance of common ground. "I love games. I love sport. I love winning. But winning at all costs in that world feels dangerous to the soul and, maybe more importantly, dangerous to the world."

A summer in Altman's shoes passed, and Garfield closed out his second film about big tech with more questions than answers. "I can never know the inside of [Altman's] head or the inside of his heart," he says diplomatically. "But I still remain very, very curious about what part of yourself you have to access, or maybe dissociate from, in order to achieve what these mostly men can." He uses the word "achieve" quite loosely. "It's fascinating to me as maybe someone who's too bleeding-heart."

It's this heart that has felt the disorienting effects of filming emotionally heavy projects in such close succession, but Garfield credits his costars and directors as driving forces behind the positive experiences within such "profound and challenging" films.

"Luca is someone who's so artistically free and kind of radical and punk," he rattles on about his Artificial director. "He just cares about expressing himself in the purest way possible, which I find deeply inspiring."

When speaking about Artificial costar (and girlfriend) Monica Barbaro, there's reverence in Garfield's tone. "I think Monica is a supremely talented actor," he starts. Fresh off a successful few years of high-profile films like Top Gun: Maverick, A Complete Unknown, and, most recently, the rom-com One Night Only with Callum Turner, Barbaro joins Garfield as former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, and he isn't shy about commending her portfolio of work. "I think what she did as Joan Baez [in A Complete Unknown]—what she accessed in that project—is nothing short of transformational, extraordinary, and deeply mysterious," he continues. "I think she is truly incredible. I could wax lyrical more, but I'll leave it there."

For The Uprising, he commends Thomasin McKenzie's "pure and soulful" demeanor and Jamie Bell's performance, which he lauds as "so fierce and rageful in its purity." With boyish joy, he shares that "[Greengrass] is the kind of person that you want to get covered in mud and go sprinting take after take for, to the point where you might vomit."

Garfield jokes that balancing several projects in quick succession felt "a little bit like Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder, when he's gone from character to character and has no idea who he is." Though these upcoming films are the topic of much intrigue, all roads lead back to his stint as the Amazing Spider-Man from 2012 to 2014—a role he reprised alongside Tobey Maguire and Tom Holland in the 2021 installment Spider-Man: No Way Home. "I'm grateful for the connection to a character that may be one of the most beloved fictional characters in the modern world," he says humbly. He holds in high regard the fact that anyone—regardless of skin color or gender identity—can project themselves into the suit. "I find it very moving that I have any association at all in anyone's consciousness with the ultimate beautiful, human, 'trying to do good' character," he beams. "I kind of can't believe that I had the chutzpah to even try to be part of that, but here we are." He continues, laughing at his own audacity, "I feel very, very lucky."

With numerous projects wrapped and a flurry of press junkets looming over the horizon, Garfield is enjoying the present, but that doesn't mean his mind never strays toward the future. He tells me of his "definite desires" and "vague plans" to return to the theater after his last run in Angels in America in 2018, though he's tight-lipped about specifics. "I'm always, God willing, going to be able to make theater," the actor muses. "That's where I feel most purposeful. … It's the place where I feel most happy and connected to that mysterious 'thing' that's bigger than me, that I get to give myself, my energy, and my love to. I feel I can make a difference in that space in a way that I can't anywhere else."

Though there's no telling when Garfield will return to the stage, the actor still feels there are hidden opportunities coming when he asks the universe what else is out there for him. "I'm wondering 'What do I do now?' in a way that feels very possible and exciting," he imparts, emotion lapping at his words. "I hope to bring new things into the world that haven't been done before—things that feel alive and, hopefully, healing for people, like an awakening of their own souls [and] of their own wrongings and desires and stirrings."

He's nearing the checkout line now, and I can only imagine what the cashier must be thinking as Garfield muses about one's unending search for self between pleasantries and passed produce. But that's the thing about Andrew Garfield: He knows how to turn the mundane into a masterpiece. "I just want to be of service through storytelling," he concludes.

In "Internet Files," Garfield is wearing a Giorgio Armani jacket, Michael Kors shirt, and Louis Vuitton tie.

Photographer: Emmanuel Sanchez Monsalve
Stylist: Jake Sammis
Groomer: Christine Nelli
Editor in Chief: Kat Collings
Creative Director: Amy Armani
Set Designer: Lizzie Lang
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Producer: Erin Corbett
DP: Kyle Hartman

Shop the September Cover Story

You might have a friend who spends their weekends hopping from sample sale to sample sale (preview days, not general access). They may spend their Saturday mornings poring through their inboxes, reading the latest digests from industry bibles like Puck News and Air Mail. Their Vinted searches could be bottled and sold for their ability to unearth archival treasure. Their Mastermind subject would be shoe designers of '90s fashion houses. They subscribe to a clutch of thinkers who approach style like a science on Substack, such as Rian Phin's Cultural Production or Amy Francombe's Amy_Coded. They have an avatar on Doji, an app that lets you try looks on your own likeness. In short, they haven’t just got style, they’ve got a sky-high fashion IQ.

In a fashion landscape underpinned by social media, where nothing stays under the radar, it’s become a new kind of capital. A blue tick of authentication that conveys more than IYKYK (in 2026, everyone knows). These days, it's about whether you have a feature on Perfectly Imperfect, co-hosted a La Watchparty with Lyas and had the privilege of sitting on Bella Freud's couch for a dedicated episode of her Fashion Neurosis podcast.

And whilst it helps to have designers on WhatsApp or a discount at Dover Street Market, one’s IQ—fashion or otherwise—can be improved, enabling you to better serve your wardrobe. (Also, you don’t have to work in fashion to score highly; check out Erchen Chang, co-founder and creative director of Bao; Teya Kepila, a ceramicist; Mya Hansel, a law student and Kat Chan, a nutritional therapist.)

Endrit Nurcaj does work in fashion as the style editor of Encore!, but doesn’t live in a fashion capital (the lifestyle magazine is based in Switzerland). His fashion philosophy is the opposite of what you might expect from someone with a high fashion IQ. For starters, he doesn’t like gatekeeping, and names the brands he’s loving at the moment as RECTO, Nothing Written (both of which are Korean) and Welter Shelter.

"I like sharing things I discover. If anything, I’m sometimes worried about the opposite phenomenon: ending up in a very small circle where everyone follows the same people, wears the same brands and starts looking at fashion through the same lens," he tells me. His biggest style influence also might surprise you. "Ralph Lauren is probably the obvious answer (and a cliché one)," he says. "Through all his different labels and worlds, he somehow always remains himself. Purple Label is Ralph Lauren, Polo Ralph Lauren is Ralph Lauren, RRL is Ralph Lauren. They are completely different facets of the same identity. I love that he never seems trapped in one particular fashion prism," says Nurcaj, who always finds a way to make a shirt by Polo Ralph Lauren, say, look more than the sum of its parts, pairing a sun-bleached denim style with distressed jeans on a recent holiday in Las Vegas.

Having the self-awareness to like what you like and let that—not friends, "tastemakers", trends or algorithms—determine how you dress is part of the process. Olivia Singer, the editorial director of Prototype, springs to mind; someone who never falls into cliché territory despite only wearing black. As does Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, the fashion director and stylist with a self-described "maximalist sensibility and peacocking tendencies".

"I’m much more interested in someone who has developed their own visual language over time," says Nurcaj, who also prefers shopping in person. "I like the whole experience of it: talking to a salesperson, looking at the clothes properly, touching the fabrics and, most importantly, trying things on. I need that physical connection with a garment. I’m not particularly interested in being "in season" either. I’ll happily buy something in the sales, in an outlet, secondhand or somewhere completely unexpected. For me, the place matters less than the feeling of finding the right piece."

As well as analogue shopping, you can expand the horizons of your taste by delving into the "contemporary" bracket of brands. I’ve recently picked up two on the more pared-back side as they’ve both just launched at Net-a-Porter: Ruohan, the eponymous womenswear label by Wang Ruohan, and FANE, a handbag brand from Paris.

You can also consume forms of media that prioritise original thought as much as visuals. Substack differs from Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok in one vital way. "The platform isn’t built to keep you in an endless doom scroll; it's built to connect you with creatives you'll actually love, and hopefully leave you feeling inspired," says Farrah Storr, Substack’s head of international. The site has just announced a translation feature that means it’s never been easier to not only find content outside your own echo chamber, but consume it, too. Ultimately, the appeal of the newsletter form is simple: it’s "a real person telling you what style means to them," says Storr.

Substack’s deputy editor, Danya Issawi, who was previously fashion news writer at The Cut, was already centring her own style before she took a side-step outside of the fashion industry. "Having spent years working in and around fashion, I honed in on what my personal style is and feels like whilst blocking out noise from the industry at large," she tells Who What Wear UK.

Her favourite newsletters—by writers who undoubtedly have very high fashion IQs—offer no set way to be "on trend" or "It". Instead, they’re much more personal. "There is no singular way anyone goes about it. Every publisher brings their own unique perspective and follows their curiosity, which is what I’ve always been hungry for as a reader. I always enjoy Gabriella Karefa-Johnson’s voicey dispatches from fashion weeks and her commentary on the industry writ large. Viv Chen’s posts always inspire me when I’m vintage shopping or getting dressed. Liana Satenstein is an absolutely delightful read. [She's] able to weave trend reporting in with her hilarious, obsessive tone. Biz Sherbert does exactly what I loved most when I was writing about fashion and takes an earnestly curious, anthropological lens to what people are wearing across the country," says Issawi.

Want to test your fashion IQ?

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IYCYMI, slogans are back. It’s all about "I ❤️ Erotica".

John Dutton, who? Those in the know holiday at Ranchlands, Wyoming.

We're done with Celine's bug shades; stylish girlies are wearing The Atlas, a bold frame by NYC brand Thistles.

A day in the life of one of young Hollywood’s most recognisable stars must be all chauffeurs and jumping from party to party, right? Not so for Maisie Williams, whose schedule for the day ahead involves doing her accounts and cleaning up after a dog with an upset tummy. Oh, the glamour!

Still, that’s exactly how Williams needs things to be. "I love it here so much, and I think that the exciting parts of my life can only be exciting if I have lived a kind of more normal life for the rest of the time," says Williams, gesturing around the office ("A real mess!") of her home in the countryside south of London. Too much "suitcase to suitcase, hotel room to fancy restaurant, to aeroplane, to new city, to PR trip to Ibiza or whatever, can just suck the fun out of it," she tells me.

Williams is not just tolerant of the ordinary, but grateful for the "cyclical mundanity" of walking the dog, taking the bins out, doing laundry. "I'm so lucky that I get to have a portion of my life that is not like that. But I think it's only enjoyable because I also feel the throes of boredom now and then. I think that's when you really percolate on life," she says. Williams, a lively and open chit-chatterer, has always craved normality. "But what even is normal, right?"

Certainly, her teenage years were very much not normal. She was 12 and a confessed goofy kid with a propensity to daydream when HBO’s cultural juggernaut Game of Thrones started, in which she played kickass fan favourite Arya Stark for all eight seasons. A global phenomenon, GOT catapulted Williams (along with the rest of the cast, and notably her on-screen siblings Sophie Turner, Kit Harington and Richard Madden) to instant, big-league fame.

Williams returned to school after filming the first three seasons. I tell her that must have been weird. It was certainly a gear shift, she says. "On one hand, you're working with adults, and you're being paid for a job, but on the other, you're part of a school classroom where a teacher is trying to navigate the group as a whole. It's just very hard for a small child to jump between the two." Sweetly, she says the first time she felt famous was when Chloé sent her a pair of sunglasses, a cute anecdote that reminds you quite how young she was.

Crazy as the GOT experience must have been, Williams is one of the lucky ones to emerge from the child-star grinder intact. Her non-famous friends keep her grounded but are also "supportive of the chaos of celebrity". Fame can be scary, she admits—"Being perceived is terrifying!"—and she treats social media (she has over 10 million followers on Instagram and TikTok) with caution, comparing it to a monster in the garden ("I'll feed you but that’s it, you can't come in the house"). She has navigated fame and fandom "clunkily", she says. "There are times when it comes freely, and there are times when you don't quite nail it. But I think it’s just intuition."

Does she feel like she has made mistakes in the past? "So many! But the thing is, because I don't give them the power to upset me, they don't even feel like mistakes anymore," she says. Like? "Things I wish I hadn't said, there are things I wish I hadn't worn. Friends I wish I kept in touch with or had not kept in touch with. Times I should have made a decision sooner, or times that I made a decision too quickly. [But] so many people are going to judge you for your actions, so maybe be nice to yourself," she says. "People are going to talk no matter what, so you might as well not hate on your own life."

The first 10 years of Williams's career were non-stop (the enforced COVID hiatus offered her a moment to take stock). Choices post-GOT have been varied, from a Marvel superhero flick (The New Mutants) to a teen rom com (Then Came You) and her turn as 1970s punk-scene icon and Vivienne Westwood muse Jordan in the Sex Pistols bio-series Pistol. This year, there’s been the heart-tugging Irish drama 500 Miles alongside Bill Nighy, and, although she can’t say much about it, a gothic horror she’s producing as well as starring in.

The more chaotic part of her life is about to crank up a gear again with the release of Practical Magic 2. Picking up several years after the original was set, the sequel sees Sally’s (Sandra Bullock) children, Antonia (Williams) and Kylie (Joey King), now in their twenties, "with no recollection that magic ever existed". Pragmatic Antonia is a neurosurgeon in training, whose "journey is about accepting magic and medicine as part of her life," Williams tells me. The key players of the original cast return, including Bullock and Nicole Kidman ("the last of the real movie stars") as the witchy Owens sisters, as does the love curse and that iconic turret-and-white-picket Gothic villa.

Williams is bursting with affection and admiration for her co-stars. King is "a deeply funny, silly person. [Working with her] just made the whole thing a lot more freeing." Arm-in-arm pap shots and the pair’s social media pages show a duo who clearly have a blast together. Last summer they had a night of karaoke in wigs, followed by a morning-after hangover dance (duly posted to TikTok by King).

Shortly after Williams signed on to the project, she got a text from Bullock saying, "Hey, it's your mother here," welcoming her and telling her she was excited to dive into the world of Practical Magic with her. There is a line in the film where one character says there is no magic stronger than sisterhood. "I do believe that, and think it is such a beautiful message," says Williams. "I wouldn't have made it through this industry without sisterhood and without friendships with other female co-stars or directors, and also, my friends are not in the industry."

Bullock, Kidman, Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest really took King and Williams under their wing. "It was so beautiful, it was like a dream," Williams says. She tells me that her favourite memories of being on set are "when we were just having girly gossip chats about love and friendships and sex and the world. I cherish that the most. It was just girls hanging out, chatting," she says. There was even a sleepover at "Sandy's", complete with midnight margaritas.

Fashion—which Williams has a huge respect for and a genuine interest in—is not only a huge source of power for an actor but also a powerful tool she’s utilised to help her "graduate from child actor to adult actor". She is equally at home in Dior couture (Williams played Christian Dior’s younger sister Catherine in the Apple TV+ show The New Look), Thom Browne, Margiela and Miu Miu as she is wearing independent labels like Talia Byer.

She is clearly someone who "gets" fashion and doesn’t dress like a woman trying to fast-forward her age, but rather like a typical 20-something—albeit one with access to custom pieces. When we talk, she is wearing a thrifted French Connection baby tee with "Cool as FCUK" emblazoned on the front.

Williams has clearly been having fun with the fashion part of the Practical Magic 2 press tour, and has eschewed working with a tried-and-tested Hollywood stylist for her friend, Dino Bonačić. It’s clearly paying off; vintage Gucci plum tailoring, pleasingly witchy Lili Curia boots, floral organza Cecilie Bahnsen, deconstructed Maison Margiela and a smattering of eBay-sourced accessories have all been on the agenda.

As for method dressing? "A little bit!", says Williams, who adds that for her, it’s less about doing playbook gothic and more about "taking inspiration from like the late '90s [and from] Sandra and Nicole at the time; the things that they were dressing in." True to this sentiment, at the London premiere a couple of weeks after we spoke, Williams wore a custom Ellie Misner look inspired by Bullock's dress to promote Forces of Nature in 1999.

Fashion aside, it's an apt time for Practical Magic to return, not least because of 2026's intensified interest in all things woo-woo. Williams herself has been known to dabble in it; she has used an Etsy witch, consults Tarot cards, attends esoteric readings and breaks off mid-sentence when the time is 11:11 to excitedly exclaim, "Witchy! Let’s make a wish!" (This is probably the only instance when a celebrity suddenly observing the time mid-interview isn't a heavy-handed hint to wrap up). This summer, she was papped leaving the Gypsi Tea Room psychic in West Hollywood.

"I think there's a real rise of divine feminine power," Williams observes. "And yeah, I'm here for it. When the word 'witch' is fired out as an insult, it’s usually because very powerful women and groups of powerful women … are a threat to the patriarchy." Now "feels like a time to, you know, get more in touch with your intuition and to explore the synchronicities and the power that women have in groups; the power of gossip and information, of knowledge and knowing."

Criticism of the esoteric can be "a bit misogynistic," she adds. "I think unlocking answers can happen in all kinds of ways. And that's all we're searching for."

Williams turns 30 next year, which she says she's excited about. "But I'm more excited to turn 40. I'm more excited to have 50. I just feel like life is gonna make more sense." For a long, long time, she has "yearned for people to see me as a grown-up," she says, admitting, "I don’t know if that’s going to come until I really do have grey hair." (Thanks to childhood fame plus naturally youthful looks, she was ID’d to see a 15-certificate film recently, she tells me, laughing).

She talks with the wisdom of someone who’s had to grow up fast, but she says, "I don't have it all figured out. I'm also not naive enough to think that that same doesn't apply to everyone. No one's really got it figured out! And even when you do have it figured out, life will throw something at you that is completely unprecedented. I think that being okay with uncertainty is very liberating."

Photographer: Melanie Rodriguez
Stylist: Rachel Bakewell
Hair Stylist: Tomi Roppongi at Julian Watson Agency
Makeup Artist: Bari Khalique
Manicurist: Michelle Class at LMC
Editor-in-Chief: Jane McFarland
Art Director: Natalia Sztyk
Executive Director, Entertainment: Jessica Baker
Writer: Laura Jordan
Video: Natasha Wilson
Photography Assistant: Paul Hyde and Daiki Tajima
Styling Assistant: Lorna Lane
Production: Town Productions

Among the many things the Kardashian-Jenners are known for—enviable commercial instincts, unswerving loyalty, astounding ubiquity—lavish birthday gestures surely rank near the top. They have been throwing money-no-object parties for so many years, since long before they were famous, that entire industries have sprung up around them. If you count all the siblings, parents, grandchildren, significant others, and exes who are still in the picture, that's something like 25 birthdays a year, which, mathematically speaking, is one every 14.4 days. The reality for everyone in the family is only slightly less rigorous. For example, the entire month of September is a rare birthday-free zone on their calendar. November, on the other hand, abounds with cakes and balloons—four celebrations (Kendall, Rocky, Kris, Dream) in the span of a week! And then there's August, which Kylie owns.

Indeed, Kylie and I are on the phone the very Thursday of the party she's throwing for herself later at her concrete mansion in Beverly Hills, even though her birthday isn't until Monday. "I'm pretending my birthday is today because I'm going away tomorrow," she says. "So we're having a little get-together at my house so that my kids are a part of it." (A "little get-together" in King Kylie's world means a strictly enforced hot-pink "princess kitty" theme with three cakes. See Instagram.) It's 11 a.m., and she's taking a break from her preparations—Stormi and Aire in the background occasionally interrupting—for a meandering conversation about her year of being brave, testing the waters, and pushing herself to spend more time in the flow of normal human life.

For the sake of argument, let's agree that Kylie is the first Zoomer—patient zero of cohort Gen Z. She was born on August 10, 1997, three weeks before Princess Diana died and Netflix was founded. Chelsea Clinton packed off to Stanford that year, Ellen DeGeneres came out on the cover of Time, and J.Lo got married for the first time. The premiere episode of South Park, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe," aired when she was 3 days old.

In some ways, she embodies many of the quirks of her generation. For example, she has an aversion to small talk. I first met Kylie over the phone in March 2022 as I was working on my forthcoming book, Citizen Kim, about her big sister. I spent years around Kim and had interviewed almost everyone in the family—except Kylie. The call lasted no more than 20 minutes and was the very definition of pulling teeth, a lot of long, awkward pauses and monosyllabic answers. At the time, I took it almost personally because it felt impertinent. Show some respect, young lady. But looking back, I see that it was just a combination of shyness and circumspection.

This time is different—although she still won't indulge me in small talk. (Whenever I share a personal anecdote, she says, "Yeah, same.") Kylie 2.0 is less suspicious and, relatively speaking, effusive. I had read the YouTube comments from the podcast she did with her sister Khloé Kardashian in late 2025, and the very first one said, "1 hour of Kylie just talking. This is what we have been waiting for all these years." And that is when I realized that even her superfans find her inscrutable. When I share this with her, she says, "Sometimes, I don't realize how much I don't share? So when I do things like that, I feel like that's always the reaction." In other words, she knows. She doesn't seem to care about relatability, which is probably the result of having been on a TV show since she was a child. As she said in a recent interview, "Not a lot of memories. I was 9 years old. [Cameras] were there one day in the house." You, too, might not want to bond with strangers after nearly 20 years of reality-show surveillance.

Kylie once said she feels like she lost her most "amazing traits" because she listened to "ignorant people who are bullies" on the internet. Today, she says, "I'm a confident person in my private life. I think it's just hard to be a woman and a human because of this very singular experience of having so much attention."

"She's always been the most, I would say, individual of all of us," says Kim Kardashian. "She's always known what she wanted to do in life, always known who she is at a young age, and has always been very confident. She's a wise soul. I've always seen that side of her behind the scenes. But she's coming into her own, and I think the world can see what our family has always seen."

One of the occasions for this profile is the rebrand of Kylie's accessible, collab-centric fashion label, Khy, into wardrobe-first minimalism. In addition to the launch of its upcoming fall collection, Khy is expanding into shoes for the first time in a collaboration with the Italian label GiaBorghini, which launched August 21. (More on this later.) But I could not help but think that it is Kylie herself who is in the midst of a rebrand. She is suddenly popping up on podcasts, acting, and sitting for interviews for British Vogue and Vanity Fair.

"I think it's more of a personal refresh," she says. "I think there's something that happens when you're turning 29—I'll be 30 next year—and you almost feel like the clock is ticking, even though you're still so young. So you're trying… I'm trying… I don't want to look back on life and be like, There's things that I wish I did when I was younger. Even though I already have children—so young—I feel like I lived such an adult life when I was young, and I'm trying to make sure that I don't have any regrets and to do brave things and give myself more opportunities or take advantage of the ones I have." She goes quiet for a minute as I learn in real time not to rush her. "Kim inspires me in that way because she does a lot of things that excite her but, at the same time, scare her. And it's amazing to watch her achieve and chase her dreams. I'm just trying to do more things, choose a few things a year, get out of my comfort zone, and just go for it."

Can you describe your comfort zone? "I think I've gotten really good at protecting myself and knowing what feels really safe and what I can handle," she says. "So I just kind of know—even down to how to leave my house and the safe places to go to. You know what I mean? How I present myself on the internet, what to say. I think there's a lot that I do to protect myself, and I just stay in this comfortable bubble. And I think it's because I've been so judged on the internet. Now, I have this big fear of embarrassment or something—more than ever. When I was younger, I just didn't really think about it. So when I was 16, I put myself out there, and I shared a lot more of my life. But the world is just different. Now, there's all these platforms. There's TikTok, Reddit, Substack…"

I'm afraid to start a Substack, I say. What if no one subscribes?

"I'm kind of into it," she says. "I might start one. It seems fun."

There were glimpses of the new swashbuckling Kylie last year. My first clue came in June 2025, when a fan asked her on TikTok what she requested when she got her "boobs done" because "it's like the most perfect, natural-looking boob job ever," and Jenner, to the world's great surprise, responded: "445 cc, moderate profile, half under the muscle!!!!! silicone!!! garth fisher!!! hope this helps lol." By the end of last year, she did her very first podcast interview in the safe space of Khloé's living room, with martinis in hand. In December, she and Timothée Chalamet went to the premiere of Marty Supreme in matching neon orange. Fun! When 2026 kicked off, the couple (together now for three years) hit the award-show circuit, from the Golden Globes in mid-January (making out!) to the Oscars telecast two months later. Then she appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair smoking a cigarette in a bustier and Hermès riding jodhpurs in a Madonna by Helmut Newton homage. In April, she was the first guest on the new podcast Big Bro With Kid Cudi—entirely winning and hilarious. A month later, she went on Therapuss With Jake Shane and went viral with this flawless bit of repartee: "Sometimes, I think I'm depressed, and then I get a spray tan, and I'm like, 'I was just pale.'"

But the revelation came with her cameo in the Charli XCX mockumentary, The Moment. Vulture described it as the best scene in the movie: "Kylie Jenner, it turns out, has legitimate chops as a comic actress. Nobody tell Kim." When I ask Jenner about it, she says, "I was playing a heightened, bitchier version of myself, so I kind of just turned up the volume." I ask her about the process (Did you rehearse? How many takes?), and she surprises me with a burst of candor and verbosity. "So I got the script," she says. "I was really nervous, so I called Kim, who was doing the Ryan Murphy show [All's Fair] at the time. Do you think I should do this? At first, she was like, 'Okay, just make sure you're prepared for this—blah, blah, blah.' She was a little more iffy. And then I read my part to her, how I planned to do it, and she was like, 'Oh! Kylie! You got this. Do it just how you did it on the phone. It's great.' And it gave me that confidence."

Kim—who, as Kylie said, is "in her actress bag"—was thrilled that her little sister called for advice. "Kylie is so funny," says Kim, "but you know, she was really shy for a while there. I told her that if she was going to do it, I wanted her to be her. So I just talked her through that: Are you gonna be shy? Is this one of those experiences? Or are you going to be you?"

Once Kylie signed up, she spent the next several days running her lines with friends. She felt good enough that she cancelled plans to work with an acting coach. The night before filming, Charli came over to her house, and they rehearsed it a few times. On set the next day, "they shot it maybe 10 or 12 times," says Kylie, "and then I started improvising a bit. It was just these little things that we were playing with and paying attention to what was making everyone laugh in the room, what felt funny." Spoken like a true comedian.

In July, she shot the King Kylie Dunkin' commercial with Dave Meyers, director of untold ad campaigns and music videos. "I had lines, and I had to act," she says, "and even though it wasn't a television show or a movie, I had to act in front of 40 people—all those actors plus the biggest crew you've ever seen in your life. I've never seen more people in a studio before. I was so nervous, but it was a test for myself to see if I could do this or not. Like, can I act in front of all these people? And it was great. So now, I'm like, Okay, I am good to go."

Indeed. The offers have started trickling in. "I haven't found the right thing yet," she says. "There were two scripts that came to me that I passed on. But I read something recently that I'm kind of interested in—the best I've felt about something so far. It's just a pilot; it hasn't been picked up yet. I'm feeling more precious about what I do next because I want to make sure it's the right fit, especially if I'm going to do something major and have to travel and be away from my kids. I want to make sure it feels right."

I tell Kylie that when I started working on the book about Kim—in 2021—I first watched every single episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians back-to-back over a period of six months, sometimes three episodes a night. "Oh my God!" she squeals. "I'm so happy for you! Isn't it the best?"

It's the most underrated documentary in history, I say, and we laugh.

I bring up the show to tell her that you can see—in later episodes and especially in the Hulu version, The Kardashians—Kylie getting funnier and funnier. Khloé, it seems to me, always held the mantle of funniest sibling. But maybe Kylie is the funny one. "I think Khloé and Rob and I are really similar in that way, but yeah…" She trails off and then whispers, "It's secretly me."

I wonder if she has a theory about what changed. Why did she become more self-conscious as she grew up? Was it getting older and raising children? Caring more about how she's perceived? Or was it something external? "I think social media is a big part of it. It's just changing," she says. "Now, it's more How far away can I get? You know, I delete my apps a lot. I try not to be on my phone all the time. I'm not a teenager anymore. It doesn't feel right for me to just scroll on TikTok all day when I have kids."

Having children so young forces you to grow up fast. You miss out on some things; you become both an early and late bloomer at the same time. Did Kylie experience that? "Yeah, absolutely," she says. "COVID was my college experience—when everything was shut down and no one was really working. It was the first time that I slowed down, and the world started to feel safe again. For the first time in my life, there wasn't a schedule. Sometimes, I feel like a robot, where everything is planned out for me. Khy meetings on Wednesday, blah, blah, blah. But COVID felt like I had a college experience—friends over all the time, and we were always celebrating something or trying to just be together. I was like, 'Wow, I never had that thing of, like, no other outside responsibilities—except Stormi.'"

Stormi was born on February 1, 2018. Kylie was 20. Exactly four years later, on February 2, Aire was born. "I made a promise to myself at 25,” she says, “that I was not going to have any more children—right now—and really just enjoy the last half of my 20s because the first half was like, 'You're pregnant,' and then it's the year of recovery, and, you know, my mental state, my postpartum depression, and all those things. It felt like I lost some of those young years of my life.”

More than once, Kylie says, "I'm almost 30," and it seems to be an indication that she is very eager to exit her 20s. Is there anything she'd like to leave behind? Something that once seemed important that she's changed her mind about? "I think having an enormous life," she says. "I changed my mind about that. When I was younger, I got really excited, and I got the craziest house I could in Beverly Hills, and I just kind of went for it. I've realized that my life got too big, and I said, 'Yeah, never mind.' I think I lost control of my life a little bit for a while there."

The reason for this is almost certainly to do with the fact that she became nearly a billionaire in 2019 when she was just 21. The 10th anniversary of the first Kylie Lip Kit was last November. She was 18 when she posted it to Instagram, and it sold out in minutes. Four years later, she was giving the official video tour of the brand-new, custom-designed pink HQ on Agoura Road in Calabasas with a giant pink neon KYLIE sign and her now-controversial "Youngest-Ever Self-Made Billionaire" Forbes magazine cover hanging in the lobby. (Besides the fact that she wasn't quite yet a billionaire, people got caught in the spokes of self-made. "None of the money I've ever made is inherited, so it's technically true," says Jenner, "but people just feel like the privilege I've had was a major stepping stone.")

Looking back on the 10-year journey, what's the big takeaway? "I wouldn't change it for anything," she says. "I learned so much, and I'm just so happy that I'm still doing it. It's definitely the thing I care about the most. If I had to choose—you can just do one thing—it would be Kylie Cosmetics because it's just such a real passion."

This is perhaps one of the reasons why the early iterations of her fashion brand, Khy, felt like a work in progress—because it was and, in some ways, still is. When the brand launched in 2023, the first collection sold out within days and generated $1 million in sales within its first hour. She admits to me that, unlike Kylie Cosmetics, it wasn't her idea: "It was an opportunity that came to me, and then I realized how much I love it." Earlier this spring, she steered the brand into its new, more grown-up era with a complete creative transformation. "I'm so excited about the future of Khy, and the rebranding is more about creating timeless forever pieces, moving a little bit away from collaborations, and trying to identify just who we are, what we stand for, the clothes that we want to make," she says. "So I think we're still building it, and it's a challenge to build something with so many people watching."

Besides expanding into shoes—which she's been working on for two years—Kylie is most excited about opening a brick-and-mortar Khy store in a couple of years. "For clothes, you really need something physical, a building, to create a world," she says. Perhaps, here, she is taking another page out of Kim's book.

There's a shopgirl legacy on her mother's side that goes back nearly 100 years, to when Kylie's great-grandmother, Lou Ethel, and her great-great-grandmother, a woman everyone called Tiny, opened a beauty parlor in Mississippi. Lou Ethel was the mother of MJ, the beloved grandmother to the Kar-Jenn clan, who died at 91 in July. She herself was the owner of several stores in San Diego for years, including a bikini shop, a women's fashion store, and a children's clothing boutique that was a La Jolla institution for more than 30 years. It's in their blood: When a marriage falls apart, open a shop! Kim and now Kylie, are keeping the legacy alive. "I'm very aware of that," says Kylie, "and I think we absolutely got it from MJ, and MJ got it from her mother—that work ethic and looking up to strong, independent women."

Kylie has gotten a bad rap over the years for not working hard enough, not being a serious person, and people thinking she's not really that involved in her brands. It couldn't be further from the truth. There's always a suspicion about celebrity brands: Is it really her? Kylie set the record straight on Kid Cudi's Big Bro podcast, saying "I go to work every day in the office. I'm super involved and am really crazy about everything. I do the Instagram myself. I do all the posts. I do the marketing, all the shoots, picking the models, knowing all the factories. It's hard for me to hand it off, because it's my baby."

As our conversation is winding down, I bring up Kim's super-viral moment from March 2022 ("Get your fucking ass up and work!"), and Kylie lets out a mordant chuckle. Like Kylie, Kim was born on the cusp of, in her case, the millennial generation: 1980. She is the living embodiment of hustle culture—something Gen Z, like small talk, rejects. Indeed, Kylie once said, "The public will be like, 'You're just like Kim,' and I'm like, 'I am nothing like Kim.'"

Kylie takes a minute to think about what she wants to say. "Kim embraces that narrative about herself," she says. "Because she does work really hard, she's like a superwoman. She just has such a great work ethic, and she handles so many things all at once, which is really impressive." She takes another second, "How I present myself to the internet maybe doesn't show the businesswoman side of me." One more long pause. "So maybe I'll lean into that."

Photographer/Director: Aidan Zamiri
Cinematographer: James Beattie
Stylist: Alexandra & Mackenzie Grandquist
Hairstylist: Iggy Rosales
Makeup Artist: Ariel Tejada
Manicurist: Zola Ganzorigt
Set Designer: Grace Surnow
Projector Artist: Will Wharton
Production Company: Object & Animal; Ted & Jane
Executive Producer: Emi Stewart
Producer: LE Seydel
Creative Producer: Reese Layton
Editor in Chief: Kat Collings
VP of Creative: Alexa Wiley
Style Director: Lauren Eggertsen
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Director of Production: Erin Corbett

Lupita Nyong'o arrives to lunch at Sukh, her go-to Brooklyn Thai restaurant, in incognito mode: dark glasses and a black pashmina looped around her head like an Old Hollywood starlet. But when the Oscar-winning actress sheds her scarf and shades, her cover's blown. Standing in this quaint dining room in a denim micromini, a white oxford shirt, and beaded necklaces from her native Kenya, Nyong'o is—unmistakably—the most beautiful woman in the world.

This month, Nyong'o plays Helen of Troy, the mythic face that "launched a thousand ships," in Director Christopher Nolan's much-anticipated, much-shrouded summer blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey. As arguably the industry's most influential director, Nolan makes movies that are not so much theatrical releases as Cultural Events. (Remember "Barbenheimer?") Nyong'o is part of an all-star cast: Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, and many more. Opening-weekend tickets are largely already sold out, some a full year in advance.

Yet on the Tuesday in June when we meet, Nyong'o herself has not been consumed by bubbling Odyssey mania. "If I could be very honest with you, I haven't been in New York," she says shortly after sitting, nothing but waters and menus on the table. "I've actually been recuperating from a surgery, so I've been away, in nature, taking care of myself."

In May, Nyong'o underwent her second myomectomy, a major surgery to remove more than 50 fibroids, or noncancerous tumors, growing in the lining of her uterus. Her first myomectomy came after she was diagnosed with fibroids in 2014, the same year she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her breakout role in 12 Years a Slave. Nyong'o shared her private struggle with fibroids in public for the first time last year: the "seasons of constant pain"; the heavy, prolonged periods in which she lost "dangerous amounts of blood each month." Earlier this year, she revealed her fibroids had returned.

The surgery is still "very fresh," Nyong'o says. She's not quite ready to talk about it yet. First, she suggests, "let's warm up."

Many women struggle to take a simple compliment. Nyong'o is not many women. When I ask how it sits with her to be cast as the most gorgeous minx of all time, she replies with an enthusiastic "Really well." Nyong'o laughs a little, but she's not kidding: "No, I do love this for me."

Here in our snug corner booth, Nyong'o is wholly owning the role.

"Listen. I'm not going to be mad at anyone calling me beautiful," she tells me. "I grew up feeling kind of like an ugly duckling." She references her 2019 children's book, Sulwe, inspired by her own experiences with colorism: "It took me a lot of conscious work to get rid of my insecurities and to free myself from the discrimination of my skin color."

Regal, striking beauty is inextricable from Nyong'o's public identity: as Nakia, the warrior/spy and love of the late Chadwick Boseman's King T'Challa in Black Panther; as the first Black face of Lancôme and a suited Chanel ambassador. The "jarring" attention started when Nyong'o moved to her birthplace of Mexico to study Spanish at age 16: "I was like, 'Wait a minute. I'm odd enough here. I'm singular enough that people are translating it as beauty.'"

At 43, Nyong'o speaks with the steady, almost mesmerizing conviction of a woman who has done the work. "When people compliment me these days," she adds, "I embrace it."

Early Odyssey discourse has been so preoccupied with Helen, it's largely glossed over that Nyong'o pulls double duty as her sister, Clytemnestra, the tortured queen who murders her husband, Agamemnon (Benny Safdie), as payback for sacrificing their daughter to the gods. It's a role that Nyong'o first played as a student at Yale School of Drama in a class called The Greeks. "Her story is so tragic," she says. "It's hard to forget."

In some versions of The Odyssey—including Nolan's, Nyong'o reveals—Helen and Clytemnestra are twins. She immediately agreed to play the more storied sister during her first meeting with Nolan. ("I never ever thought that I would be offered a chance to play Helen of Troy.") When the Oppenheimer director doubled down with Clytemnestra, Nyong'o "almost fell off the creaky chair [she] was on," but it helped that she'd already played doppelgängers in Jordan Peele's psychological thriller Us.

"I had the reassurance that I had done two roles before," she said. "My role in Us, I was the Odysseus. It was more of a heavy lift to do Us than it was to be a really, really valuable and pivotal part of Odysseus's journey."

To tackle the twins, Nyong'o knew she had to craft key physical and vocal distinctions for each character, an approach she says "Michael" (as in Michael B. Jordan, her Black Panther costar and the Oscars' reigning Best Actor for playing twins in Sinners) has also discussed. How, specifically, did Nyong'o approach Helen versus Clytemnestra? "I can't tell you that," she says slyly.

Inevitably, we've reached the point in our interview when Nyong'o must maintain the mystique of a new Nolan film. The director famously rejects the modern movie-marketing machine, a gauntlet of appearances, interviews like this one, and a deluge of TikToks and Instagram Reels promoting—and potentially overexposing—the project. When Nyong'o and I meet in June, there have been no glimpses of her in character as Helen. Two Odyssey trailers have dropped, neither of which feature her. Journalists typically screen the film their celebrity subject is promoting; not this time.

"I actually think that a lot of filmmakers want to be guarded about what they're making, but the industry doesn't allow them to be," Nyong'o says. "Chris has that power. He is that power."

Nyong'o is a director's darling, consistently working with the new masters, including Peele and Black Panther's Ryan Coogler. Even so, the mythology (pun intended) around Nolan felt different. "There's so much lore that goes with the Chris Nolan experience," Nyong'o says. In reality, she found him to be remarkably open, inviting her into three-way discussions with him and the costume, hair, and makeup departments. She praises Nolan's no-phones-on-set policy and the fact that he didn't coddle The Odyssey's constellation of stars.

Even before The Odyssey, Nolan's and Nyong'o's careers were creatively aligned. Both have a way of elevating blockbusters, bridging the gap between Best Picture and box-office hits. The Oscars have toyed with adding a "popular film" category, but between Oppenheimer and The Dark Knight (Nolan) and Black Panther, Us, and Wild Robot (Nyong'o), the synergy between art and commerce is already being realized.

For Nyong'o, filmmakers like Nolan and Coogler mean she doesn't have to view her career in terms of the old industry juggling act of "one for them, one for me" (projects that pay and others that feed your soul). "They do work that means something to them. They're not just collecting a paycheck," she says. "That's a gift, to have artistic convictions that happen to correlate with a popular movie." She could just as well be talking about herself.

Nyong'o has gravitated to iconic IP (Marvel, Star Wars), but her meteoric, Oscar-winning debut came in a comparative indie. In Director Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, she played Patsey, a young enslaved woman immortalized in the memoir of the same name. I wonder how it's impacted the rest of her career, to get everything she's supposed to want, upfront, at age 31.

"That is the only life I know, right? The version of life where I won an Academy Award for the first movie I ever did," Nyong'o says. "It's unbelievable that it happened that way, but I'm so glad it did because it happened before I had a chance to want it and now I get to be grateful for the rest of my life." Some say it's a curse, but Nyong'o credits the Oscar's weight, and not just because she sometimes uses hers as a dumbbell. "I would not be in a Chris Nolan film were it not for that," she says. "It legitimized my presence in an industry that has a very short attention span."

Growing up, she never dreamed of acting as a viable career path. She can't seem to stress this part enough: "I come from a very different world, Michelle." The daughter of a Kenyan politician/professor and a public health advocate, she was raised between Kenya and Mexico City, born in the latter after her family fled political unrest at home. "My options for what I could be were very narrow," Nyong'o says. "I had internalized that women were secretaries and business women." But her mother, Dorothy, clearly saw her potential, signing her up for public speaking, improv, and poetry recitation classes.

"I remember seeing Whoopi Goldberg in more than one movie, and I was like, 'Wait, you could do this?'" she reenacts her childhood enlightenment. Especially "because she was dark skinned, I really took note of her." It's moving now for Nyong'o to imagine her career providing the same kind of recognition for a new generation: "I feel very honored to be anybody's Whoopi."

Still, Nyong'o's bright-burning breakout was not without complication. "The years after winning were very challenging for me, psychologically, because I was riddled with the question of, 'What does up look like from an Academy Award?'" She aimed to give herself permission to fail.

"That's what got me to a place where I was eligible for an Academy Award, because I approached 12 Years a Slave with courage," she said. "It cannot be about the accolades. It has to be about the boldness with which I go about my work."

Maybe it's because Nyong'o grew up a world away from Hollywood that she's managed to approach its gilded trap with grace. "Trying to maintain other people's regard of you is not sustainable," she says. "The Academy Award was external validation, but it cannot be the prerequisite for self-appreciation."

Nyong'o knew too well that winning an Oscar isn't a cure-all. Fans saw her in plunging, powder-blue Prada, statuette in hand. Behind the scenes, 2014 was coupled with the crushing low of her first fibroids diagnosis: "It was just a very brutal reminder that no number of red carpets will protect me from poor health," she tells me.

Over her colorful salad and my plate of branzino, Nyong'o is ready to go there. She's been listening to Lena Dunham's memoir, Famesick, and relating closely to the story of a buzzy young star privately grappling with a chronic health issue.

It's tempting to write that Nyong'o has suffered in silence, but she now describes her experience with fibroids as something more specific, something all too female: She did not recognize her suffering was remarkable at all.

Though her period was going longer and she was experiencing cramps, abdominal pain, and clotting—all fibroid symptoms—"I didn't know I was sick," Nyong'o says of the lead-up to her diagnosis in 2014. "I didn't know there was an alarm to sound."

It was only after she insisted to doctors that the toughness in her abdomen signaled a deeper problem that an ultrasound confirmed she had 30 fibroids growing in her uterine lining. "I blamed myself because it had been a stressful year, and fibroids grow in a stressed-out body," she said of the dizzying high/low. "I was the thinnest I've ever been, and that was not by design. There was not enough time to eat, and I didn't have an appetite. My diet was cortisol and adrenaline."

Nyong'o says no one could explain why her fibroids had developed or if they'd return. Doctors repeatedly shrugged at a lack of research. Despite affecting 80% of women by age 50 and disproportionately affecting Black women, fibroids were—and largely remain—"under-researched, underfunded, and routinely dismissed," according to a piercing description by health policy nonprofit The Commonwealth Fund.

Nyong'o's treatment options sounded more like an ultimatum: surgically remove her fibroids or continue to suffer. She says hysterectomies—the only certain cure for fibroids—have too often been recommended as an extreme first course of action. Facing her first surgery, "I felt very alone, and I also felt like I had to deal with it in private," she recalls. Overnight fame was disorienting enough without publicizing her medical records. After a myomectomy that removed 23 fibroids, Nyong'o continued to grind. Ten days after the procedure, she honored a prior commitment to speak before 10,000 women in Boston. "I didn't know that I could say no, and I think a lot of women do that," she says. "Taking care of their bodies is not on the agenda, because the world does not create an environment where your pain is considered."

Post-op conversations about prevention felt similarly bleak. Nyong'o recalls two options: go on The Pill, which can alleviate symptoms but isn't a cure, or accept that it would only be a matter of time until her fibroids returned. "I lived praying that my fibroids weren't coming back," she said, "so when I learned that they were, it was this inevitable tragedy."

Nyong'o was mostly able to live her normal life in the years since her first surgery, but over time, her symptoms flared. "It wasn't until my period lasted more than 30 days that I finally crumbled," Nyong'o said. In early 2023, she learned her fibroids had returned and more than doubled: There were over 50 tumors, the largest being the size of a peach. This time, she was almost a decade older and full of fiery resolve: "I realized this system has failed me, and I got to try and understand the female body for myself."

Playing a cancer patient in 2024's A Quiet Place: Day One proved a turning point. "That movie where I had to look ill actually made me more well," Nyong'o said. To safely lose weight for the role on a short timetable, she worked with a healthcare facility that dialed into her nutrition and bloodwork. She learned that fibroids feed on estrogen and eating iron-rich foods could improve her liver function and, therefore, her hormonal balance; that getting vitamin D via sunlight and supplements could inhibit fibroids from growing (which is notable for Black people, who can be vitamin D deficient, as the melanin in their skin decreases sun absorption); that reducing stress and inflammation can make your body a less-friendly host for fibroids.

Nyong'o approached her second myomectomy this past May empowered by information. "Last time, I felt completely helpless and at the mercy of the medical industry," Nyong'o said. This time, "the fibroids don't have the same power over me."

Instead of racing back to the grind, "I went away for a month, and I stayed in the countryside, and my mother came and she took care of me," Nyong'o shares. She ate well, walked every day, and got tons of sunshine, "like a wounded cat." Nyong'o is still healing, including discomfort and pain from the surgical wound, but she says her body seems lighter already.

Even on set of The Odyssey, she strove for sleep, rest, and maintaining her anti-inflammatory diet.

Nyong'o doesn't feel alone after this second surgery, either, in part because of the community she's created by going public. Nyong'o has established herself as a truthteller. In 2017, she lent her voice to the #MeToo movement, alleging in a stinging New York Times op-ed that Harvey Weinstein made sexual advances on her while promising to boost her career. When she broke up with boyfriend in 2023, she skipped the typical, pat statement, instead vulnerably writing on Instagram about "a love suddenly and devastatingly extinguished by deception."

She decided to share her fibroids story last year. "Honestly, I just had it," she tells me. Part of her advocacy is awareness. "Why is this thing that's so common a mystery?" Nyong'o asks. "We should know about fibroids as much as we know about impounded wisdom teeth. Every single girl should know about the risk of fibroids in their teens when they're learning about their period and their reproductive system."

In March, she announced a Make Fibroids Count campaign with the Foundation for Women's Health, creating a grant to research less-invasive treatments; it has surpassed its $200,000 goal, raising more than $230,000. "I would love for there to be more solutions for women than just cutting us open," Nyong'o says.

This is the true beauty of Lupita Nyong'o: her resolve to do something productive with her pain, and her fame. "It's the delight of my soul," she says.

The Odyssey is in theaters July 17.

Photographer/Creative Conception: Kenny Germé
Creative Director: Natalia Sztyk
Stylist: Jan-Michael Quammie
Hairstylist: Vernon François
Hair Assistant: Batiseol Gomis
Makeup Artist: Nick Barose for Exclusive Artists using Chanel
Makeup Assistant: Naruedom Putipan
Manicurist: Bagir Hasanov
Set Designer: Lane Vineyard
Video Director: Sarah Al Slaity
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Producer: Nick De Bellis

Framed by rich drapery, layers of outdoor-printed scenery, and regal solid backdrops, our July cover star, Lupita Nyong'o, sparkles. Whether she's decked out in head-to-toe Chanel or a bold yellow-and-black uniform of Luar, the star of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey commands attention, and her collaborative, highly engaged spirit shines brightly. You can read the Oscar winner's full cover feature here, but I'm spending time with Nyong'o's hairstylist Vernon François and makeup artist Nick Barose to discuss all of the behind-the-scenes beauty details, from expert hairstyling and makeup application tips to specific product IDs. Below, we're diving into all of the glamour.

"My inspiration for Lupita's hair was rooted in celebrating versatility while allowing each look to feel authentic rather than performative," François tells me right off the bat. "Lupita has an extraordinary ability to embody completely different energies while remaining unmistakably herself, and I wanted the hair to reflect that. Some looks felt sculptural and architectural, while others embraced softness, texture, and movement." Across all of them, François noted a sense of confidence, elegance, and quiet strength. Rather than the hair being the dominant fixture, he wanted the actress's strands to become another layer of storytelling that could work in harmony with every creative element.

"Any look I create begins with understanding the intention behind the image," says François when I ask him to reveal his prep and styling process. "Before I touch the hair, I'm thinking about silhouette, proportion, movement, and how the hair will interact with light, wardrobe, and the story we're trying to tell." Of course, preparation is everything. Healthy, well-conditioned hair responds beautifully, so he always begins by ensuring the hair is hydrated and protected. From there, he tailors each technique to the specific look—whether that involves sculpting, defining, stretching, or creating softness and movement. "Throughout the shoot, each style evolved organically while maintaining the integrity of Lupita's hair and the kinky-straight Afro wig we used," he adds.

For products, François relied on Olaplex's No.5L Moisturize & Mend Leave-In Conditioner ($34) to hydrate and protect the actress's strands, the No.10 Curl Defining Frizz Reducing Hair Gel ($32) to create definition and hold where needed, and the No.7 Bonding Oil ($32) to add lightweight shine and polish. He says he uses these three products on practically all of his celebrity clients and recommends them to just about anyone due to the excellent foundation they create for healthy, versatile styling regardless of hair texture.

Styling tools were equally important, and François's arsenal included a rattail comb, a wide-tooth comb, sectioning clips, brushes, a diffuser, and a medium-sized Olivia Garden curling iron to create shape and movement. "My hands remain my most important tool," says François. "They allow me to respond intuitively to the hair and refine each look in a way that feels effortless rather than overworked." According to François, it's always important that hair isn't treated as an afterthought. "Hair has the ability to communicate identity, emotion, culture, and personality before a word is even spoken," he adds.

When it comes to Nyong'o's makeup, Barose tells me that he always wants to make sure that the actress's beautiful natural glow can show through the makeup, even when it's super dramatic. "The skin is never suppressed by heavy, opaque foundation or powder that's too matte," he says. "When the skin looks fresh and touchable, the rest of the makeup will always look better."

To prep Nyong'o's skin for our cover shoot, Barose massaged Chanel's Sublimage Le Sérum ($560) into her face and neck. Once it absorbed, he added a small amount of the brand's Sublimage La Crème ($505) to her complexion in addition to eye cream, the Sublimage La Crème Yeux ($320), and lip oil, Sublimage L'Extrait Huile Lèvres ($365). He shares that it's necessary to let all of the skincare sit and absorb for about five minutes before patting away any excess.

"For dark skin like Lupita's, it's important to make sure the T-zone stays matte but to leave any glow that's on top of the cheekbones," Barose explains. "There's a Mehron Makeup product made for the stage that I love called TouchUp Anti-Shine Gel ($15). I used a tiny bit of the Dark Tint on Lupita's forehead and T-zone, which allows me to rely less on powder and to control any extra shine." For foundation, Barose used Chanel's Les Beiges Foundation in B140 ($69) and Les Beiges Healthy Glow Sheer Powder in B140 ($61). He prefers to apply liquid foundation with a dense goat-hair brush, like the premium handmade Japanese Hakuhodo model S5555 ($173). This brush is ideal, he says, because it allows more control so you can effortlessly layer or sheer out foundation. To create a beautiful pop of color, Barose reached for Chanel's Joues Contraste Intense Cream-to-Powder Blush in Grenat Profond ($56), a rich, deep red, on the apples of Nyong'o's cheeks.

Since the actress's wardrobe was quite dramatic, Barose didn't want the overall color palette of the makeup to get too vibrant or too busy, which would compete with what Nyong'o was wearing. Instead, he complemented the wardrobe by mostly using neutral brown tones to define and sculpt Nyong'o's features, which he loves to play up.

"I especially like to emphasize her eyes, lips, or both," he tells me. "I love Chanel's Le Crayon Yeux in 01 Noir Black ($36), which is a rich, pitch-black eyeliner that doesn't turn gray on dark skin like most black eyeliners; Chanel's Inimitable Extrême Mascara ($40), which adds volume and length in just a few coats; and I-Envy Cluster Palette Lashes ($8), which look so natural and are easy to use." Last but not least, Barose used Lisa Eldridge's Elevated Glow Balm Concentrate in High-Key Light ($38)—a favorite from the brand's new Marilyn Monroe collection—as a topcoat for eye shadow.

For Nyong'o's lips, Barose's product arsenal included Chanel's Le Crayon Lèvres in 192 and 194 ($37) as well as Lisa Eldridge's Gloss Embrace Lip Gloss in Sorcery ($28) and Chanel's Rouge Coco Hydra Gloss in 448 Opulence ($45) to add shine.

Barose and François agree that the strongest editorial work comes from authentic collaboration. "Every department brings a unique perspective, but the goal is always the same: to create one complete and visual story," François tells me. "Working with artists who trust one another allows everyone to elevate the final image. It never feels like individual contributions competing for attention. It feels like one creative language."

Throughout the day of our cover shoot, Barose and François stayed in constant communication, sharing ideas and making small adjustments as each look evolved. Sometimes, François explains, that meant softening the hair because the wardrobe was making a stronger statement or adding more structure because the makeup had shifted the overall mood.

"We looked at the clothes and discussed with Lupita, and since I frequently work with Vernon, we just try to complement each other's work," adds Barose. For example, when he noticed François was going bigger with the hair at one point, he adjusted Nyong'o's eyeliner to be longer and thicker, even adding lengthier false lashes to ensure everything stayed balanced.

"Working with Lupita is always inspiring because she's deeply engaged in the creative process," concludes François. "She welcomes exploration and thoughtful collaboration, which allows every look to feel considered rather than simply styled. When everyone on set shares that same intention, the final images become more than beautiful. They tell a story."

Sadie Soverall is a daydreamer. The sort of summers she yearns for were spent at her grandma’s bungalow in Guernsey, where she’d head out into the garden and lie on the warm floor of a dilapidated greenhouse, making up stories amongst the tomato plants. "It felt like a magical place, my own little world. I talked to myself a lot as a child," she says, smiling at the thought of her 10-year-old self.

She’s speaking to me from her bedroom in London on a sweltering day, and when we both appear on screen in matching tank tops, we giggle conspiratorially. Soverall still spends a lot of time cocooned in her imagination, she tells me. "Talking to myself is how I get into my characters; testing out how they sound and finding their voices. I even have a little altar to one of the characters I’m prepping for in the corner of my room." She can’t say what the role is just yet, but if her current trajectory is anything to go by, it’s going to be major.

At 24, Wandsworth-born Soverall is booked and very busy, not long off a sold-out run of John Proctor is the Villain at the Royal Court Theatre, and now starring in Every Year After, the YA romance that’s captured our love of yearning so deeply that Prime Video has already announced a second season. Soverall was still in school when she landed her first major role in Netflix show Fate: The Winx Saga, and she soon caught the eye of director Emerald Fennell, who cast her in Saltburn as Jacob Elordi’s university love interest. She held her own amongst titans including Barry Keoghan, Carey Mulligan and Rosamund Pike, her character Annabel all pouting privilege and noughties waist belts.

"I was really lucky on that set because they had us in the background in a lot of shots, so I got to spend time just watching Barry and Jacob work. They are both incredible at what they do, and I became absolutely obsessed with Alison Oliver [who plays Venetia Catton, sister to Elordi's Felix]. I think she’s one of the best actors of our time," says Soverall. The masterclass continued behind the camera, too. "It was fascinating to see how creative Emerald’s process is. She’d come up with little ideas in the moment, or she’d write a new scene at night, and we’d shoot it the next day. It was just so exciting to have a brilliant, intelligent woman at the helm of this thing."

Soverall, who gently rebuffs any hint of praise with a warm humility, admits Saltburn felt like a turning point. Her childhood dream of becoming an actor—sparked by a love of the 1976 musical Bugsy Malone and fed by a primary school teacher called Mr Vince, who’d write mini plays for her to star in—was no longer just in her head. But she says that nothing has made her success feel more real than playing Percy in Every Year After; the sun-soaked, swoon-worthy adaptation of Carley Fortune’s best-selling book. In it, two childhood best friends who spent summers together in the lakeside town of Barry’s Bay are torn apart by betrayal, then thrown together again in their twenties. The tension is painful and totally delicious.

It’s the latest in a string of book-to-screen blockbusters that have sent our desire for tales of yearning off the charts, from The Summer I Turned Pretty and My Life with the Walter Boys to Heated Rivalry and Off Campus. With an already dedicated (and vocal) fandom attached, does a role like this come with extra pressure? "I think it’s lovely that these books and shows have such devoted fans, but I feel the same amount of pressure as [with] any other character I play," says Soverall. "Of course, it’s an adaptation, but to my mind, the book is there and perfect, and this is just an expansion of that world. The thing about written stories is that they’re personal—we all have a specific, special version of it in our heads that can never be replaced."

Like me, she’s a lovergirl, so she understands innately why tales of young love resonate with people of all ages and are coming to define this current era of entertainment. "Partly, the escapism and levity they offer are exactly what we need in the world right now. But I think there’s also something about social media impacting the way many of us relate to each other, and the instant nature of it. We’re yearning for these real-life, slow-burn interactions," she muses. "When I was younger it was cool to be nonchalant, which was really hard for me because I wear my heart on my sleeve. But I think it’s swinging the other way, and that’s really lovely. Being able to talk about how you feel is a joyous part of being human."

Soverall says she drew a lot of inspiration from Meg Ryan’s roster when preparing for Percy. "I watched a lot of Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and especially When Harry Met Sally, because it captures that specific feeling of seeing someone significant after a long time apart," she says. "Meg Ryan is my favourite rom com queen; she’s fun and a bit messy, and her characters make mistakes. She’s so exciting to watch because she’s not perfect, and because of that, she kind of is perfect."

This leads us onto her own relationship with imperfection and the journey she’s been on to embrace parts of herself that she once wished away. "As a mixed-race person who’s Trinidadian, Scottish, Irish and English, I always felt a bit different as a teenager. The only thing that was cool and attractive at my school was having straight, blonde hair and blue eyes, and when I was going through puberty, my hair would just be huge and frizzy no matter what I did," she shares.

When the boy she liked said that her hair made her look "like a witch", she saved up her pocket money to get a straightening treatment. "I immediately regretted it. I looked in the mirror and realised I’d done this permanent thing based on a very small group of people’s opinions about me," she says. "There was a period when I was trying to be someone else, but I can look back and have compassion for that version of myself. Now I love my hair, and I love all the features I got from my Trinidad side; they’re beautiful and special. And I think it’s really cool that I have my big hair on this cover. It’s like, in their face, you know?"

I do know; the tussle with our hair almost feels like a rite of passage for mixed women, but it’s glorious to see Soverall own exactly who she is, especially when, despite her impressive score sheet so far, she’s really just getting started in her career.

Is she planning to take her foot off the gas anytime soon, or is it still full steam ahead? She sips her iced coffee, thoughtful for a moment. "I’ve been wanting to work all the time, but the summer sort of forces you to slow down. It’s a time for being with friends in the sun and having fun and looking after yourself. So I’ll do some of that, then I’ll get back to it." She smiles slyly, as if she doesn’t even believe this herself.

Her eyes flick in the direction of the altar she’s made to her next character, and I suspect she’s ready to head back to her happy place: her own imagination. I wish her sweet daydreams and sign off, safe in the knowledge I’ll meet her again on screen many more times in the future.

Photographer: Natasja Fourie
Hair Stylist: Christos Bairabas
Makeup Artist: Faye Bluff at Agency of Substance
Manicurist: Ami Streets
Stylist: Remy Farrell
Editor-in-Chief: Jane McFarland
Beauty Director: Shannon Lawlor
Art Director: Natalia Sztyk
Executive Director, Entertainment: Jessica Baker
Writer: Meena Alexander
Video Editor: Natasha Wilson
Digital Technician: Kayla Middleton
Lighting Assistant: Luké Simmonds
Production: Town Productions

It's officially summer, which means we're saying hello to a fresher (and hotter) beauty aesthetic: glowing skin, wind-swept hair, simmering eyes or lips… the possibilities are endless. In this month's Now Playing Issue (which also stars Victoria Monet and Jonathan Daviss), Camila Mendes is offering the ultimate inspiration with an ultra-glamorous burgundy lip, a glossy eye, and shiny, gently tousled strands. To provide us with all of the behind-the-scenes details, hairstylist Lauren Palmer-Smith and makeup artist Jen Tioseco are walking us through their exact process and product picks. Keep scrolling for everything you need to know about Mendes's smoldering summer beauty vibe.

Right off the bat, Palmer-Smith tells me the goal for this shoot was to create effortless glamour with an "editorial, cool-girl" vibe. For Mendes's wet look, she used a personal favorite combination of products: water and Shu Uemura's Essence Absolu Nourishing Protective Hair Oil ($42). For Mendes's soft (and dry) look below, Palmer-Smith reached for Chris McMillan's The Dry Texture and Volume Spray ($38) and a 5/8-inch curling iron (we like this one from Hot Tools) to add a touch of soft texture.

"In addition to the Chris McMillan texture spray, there's three hair products I literally always bring with me to set when working with celebrity clients," says Palmer-Smith. "My Bumble and bumble Spray de Mode Flexible Hold Hairspray ($29), my Oribe Maximista Hair Thickening Spray ($42), and my Oribe Supershine Moisturizing Hair Cream ($54)."

For makeup, Tioseco tells me it's always about creating a statement in one area when she's working with Mendes—whether it's her skin, lips, or eyes. For this shoot, the focus was on the skin and lips, keeping the eye simple with a gloss for a true, editorial feel. "After Cami's fitting, it was obvious the clothes were going to be the statement of the shoot," Tioseco explains. "We decided to start clean and fresh and build onto each look as the shoot progressed. I used the Haus Labs Triclone Skin Tech Foundation ($52)—the range is so great for olive and golden skin tones—and landed on the bold burgundy lip because it felt impactful yet complementary without overtaking the clothes. Cami is so gorgeous, it's always hard to pick one area to focus on."

Naturally, skin prep is the most important part of Tioseco's routine, especially when there will be a large emphasis on a client's skin during an event or shoot. "If the skincare and skin isn't skinning, no matter what foundation I use, the end result is not going to look good," she says.

To start the process with Mendes, Tioseco cleansed the actress's skin with Danucera's Cerabalm ($92) to gently reset the skin, followed by the brand's D22 Tonic ($42) applied with a cotton round in a lifting motion to refine and prep the complexion. Next, she pressed the Mega Serum ($165) with vitamin C and niacinamide into Mendes's skin with her hands for hydration and bounce, then sealed everything in with the Cream Supreme ($225). For the final touch, she finished with the Iconic Eye Cream ($145) to smooth and prep the under-eye area for a flawless concealer application.

"Jen and I work very well together in creating cohesive glam looks that communicate the overall feeling of the story we're trying to tell with the hair and makeup," says Lauren-Smith. "I also just love collaborating with Camila. I love the ideas that she brings to each event and shoot."

Victoria Monét's music used to drip. Her voice moved in rich, honeyed ripples that swam through sultry backbeats and orchestral symphonies. Her new music, however, soars. This is quite fitting for the former jaguar, who tells me she's traded her claws for butterfly wings.

The sugar-dipped voice that I've heard crooning "On My Mama" one million times on the radio and at sparkling New York City parties greets me during a short hour of downtime in early May. I'm hesitant to even call it that, seeing as it's the only time she could spare on a packed rehearsal day. We'd already pushed things back to accommodate her dancers' schedules, as they were approximately 40 days out from The Romantic Tour with Bruno Mars, which Monét joins this month in Saint-Denis, France. You see, the singer-songwriter (and recent culinary school graduate!) has been in constant motion ever since clinching three awards at the 2024 Grammys, including Best New Artist, but if you've been wondering where she's been in the two years that have passed since, she doesn't blame you.

Newcomers to Monét's musical universe, strap in. The star has been putting down roots in the industry for more than 15 years, spending the majority of this time as a hit songwriter for and frequent collaborator of stars such as Ariana Grande, Chlöe x Halle, and Fifth Harmony before dedicating herself to a solo career. Six studio albums, 26 singles, and 36 award nominations later, we meet Monét in a stage of metamorphosis, shedding the weight of expectations, accolades, and timelines as she etches a new chapter into her story.

I met the multi-hyphenate just a few days after her 37th birthday, which Monét used as a benchmark for a new and spotlessly cleaned chapter. She celebrated the occasion on her socials too, scrubbing every photo that predated May 1 (Taurus hive, rise) from her Instagram profile—yes, even photographic proof of her career-defining awards. It sends a subtle yet powerful message that no one needs to see her résumé to measure her worth. They simply need to see her now.

I ask her about the sudden switch-up in social presence. It usually means one of two things: a new record or a horrendous breakup. Luckily for Monét's avid music fans, it's the former—an album. She tells me it is "the longest she's ever done," with a release date and name so ironclad that even I couldn't get her to budge. Fans did, however, get a taste of what's next with her buttery single "Let Me," which became the top-added song on R&B radio in its debut week.

"I wanted to start over, using my birthday as a launching pad," she explains in her irresistibly soft voice. Monét's goal is for listeners to understand the world of her upcoming album before ever stepping inside, one that's steeped in monochrome nostalgia—inspired by childhood memories of dancing in front of her grandmother's analog television set in Mobile, Alabama—and reflective of her new outlook on life. Three Grammys later, the world views you differently, and she quickly learned that it's not always for the best.

While the singer-songwriter took these coveted awards as confirmation that she is, in fact, on the right path ("It's a peer-voted award," she points out), Monét was disillusioned by the aftermath of that career-altering evening. "Once you have an accolade like that, people often look for a reason to discredit why you got it," she nearly whispers, forlornness staining her pillowy voice. It's the age-old tale of support from those around you until your achievements highlight their own insecurities. "Once you get there, there's another group of people that question the validity of your deservingness," she continues. Monét found that it is indeed lonely at the top.

Regardless of the online chatter, the award came with an immense sense of personal pride and media attention, so it didn't take long for plenty of doors to swing open to new opportunities for the performer. Rarely, however, did they reveal a recording studio. "After the Grammys, I was so busy that I wasn't in the studio that much, which I don't like," states Monét. Her life quickly became a flurry of rehearsals as she ran the music-festival gambit and devoted every other minute to press engagements, interviews, and event appearances. "I just had waited for those types of opportunities for so long that my team was saying yes to everything," she explains. The artist doesn't blame anyone; it was a learning lesson all around. But ultimately, this period dragged her into the undertow of marketing and away from what earned those awards in the first place.

"It's one reason why this album has taken longer," she explains. "I think—pending [a Grammy] happens again—I would do the opposite and bunker down in the studio," she theorizes, looking toward life after what I'll call Victoria Monét 7 for now. She calls the now-necessary content side of her career nonstop and admittedly foreign to what she once imagined the music industry would look like. "But I'm down because I want to make sure the music goes as far as it can," she tells me. The grit required for years of work to finally become the people's favorite new artist is momentarily evident in her tone. Her upcoming album, which I'm told is arriving later this year, is one she's dubbed her very own Thriller—referencing Michael Jackson's genre-defying sixth studio album. I've coincidentally just returned from devouring every frame of the film Michael, starring the eponymous star's very own nephew, Jafaar Jackson, over a giant bowl of movie theater popcorn, so naturally, I press her for more details.

"When he was making Thriller, he wanted to expand beyond what people would think of him doing," she goes on. The artist cites Jackson's genre-bending next moves—dabbling with yacht rock and other contrasting themes to push past the confines of R&B—as part of the driving force behind her new project. "The album really doesn't have that much of a box, so it will have some moments that are more surprising sonically but also some that feel like a natural progression from Jaguar to now," she adds.

Such is evident in the seven tracks I streamed from a password-locked vault: sprinkled with vintage guitar and violin strings, peppered with synth, and glazed in sweetly seductive vocals. A nostalgic, orchestral opening track reminds me of grainy VHS tapes and dancing Disney princesses—a nod to her Southern grandma's family room, the birthplace of so many of Monét's earliest musical references. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Sound of Music, and Mary Poppins were repeat hits in her grandparents' home, which eventually played a role in the performer's evolving music and style identity. The world will soon see the nostalgic influence of Dorothy Dandridge glamour shots, Singing in the Rain costuming, and the choral performances of Mr. Holland's Opus shaping Monét's new chapter.

"The jaguar exists within me always, but I'm feeling like a softer version of myself [now]," she explains. "The claws are retracted, and [it's] not growling. I'm more peaceful. I keep thinking about the caterpillar … and the transformation, the complete release of itself that has to occur for it to become a butterfly."

The synergy that Monét feels with Jackson and her other childhood references wasn't just the catalyst (or shall I say chrysalis?) for her new work. It was a wake-up call. The artist realized that she was on the precipice of something great but ultimately needed to do some shedding to move forward and continue to grow as both an artist and a person. "That's what this year is about: growing spiritually," she explains. "It's about being a better person while I'm here … [and] making sure that I have the longevity and mental capacity to handle the stresses that come with whatever my next chapter is bringing. I'm asking for more, so [I'm] making sure I'm equipped to handle more."

Spiritual and personal growth have been a theme throughout the songwriting process and slowly seeped into the project itself. "[This album] feels a lot more clearheaded, more pure," she explains. This clarity allowed her to show love to herself, offer it to others ("even people who don't even really deserve it," she muses), and thread it into every pulse of the music. I mean that literally. She's infused healing frequencies into some melodies for alignment. You can think of these upcoming tracks as your modern-day "Ring My Bell," the 1979 hit from Anita Ward that went viral on TikTok for its 432-hertz pitch—thought by many to be a fast track for abundance manifestation. Monét herself is a believer, having once danced under an eclipse moon while looping Ward's chart-topper in her bedroom.

If being a singer-songwriter, Grammy winner, and mother (yes, Monét has a doting 5-year-old daughter) weren't enough notches on the multi-hyphenate’s belt, she's decided to add another—this time in a completely different industry. After graduating at the top of her class this spring from the Institute of Culinary Education in Pasadena, California, she can officially call herself Chef Monét. A few of her newest acts of service include hosting generous brunches and dinner parties for her friends that include fried chicken and caramelized waffles, French omelets and chives, and date cake with bourbon ice cream.

"It's something that I wanted to do forever," she responds when I ask her what sparked this new venture. "I had such a crazy year last year emotionally that I was starting to look into it, and I would put my foot in and then be one step out." Eventually, the star set her mind to it. "I said, 'Fuck it!'" she exclaims with a laugh. "I went on the school tour, started talking to them about what it would require, including the externship that I have to do to get my actual diploma. Then a couple of days after that, Teyana Taylor posted that she was in culinary school, and I was like, 'Wait, what? You too? I'm going too!'" It's like freshman year all over again.

Though I lack the cooking prowess that Monét now wields, I've experienced the "mind wandering" phenomenon, as detailed in a paper by assistant psychology professor Zachary Irving at the University of Virginia, while chopping vegetables. Essentially, they're those brilliant, crystal-clear ideas that seem to fall out of the sky once your brain quiets down during a repetitive task. Seeing as I've gotten some of my best introductory lines and styling ideas when dicing up cucumbers, I ask if culinary school ever aided the songwriting process of her upcoming album or even unstuck a bout of writer's block. Unsurprisingly, she says yes.

"I actually came up with one of the songs on my album while making cookies," she says with a grin. The act itself became meditative: listening to music while cooking and humming while nursing a pan over open flames. "It all goes together, food and music," she states. But when it comes to songwriting in general, Monét has found that the process is entirely attached to ego.

"Opposite of writer's block to me is an ego death: just going in and getting all the 'bad' things out—the bad melodies, the bad songs, bad lyrics—and not judging yourself for it," she muses. Whether that's in the kitchen or in the studio, Monét has learned to trust in her abilities, and that includes the initial shed that each songwriting session requires. "Eventually, you'll work your way into the songs you start to feel good about, but you have to do it without ego," she adds.

At this point in her career—one marked by graduation caps, Grammys, and a growing daughter—you'll see Instagram comments like "Queen of side quests!" all over the star's social media posts. While it's true that Monét refuses to let herself become stagnant (she has future goals that include massage therapy, gardening, and learning ancient Chinese medicine), one thing that will forever remain firmly rooted in place is family. Hazel, the star's kindergarten-age daughter, has accolades of her own despite her small stature, for the energetic, button-nosed kid made history as the youngest Grammy nominee at age 2 when her mother's song "Hollywood" was nominated for Best Traditional R&B Performance in 2024.

Though Monét’s mini-me achieved a goal before pre-K that most musicians won't in their lifetimes, the star is leaving her daughter's future in her own little hands. "Just yesterday, I was looking at this paper she brought home from school that said when she grew up, she wanted to be a dentist, which was my first time hearing that one," Monét says with silvery laughter. "But she also wanted to be a hairstylist, a singer, a scientist. She's taking jiujitsu. She's in piano. She loves dance—she's at my rehearsal right now. As soon as she gets here, she's in the mirror, posing, dancing, choreographing, and telling people what to do." She gets it from her mama, no?

Monét's relationships have long been the source of much chatter, but at this stage in her life, the artist is approaching romance opportunistically. "It's really hard," she says in response to my question about dating as a successful woman. "It's hard, one, to attract anyone who is going to understand this lifestyle [and], two, to maintain it. So I've just been focused on my daughter and me and what I have ahead because when I'm in a relationship, I'm prioritizing the other person as well." It should be that way, she says, but with an upcoming tour, a busy kid, and a forthcoming album, there are only so many hours in the day. However, she won't say no to a fun date.

In all, it's Monét's main wish for her daughter to have a primary example of accomplishing dreams, hobbies, side quests, and more as a mother. "I'm just trying to show [Hazel] that she really can do it, even when it's hard or you don't get the right amount of sleep or you don't feel great about your work or whatever it is," she explains, her voice breaking ever so slightly. "I'm just pushing through and letting her see by actions, not just by words."

Though artists, especially women, are taught to measure their talents by their accolades, Monét has taken care to reshape her relationship with success into something much healthier way before this next chapter unfolds—making sure she doesn't "live and die" by awards. "I would love to experience another Grammy and that feeling of being a musician's musician, but I also want to make sure that if that doesn't happen, that I don't feel any less powerful or less supported or less successful," she explains. "[I'm] just learning a new way to detach from certain things and grow, but ultimately with love."

Photographer: Erica Snyder
Stylist: Dione Davis
Hairstylist: Davontae Washington
Makeup Artist: Diana Shin
Manicurist: Coca Michelle
Creative Director: Amy Armani
Set Designer: Lucy Holt
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Producer: Erin Corbett

“We’re off to a great start,” Camila Mendes croons from the other side of her screen, her eyes wide with amusement and her sharp, chin-grazing bob almost perking up at the sound of my voice. Within minutes of logging on to our Zoom call, my Miami-laced tone tips her off to our similar backgrounds. We both grew up in South Florida suburbia, a humid, heat wave–filled swampland that’s both increasingly chaotic and painfully claustrophobic at the same time. She puts it best when she states that our hometown, and the bubble it occupies in our origin stories, is like another world.

Maybe that’s why our hour-long interview feels strangely familiar, much more akin to a reality-television confessional than a prim-and-proper affair. She talks about her fitness routine and starring in a Mr. Fantasy (rumored to be her former Riverdale costar KJ Apa) music video. When Mendes learns we graduated from the same high school, only a few years apart, our conversation derails into a trauma-bonding session uniquely reserved for those of us who survived South Florida adolescence. By the end, talking to Mendes feels much less like interviewing a celebrity and more like catching up with a cool upperclassman I would have passed in the hallway all those years ago.

The ease and flow of our conversation almost distracts me from how, unlike the hazy, slow life most people live in Miami, Mendes is in the middle of one of the biggest years in her career so far. In the first half of 2026 alone, she’s been attached to three separate upcoming projects; her cofounded production company, Honor Role, just released its second feature film, Idiotka; and somewhere in the middle of it all, she’s planning a wedding to longtime partner and former Música costar Rudy Mancuso.

And then, of course, there’s the small matter of starring in a major summer blockbuster. This month, Mendes steps into the sprawling, nostalgia-drenched world of Masters of the Universe, the live-action reimagining of the beloved ’80s He-Man franchise starring Nicholas Galitzine, Idris Elba, and Jared Leto. In it, Mendes plays the sword-slinging Teela, who teams up with Prince Adam, played by Galitzine, to defend their home planet of Eternia from the evil wrath of Skeletor. It’s the kind of studio summer spectacle built for oversize budgets, Comic-Con hysteria, and inevitable internet discourse. Masters is the largest stage Mendes has occupied since her breakout years as Riverdale’s resident mean girl, Veronica Lodge. No big deal or anything.

“I’ve never been a part of something of this scale. I’ve never been a part of a proper press tour before, and I hear it’s really chaotic in a fun way but also really exhausting,” Mendes admits, nodding to the high-intensity demands of the cast’s global premieres rolling out over the next several weeks. It’s a whirlwind of red carpets, international red-eye flights, and press-tour obligations with no educational crash course to help one prepare. But Mendes is used to it. She stays busy. Her life in this era, she jokes, is not unlike the infamous Lady Gaga meme: “No sleep. Bus, club, another club, another club, next place.” The image tracks.

Despite what her hectic schedule may imply, or the fact that Mendes’s name stays in the headlines of Deadline articles posted across Instagram by talent agencies and stan accounts, she loves having nothing to do. “I’m not someone who seeks busyness, genuinely, and I feel like if you’d talk to any of my friends or family, they’d laugh at me for saying that,” Mendes notes. “I think I’ve gotten a lot better at saying no to things as I’ve gotten older.”

There’s a surprising steadiness to Mendes when we speak, the kind that feels slightly at odds with the hypervisibility that’s followed her since Riverdale catapulted her into mainstream recognition nearly a decade ago. Despite only being a few years older than me, she speaks with the kind of emotional clarity that usually only arrives after either a complete existential unraveling or a very expensive wellness retreat—or in Mendes’s case, both.

In 2024, the actor attended the Hoffman Process, a personal-growth retreat beloved by a very specific subset of spiritually curious celebrities—think Gwyneth Paltrow, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, and Sienna Miller. The retreat, structured as an intensive seven-day program, has become something of a rite of passage for Hollywood figures attempting to untangle themselves from years of industry burnout. Mendes’s decision to go came at a particularly loaded moment in her life: fresh off the heels of her Saturn Return and after Riverdale’s seven-season run came to a close—a chapter of her life that, for nearly her entire adult career up until that point, dictated everything from her public identity to the rhythm of her day-to-day existence. What happens after the role that made you who you are becomes past tense?

It’s no surprise the actor needed to figure out what was next in the void of insurmountable change. “I was going through a period in my life where I didn’t know how to say no. I kept blaming the world, kept blaming everybody but myself for being busy, and had so much anger,” Mendes admits. “That experience at Hoffman really helped me clarify for myself what my priorities are and what I want out of life. I now have such an easier time determining what’s worth my time and what isn’t.”

That emotional clarity has seeped into the way Mendes approaches acting, too. Despite starring in increasingly larger-scale productions—where performance can often feel more manufactured than personal—Mendes insists the work only clicks for her when it comes from a place of authenticity. “To me, acting is being truthful, and that’s why it comes more naturally to me,” she says. It’s why she speaks about her characters less like fictional creations and more like emotional extensions of herself. Whether it’s Veronica Lodge or Teela, Mendes feels protective of every woman she plays. They all carry fragments of her.

On paper, Teela and Mendes don’t exactly seem spiritually aligned. One is a sword-wielding fantasy warrior born out of an ’80s toy empire, and the other is an actor who speaks thoughtfully about boundaries, emotional healing, and the importance of doing absolutely nothing whenever possible—their hair colors don’t even match—but Mendes insists that stepping into Teela’s world revealed more of herself than she initially expected.

In many ways, Teela’s emotional arc mirrors the lesson Mendes says she’s only recently begun learning in her own life: Softness isn’t weakness. You don’t have to become emotionally detached to be powerful.

Strength, particularly for female superheroes on-screen, is so often written as emotional restraint, Mendes says, noting she’s often felt disconnected from several on-screen female superheroes in the past. “To me, Teela’s journey in this film is about finding strength in vulnerability. Teela was really in touch with her physical strength but not so much with her emotional side,” Mendes adds. “In her mind, she’s like, ‘I’m on my own in this world. Everyone is incompetent, and I need to take care of everything,’ but at the end of the day, there’s just a really sad little girl inside of her who feels abandoned.”

The 2026 reimaging of the world that He-Man, Teela, and the rest of the Masters of the Universe characters live in feels fitting for this moment. There’s a reason director Travis Knight and the rest of the cast felt compelled to tell the story of Prince Adam of Eternia, unlocking his inner strength by accessing his emotional, vulnerable side. We’re living in a cultural moment increasingly defined by hyperperformed masculinity—where dominance is mistaken for confidence, emotional detachment gets reframed as power, and entire online ecosystems profit off convincing young men that empathy is weakness. Against that backdrop, Masters feels less like a reinvention and more like a course correction.

Despite acknowledging that, though, Mendes assures me there’s no woke Hollywood agenda the movie is trying to force-feed audiences, despite what some circles of the internet will have you believe. “There is no agenda other than to breathe life back into a very beloved franchise,” she urges. “But it just so happens that one of the themes explored in this movie is masculinity—to be expected in a movie about a character named He-Man,” Mendes adds, referencing Galitzine’s layered portrayal of the iconic hero. “It’s not just about how masculinity can hinder us but also how it can help us.”

In a direct contrast to He-Man, Teela’s entire worldview hinges on self-reliance: survive first, soften later. Mendes realized early on that embodying that mentality meant rebuilding not just the character emotionally but herself physically. Then came the muscles. Lots of them.

“Honestly, training was one of the most exciting parts of Masters for me,” Mendes recalls fondly. Alongside Galitzine, the actor spent months training in Los Angeles and London with stunt coordinators, nutritionists, and physicians to achieve the yoked-up look of Eternia’s royal battalion. But Mendes’s transformation wasn’t just about looking convincing while wielding a sword or surviving grueling stunts—it became something unexpectedly personal.

In a genre where female superheroes are often expected to appear impossibly lean while somehow possessing superhuman strength, Mendes wanted Teela’s body to look like she could fly planes and jump off of freeways, no suspension of disbelief required. “A really valuable lesson for me was realizing that not only does strength look different on everybody, but being strong and looking strong are two different things,” Mendes notes. Health is wealth, as they say. Mendes isn’t buying it, though.

“Our image of what strong looks like is really distorted,” Mendes adds. Deliberately gaining weight, even for a role, was something that might have terrified the actor in her 20s. Mendes has spoken candidly in the past about her struggle with and recovery from an eating disorder. For years, thinness felt synonymous with success. Today, Mendes’s experience in becoming bigger, even if just for the span of a few months while filming as Teela, is something she almost misses. “I didn’t want to lose all of my hard work,” she admits, looking back at the experience. “It took so long to get there. It’s so challenging, and then you become so proud of your muscles and how strong you feel.”

Mendes’s reinvention, both physically and emotionally, is a theme that’s been bubbling up in her life over the last few years. Before venturing to the planet of Eternia, Mendes had worked on a few acting projects outside of Riverdale. There was Do Revenge, a campy, teenage dramedy opposite Stranger Things actor Maya Hawke; Upgraded, a glossy Netflix rom-com about the fine-art world; and Música, a semibiographical coming-of-age Brazilian American love story that was just as important on-screen as it was off (Mendes famously met her now-fiancé Rudy Mancuso on set). Project by project, Mendes began reconstructing an identity that existed separately from the corporate CW machine that first made her famous mere months after graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

“Once I started to do other projects outside of Riverdale, I really started to gain my sense of self back,” Mendes admits, reflecting on the bubble she and her costars turned best friends, Lili Reinhart, Madelaine Petsch, and KJ Apa, lived in over the course of seven years. There was an element of surrendering herself to the script—she says she was just a 22-year-old girl showing up to collect a paycheck at her first job—and a relief that came with the knowledge that sometimes, things were out of her control. “I had to detach myself from overidentifying with my role on the show and what it meant to people,” Mendes notes, alluding to the all-encompassing fan wars and Tumblr discourse that are synonymous with teenage sitcom culture. “I put a lot of pressure on myself, and I let the comments penetrate my mind too much.”

It wasn’t until launching her production studio, Honor Role, that Mendes found her respite from the chaos of the industry. Amid the 2023 SAG-AFTRA writers and actor strikes and small but mighty career burnout, Mendes and fellow actor Rachel Matthews launched their incubator-style production company rooted in storytelling on an auteur scale, offering first-time writers and directors a platform to create.

“Honor Role has reminded me of my own creative abilities outside of performing, and it’s reconnected me to my own autonomy,” Mendes explains. “Having my own production company is like tapping into my own inner power. It’s something I can always fall back on if I’m not seeing a certain role or project in the industry. We can just go out and create it ourselves.”

Mendes, lovingly, makes movies for the “girls and gays,” she states. Just like her on-screen roles, her work at Honor Role is no different. The company launched its first project with a queer coming-of-age indie, Griffin in Summer, which was honored at the GLAAD Media Awards. Next up was Idiotka, a recently released immigrant-focused comedy that touches on the perils of the fashion industry and the reality-TV ecosystem. There are dozens of projects in Mendes’s back pocket she can’t wait to produce when the time is right, she shares, particularly those with a Latin focus. Being Brazilian American, Mendes never saw herself reflected on-screen in a nuanced, major role and, to this day, doesn’t.

“There are not a lot of us out there being positioned or offered meaty roles that will garner them Oscars one day,” she notes, adding that she can count the number of breakout, executive-respected Latin actors on her fingers. She dishes about a project that she’s been developing for years, starring an all-Latina ensemble, and you can practically hear the quiver in her voice when she breaks down what it means to her. “Being Latin has only served my artistry, and I think a lot of my peers would say the same,” Mendes notes. “Our culture lends itself to being good performers.”

With Honor Role flourishing and new acting horizons under her belt, Mendes is cruising into her 30s with a steadiness and ease she admits her younger self—the 20-year-old ball of anxiety—could have never imagined. At this point in her life, she knows the quiet strength in harnessing her emotions. “I want my willingness to be vulnerable and show the deepest, most shameful, and ugliest parts of myself through my characters to help others connect to their own feelings,” Mendes explains. If she can do that well, the job she’s devoted her life to doing is done.

For decades, women in Hollywood have been taught to view turning 30 as less of a milestone and more as a warning sign—an invisible countdown ominously looming in the background. The entertainment industry has long treated youth as its most prized commodity, creating the perception that a woman's relevance, marketability, or appeal is tied to how closely she aligns with an ever-shifting ideal. As a result, many women are made to feel as though they're constantly being measured against the next generation of talent. (Lest we forget the Substance of it all!)

Hollywood, of course, sells reinvention as the antidote, and nowadays, everyone is buying it. New stylists. New faces. New bodies. Entire career revivals are built around the illusion that, with enough discipline and luck, you can shed your old skin fast enough to remain an object of desire for the public to project their fantasies onto. But Mendes doesn’t seem particularly interested in outrunning herself anymore.

There’s a quiet confidence to the way Mendes speaks about her future, one rooted less in reinvention for reinvention’s sake and more in reclaiming what’s always been there—her artistry, her creativity, or her love for connecting with the most vulnerable parts of herself. The irony, of course, is that Hollywood will probably frame this era of Mendes’s career as a comeback or transformation. Mendes, meanwhile, might simply call it finally becoming herself again.

Photographer: Gleeson Paulino
Creative Direction: Amy Armani
Stylist: Lauren Eggertsen
Hairstylist: Lauren Palmer-Smith
Makeup Artist: Jen Tioseco
Manicurist: Thuy Nguyen
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Producers: Lindsay Ferro and Luciana De La Fe
DP: Sam Miron
Video Producer: Kellie Scott
Special Thanks to @blackwidowmustang and @goldlinebar

ICYMI, Maude Apatow is Who What Wear's May Cover Star, and I'm about to take a glamour-soaked nosedive into the hair and makeup details behind each of her gorgeous looks. According to makeup artist Alexandra French, the beauty aesthetic was meant to be "ethereal, intelligent, and quietly sensual." Soft skin and hair, subtle structure, and just enough definition to hold up against the styling and photography (without overpowering Maude, herself), was the goal. Below, French and Apatow's hairstylist Rena Calhoun take me through their process, must-have products, and favorite moments from shoot day. Keep scrolling!

According to Calhoun, the inspiration for Apatow's various hair looks was a true product of the team's collaboration. "With every look, we took a moment to connect on what felt right in that specific context, allowing things to unfold intuitively," she shares. "It was very much about moving together with a shared sense of creativity."

"Collaboration on set is always one of my favorite parts of the process," agrees French. "With a shoot like this, everything has to feel cohesive, so, from the beginning, there was a constant dialogue between hair, styling, nails, and makeup—the goal is to work together to create the same emotional tone and visual language, instead of separate standout moments that feel siloed."

Since the styling had a beautiful balance between softness and graphic structure, French wanted to echo that in the makeup by keeping the skin soft while still adding subtle sculptural elements around the eyes and cheeks. "Rena and I didn't want anything to feel too 'done,'" she explains. "Every adjustment was made with the lighting and photography in mind."

Artistic restraint was also pivotal. "Sometimes the most impactful beauty looks come from knowing when to stop adding," she tells me. "Maude naturally brings so much atmosphere and emotion to an image, so the makeup was really about supporting that energy rather than competing with it." If the final images feel timeless, soft, and a little dream-like, that was, according to French, exactly the intention.

On shoot days, especially when she's creating multiple looks as she did here with Apatow, Calhoun likes to keep product use light so that the hair stays flexible all day long and is easy to transform. "It’s all about maintaining movement and being able to pivot quickly without any buildup," she explains. But one product she does always start with is the Virtue Labs Create Style-Setting Hair Volumizing Primer ($40), which she applies to her clients' damp hair. "It gives me the perfect foundation; it's light, workable, and has just enough memory to support the structure of whatever direction the shoot takes us in."

In addition to the Virtue Labs Volumizing Primer (aka "the scaffolding" of each look), Calhoun also recommends Oribe's Superfine Strong Hold Hairspray ($46), which she dubs "the absolute best hair spray" thanks to its incredible versatility and strong, yet feather-light hold. If she's trying to inject a shot of quick texture into a look, she'll reach for Bumble and bumble's Surf Infusion Sea Salt Spray ($36). "A good salt spray works on many textures to give the hair a lived-in feeling—it helps negate that freshly ironed or styled look I sometimes want to avoid."

For this shoot, French tells me she wanted the makeup to feel cinematic and emotionally understated—polished but still intimate and human. "Maude has such delicate, expressive features, so the process was really about enhancing what’s already there rather than transforming her." Vintage fashion editorials also served as inspiration. "Think soft analog photography, and that dreamy, slightly surreal feeling one gets while looking at old magazine campaigns," she explains. "One image feels very earthy and romantic, while the other leans more graphic and experimental with color and light. The makeup had to sit beautifully in both worlds."

Unsurprisingly, skin prep was a huge part of French's process as she wanted to ensure Apatow's skin looked hydrated, alive, and almost light-reflective without appearing overly glossy. For makeup, she kept the actress's complexion extremely sheer by using a lightweight skin tint mixed with moisturizer that she worked into the skin with a damp sponge and small buffing brush. Concealer was only placed where it was needed, mostly around the center of the face to keep the skin dimensional and natural. "I softly set only the areas that needed longevity while allowing the high points of the face to keep their natural sheen," she notes.

For Apatow's eyes, French started minimal with some fun, spike-y lashes to achieve a '60s-inspired look before transitioning to a more dramatic smoky-eye vibe later on in the day. "My favorite features to emphasize on Maude are definitely her eyes and bone structure. She has this incredible ability to communicate emotion very subtly, so I never want the makeup to distract from that."

"For lips, I used a neutral rose tone pressed into the lips with my fingers instead of applying it directly from the tube," shares French. "This created a softer, more lived-in effect—the overall application process was very layered and diffused, with most products pressed into the skin rather than heavily brushed on."

Maude Apatow hesitates over her drink, seated across from me in the terrace room at Tower Bar, a buzzy West Hollywood mainstay that shifts from restaurant by day to bar by night.

There's a lipstick print on the glass. "Wait—is it horrible if I send this back?" she asks, turning the glass in her hand as if she's contemplating whether to ignore it. I'd just switched tables before Apatow arrived, trying to find somewhere more discreet, and mixed up our waters in the shuffle. I cut in quickly to apologize and explain that it was my mistake. She laughs, easing instantly: "I didn't want you to be like, 'Wow, Maude sends her water back.'"

We start again. Apatow orders an oat milk latte; I go for a matcha. We add hummus just in case, a decision that comes with a quick "only if you want it" before she settles back into the conversation. A few minutes later, she glances at my drink and leans in slightly. "That's like… the milkiest matcha I've ever seen," she muses a little incredulously.

From there, the conversation unravels in the best way. A self-proclaimed matcha lover, she insists I try Handles on Sunset—"you have to go"—then asks if I've been to Faregrounds. Our discussion drifts into coffee, then food, then travel. Hong Kong, Shanghai, London. She's heading to Asia soon (it'll be her first time in China), and something shifts when she talks about it. Her energy lifts, her eyes light up, and suddenly, she's jotting down recommendations and asking questions. "I love traveling," she smiles. "It's my favorite thing in the world to do."

The conversation doesn't move in a straight line. It loops, meanders, doubles back. But it never loses its thread. The detours reveal what Apatow gravitates toward—what she pays attention to, what she gets excited by, and the way she processes things as they come.

For someone who grew up so close to the industry, Apatow's relationship to it feels remarkably self-directed. Her parents—Judd Apatow, the filmmaker behind The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Funny People and a defining voice in modern comedy, and Leslie Mann, whose performances have long carried that same emotional specificity—are part of the landscape she comes from, but they're not the framework she operates within.

She speaks instead about structure, school, and being a kid who was already planning how to get from where she was to where she aspired to be. "I was like, 'How am I going to get to Broadway now? How many years do I need to take of tap? Ballet? Jazz?'" she says. There's a clarity in the way she describes it but also a sense that she was willing to wait. Despite her acting debut at age 9 in Knocked Up and a high school musical theater Cabaret role that led to a very full-circle moment (more on that later), acting became a serious pursuit once Apatow got to college. She started auditioning almost immediately, approaching acting with that same sense of forward motion. When Euphoria came along and Apatow landed the role of Lexi Howard, she took it.

"It's so rare and so lucky to be given any opportunity like that," she recalls. "But I also didn't even know if the pilot was gonna get picked up. I just had no idea."

No idea indeed. What followed was something else entirely: a show that expanded beyond expectation, a cast that grew up alongside it, and a character—Lexi—whose evolution felt quietly radical. Lexi begins as an observer, positioned on the edges of other people's chaos, before stepping into her own narrative later in the story. Apatow understands that arc intimately."I think I felt more like Lexi when I was younger," she says. "Really shy, really unsure." That feeling has shifted. "I have a better sense of who I am now. Lexi is still trying to figure that out," she continues.

What she returns to first, though, isn't just the character. It's the people around her and what's happened since—the scale of it. "It's been really incredible," she says. "It's like watching everyone achieve all of their dreams."

And that sentiment is not abstract. The cast has scattered outward, building careers far beyond the show itself, something she's watched in real time. "It's hard to describe how insane it is," she says.

There's pride in the way she talks about them but also something more personal—a sense of having grown up side by side without fully knowing what was ahead. "Just thinking about us being little kids and having no idea what was in store to now… It's insane," she says.

She smiles, almost in disbelief. "It's the best-case scenario that all of your friends are thriving," she says.

Later, I ask—carefully—if she'd be open to speaking about the late Angus Cloud, who played Fezco on Euphoria, the soft-spoken, protective drug dealer with a big heart. She nods. "Angus was just the best person to be around," she says. "He was so funny and full of life—such an energy all the time." She pauses, then continues, "We lost that when we lost him."

There's a moment of quiet after she says it. There's no need to expand further.

The conversation gradually shifts to what has come since. At one point, it returns to a childhood ambition she once mapped out step-by-step: live musical theater. Not Broadway but the West End, starring in Cabaret as Sally Bowles, a role that feels almost too fitting given her early fixation on the production. "I was like, 'I peaked,'" she laughs. "That was the most special, magical summer of my life."

"The experience," she shares, "is incomparable." Theater demands a unique kind of presence, one that can't be edited, softened, or revisited. "There's nothing like live theater," she says. "When you're on a TV show, you kind of have no idea if anything you're doing is working or not. Onstage, you really are right there with the audience."

That intimacy comes with its own pressures. Apatow has long been open about her anxiety, particularly around performance, and the way it manifests physically. Preparation, then, becomes less about perfection and more about control—about agency. "What I can do is prepare as much as possible," she says. "That's the only thing that's in my control." That awareness of when she's being her own worst enemy and how to pull herself out of it is something she's learned over time. "I really try not to get in my own way," she says. "I can tell when I am. I guess being able to tell is my growth."

That same instinct to prepare and understand the mechanics before stepping fully into them carries directly into Poetic License, her directorial debut.

"I'm glad I didn't do this earlier," she says of directing. "I don't think I would have been ready."

There's no grand pivot, no need to announce this project as a turning point. Instead, it feels like the result of Apatow's deliberate patience, something she waited for until she understood how to do it on her own terms. Poetic License is a quietly offbeat comedy built on character, rhythm, and dialogue that echoes the charm of early 2000s indie rom-coms—pleasantly off-kilter in a way that really works. Its tone is occasionally enigmatic, brought to life by the particular relationships within it.

Mann is cast as the lead, Liz—a mother who is warm and slightly eccentric and whose daughter is also her closest confidant. Mann's performance anchors the film with an unfiltered familiarity that never tips into predictability. It reads less as performance and more as something observed. Apatow was intentional about this perspective from the start, tracing it back to the script itself.

Apatow is contemplative when I question how much of her and Mann's real-life relationship mirrors the mother-daughter relationship in Poetic License, in which the daughter is played by Nico Parker: "I think there are parts of it that do. In the original script that Raffi [Donatich] wrote, that relationship was one of my favorite parts about it." She pauses, then adds, "Working on the script with my mom in mind and rewriting it, I just wanted it to feel like what I knew but amplified and weirder."

That dynamic grounds the film in authenticity. From there, it evolves. The characters and their conversations overlap, drift, sharpen, then settle again in ways that feel lived-in.

It's a dynamic Apatow was especially conscious of on set. She talks about letting scenes stretch far beyond what was written, allowing actors to play with and repeat and circle a moment until something unexpected surfaced, then pulling from those longer takes in the edit to build something larger. There's an ease to the performances but also a clear sense of direction. "I love when things feel a little looser," she says. "When people can riff off each other and you get something that you wouldn't have planned." But that looseness only works when the groundwork is there. "You have to know what the scene is first, what it needs to do. Otherwise, it just becomes noise," she adds.

Apatow chose not to act in the film, despite considering the possibility. She wanted to focus fully on directing and understanding the mechanics of it, the rhythm of a set, the way scenes come together and fall apart. "I need to figure out everything else first as part of my preparation," she says. "I need to know everything, or as much as I can, before I can split my focus."

So she honed her attention. She prepared, cautiously and deliberately, to understand how to shape a performance without being inside of it while also trying to figure out how that translates into comedy. That preparation shows up everywhere—in the pacing, in the performances, in the quieter details that hold the film together. The score, in particular, stood out. It's subtle but precise, shaping the tone without announcing itself and sharpening moments of tension and release in ways that feel instinctive.

When I bring up her use of music for comedic effect, she laughs, as if still slightly inside the process of it. "That was the hardest part," she says. "We were still figuring it out right up until the end." Then she leans into what that actually meant in practice. "It's so hard to not emphasize comedy in a way that feels like 'Look at this. This is supposed to be funny,'" she explains. What she's describing is timing as well as restraint. It's the effort to avoid tipping a scene into something overly signposted, too cleanly landed, or too eager to be laughed at. "It is really hard to figure out music in a comedy, especially because I think our comedic style was a little bit more subtle too," she continues. There's a tension in that—between underscoring something and overexplaining it, between letting a moment land and pushing it into a punch line. The risk, she suggests, is always the same: crossing into something that feels a little too explicit or shifting the emotional temperature of a scene in a way that breaks its rhythm.

Poetic License also marks the first film from Jewelbox Pictures, the production company Apatow cofounded with her best friend Olivia Rosenbloom, whom she met in ninth grade. They worked together for years across different projects before formalizing it into something more structured.

"Everything that doesn't come naturally to me does to her," she says. "Thank God." With Rosenbloom, she's settled into a rhythm—knowing instinctively when to lead, when to step back, when to let something pass between them without overthinking it. They've been steadily developing a slate of projects together without rushing to define each one too early, including a romantic comedy that Apatow hopes to both direct and star in. One of her guiding ambitions is simple and unadorned. "Getting to work with people that inspire me and have fun doing it," she says. "I just want to do that forever if I can."

By the time we're wrapping up, the conversation has covered more than either of us expected—film, theater, anxiety, travel, work, matcha.

Fashion comes up almost incidentally as she talks about working with her stylist Mimi Cuttrell and the push-and-pull of the collaboration. "I think I'm naturally drawn to maybe some quirkier stuff," she says. "Sometimes, Mimi is like, 'That's too crazy,' and I need her to reel me in. But I love Mimi. She's great, has such good taste, and I trust her." In her everyday life, though, Apatow doesn't think of herself as particularly styled. "I'm not that stylish in general," she says matter-of-factly. "I love dressing up with Mimi, but I dress very plain day-to-day."

She's in a white tank, a soft heather-gray cardigan slipping slightly off one shoulder, loose black jeans, and ballet flats and has a Prada bag slung casually on her chair. I offer that it reads a little model off duty. She laughs before I've even finished the sentence. "I hope?" she says. "Or slob. I can't tell."

We laugh, and she leans back slightly as I ask her one final question. Do you feel like you're in the right moment for all of this now?

She doesn't answer immediately, then speaks carefully, like she's choosing the simplest version of something she's already considered. "I feel like I've evolved enough as a person to be grounded and have a point of view," she says. "I have more energy now than I ever have."

There's no sense of urgency in the way she says it—just a quiet certainty that she's arrived at it in her own time.

And that, more than anything, is what makes it feel true. Maude Apatow is ready now.

Talent: Maude Apatow
Photographer: Dana Trippe
Stylist: Carolina Orrico
Hairstylist: Rena Calhoun
Makeup Artist: Alexandra French
Manicurist: Caroline Cotten
Creative Director: Amy Armani
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Producer: Lindsay Ferro

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Step into the universe of the coolest creatives in the fashion industry with our series My World, where readers will discover how the top stylists, designers, and tastemakers built their careers and get a peek into their favorite restaurants, beloved albums, fashion finds, etiquette rules they stand by, and so much more.

If you work in fashion, you might already know of Jenny Walton, or chances are you’ve seen a street style photo of her without even realizing it. Take one scroll through her Instagram, and you’ll immediately feel her sunshiny personality—a genuine candor (that's never cloying) that comes through on our call.

Since growing up in rural New Jersey and getting a BFA in fashion design from Parsons School of Design, Walton has been designing, illustrating, and writing and become known for her distinctive personal style—meticulously curating a dream wardrobe through hours on Vinted and The RealReal, sifting through vintage stores around the world, and dressing herself for fashion shows. This led to her becoming Vogue’s vintage shopping columnist.

Now, she has a book coming out on April 29, Jenny Sais Quoi: Adventures in Vintage & Personal Style, named after her Substack newsletter, which is currently available for preorder. Ahead of its release, we talk about everything from her closet and makeup bag to style icons like Georgia O’Keeffe, Diana Vreeland, Edith Sitwell, and Virginia Woolf; New York, Milan, and what’s next (California); and an assortment of her other all-time favorite things: Miuccia Prada, The Red Shoes (1948), caffè macchiatos, and her best vintage find yet, a fixer-upper in northern Tuscany.

Below, take a look into the world of the illustrator, designer, and writer.

How would you describe growing up in South Jersey?

Cornfields—randomly rural. I think most people in New York City think of Jersey and picture North Jersey, like Newark. The only thing we really enjoyed doing was going to this 24-hour diner nearby called Colonial, and that was the fun place to go late at night. But there really wasn’t too much else, and my mom was too afraid to drive into Philly, so we mostly stayed in New Jersey. But it was also really fun because there were a lot of vintage markets and yard sales. It was very suburban—going to Goodwill and the mall. So it was kind of simplistically nice in a way.

Can you talk me through your career trajectory?

I basically moved to New York when I was 18 to study fashion design at Parsons, and I ended up living there for about 15 years. I thought I'd be a designer or creative director—that was the plan. But then I was an assistant designer at Calypso St Barth for two years. It was a lot of it was emailing with factories and following up on samples, which I wasn’t that good at. I was always more obsessed with going to the flea market on the weekend to find a cool vintage sweater and bringing it in and saying, Can we remake this? I used to take this long subway ride—from the length of the G to the 7 train—because I lived in Park Slope and the office was in Queens, and I would just sketch for the whole hour to work and the hour home.

This was around 2014, when Instagram was really first taking off. So I would post a sketch at the end of the subway ride, and it was the early days where, if you were posting, you could actually gain traction pretty quickly. I got featured on a Discover page, and pretty soon editors and people were reaching out to me to illustrate. That’s when I went off on my own after two years, and I started traveling more. I began getting invited to shows. Over time, I started just by posting my illustrations, and then every once in a while I’d post wearing something vintage. People would say, Oh my God, I love that—where’d you get it? I realized I could document my life—whether it was traveling, vintage finds, or artwork I was working on—and people enjoyed following along.

There are so many people who are creative but might be in a job that doesn’t feel aligned, and they want to figure out a way to get out of it. What advice would you give them?

I think even though online it’s a lot more crowded now, if you have a distinct voice, you can still cut through. It happens all the time—there’s a new voice and you’re like, Oh, who is this person? But they’re so confident, and you really believe them. I guess my main advice is that you really just have to kind of jump, even though it’s horrifying.

My first illustration job—I remember they asked me how much I wanted to be paid. It was to live illustrate in a store in SoHo, and I said $700, because that was my rent. I quit my job based off that. My dad was like, What are you doing? What are you going to eat? You can’t just make your rent. And I was like, I’ll be fine. That's something that’s kind of nice about being younger—you’re a little bit naïve, so you’ll take those big jumps. Even when I was older—30 or 31—I moved to Italy after COVID, and that was also a big jump. I didn’t speak Italian. I moved there with an ex, and then we broke up, so it was like, Okay, I’m on my own—I have to sink or swim. And I ended up figuring out how to get a visa and staying. There were a lot of really hard moments, but it was always worth it to take that jump. You really start to believe in yourself when you fully commit to it.

Do you feel like there was anyone who instilled that sense of self-belief in you?

My friend recently told me, You know, you’re kind of delusional. I think my mother’s a very strong kind of woman. There's no convincing her. And I have two sisters. It was very important that we were incredibly independent and we went after what we wanted, and she never pushed us to study a certain thing, or that we needed to rely on a man or anything like that. So she really helped me be very independent.

Do you remember any formative memories of deciding to pursue fashion design?

My mother’s an amazing quilter, and I learned how to sew from her, so I was already making my own clothes in middle school. As dorky as this is, that’s when Project Runway was in its heyday. My dad’s not a fashion person at all. He would work late nights, but he would come home, and whatever night it came out, it was our bond. We loved that show, and we would watch it together. And I think that’s also where my obsession with Parsons came from. I already had these sewing skills, so I was like, Oh, I think I could actually do it. I think those early reality TV shows opened up this world to us.

Is there a piece of advice that stuck with you from your time at Parsons?

I had great teachers at Parsons, and they instilled in me the importance of hard work, and you can’t really get around putting in the hours. I have an essay about this in the book called "10,000 Hours of Style." I argue that you have to spend a lot of time doing it. Even an aesthetic choice tunes your eye, and I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of hours in vintage stores, looking through racks of things. Now I’m at the point where I can hold something up and I know exactly know how it will look on me—what I like and what I don’t like.

All of our main classes were six hours long at Parsons. I had a lot of great fashion illustration teachers. They really taught us this commitment to taking a lot of time, and there’s no kind of way around it. We were the only building in Parsons that was open until 2 a.m. because we would all stay so late.

I would love to talk about your book and how it came about.

An editor from Phaidon reached out to me two years ago and was like, I’d love to do a Jenny book. I’ve been following you for a long time. What could that be? And I was like, Oh my god, I don’t know. So it took a year of these two-hour-long Zooms we would do every week just talking about what would be fun, what would be cool. I felt like I was up against this thing of… there aren’t really that many good books about fashion or style. It’s really hard to apply rules to everyone, or say You should dress this way or This is the silhouette that looks good. And I say in the book, everybody is different. I grew up with another show, What Not to Wear, where it was really like, Oh, this is your style? It’s ugly. We’re throwing it in a trash can. I really didn’t want anything that felt like a guide, so I wanted to talk more from the perspective of how I found my style or things I’ve found helpful and hopefully inspire people through what I’ve learned but not necessarily tell them what to do.

Can you give a preview of more of the advice or ideas in the book?

I have another essay called "Off the Algorithm," about how you have to get off this thing that’s being fed to you because it’s being fed to a million people, and it’s too easy, too passive. You really need to go into a vintage store—it could be an old bookstore or record store—or watch an old movie. It takes time. I have another one called "Flow State Fashion," all about how you should make a mess—pull out all your stuff and start putting together weird combos, put on music, have fun with it. The beginning is awkward, and you’ll make combinations you’ve done a million times or feel boring, but as you go, you get into a flow state, and then exciting things happen. Another main takeaway, and why I named it Jenny Sais Quoi, is that I use vintage as a special little touch. Whether it’s a new Toteme blouse or a pair of jeans, then you have a cute little vintage belt or a vintage silk scarf, even your grandmother’s ring—it can be that simple, but those little things take your style to a whole new stratosphere and make it unique to you; something nobody can copy.

You have an incredible vintage collection. I know it probably changes, but what is your most prized piece in your collection right now?

I’m obsessed with a very, very bright blue, and there is this 1950s cardigan that I found on Etsy years ago. It’s just in this acrylic kind of wool, not too scratchy, but you just don’t see sweaters this bright. It's the same kind of blue that I hand-painted the [book] cover. So many minimalist brands now rarely go for color, which is frustrating because with Toteme or The Row, I want to see their color choices. The Row just showed a beautiful blue and white long dress at its last show, which was nice. I want to see people take more chances. Even last year, a pop of red was the It color, and it’s like, Okay, for everybody?

People always talk about style words. Do you have ones you identify with?

I hate the defining your style—although it’s a very lovely idea, and I see why it's very tempting—but it feels so reductive. People often ask, What is your style? And, of course, I could say vintage-inspired or classic with a twist or colorful. There are all these adjectives. Thinking in a world where it’s already so reductive, everyone’s style is becoming more and more similar, then also being like, Okay, how can I define it in a few words? feels to me limiting, but I’m slightly a rebel so…

Do you have style icons?

Honestly, I realized as I was writing the book, so many of them are artists, which is really interesting. There’s a great book by Charlie Porter called What Artists Wear. Diana Vreeland, incredible dresser. Edith Sitwell, really interesting. Virginia Woolf, also Georgia O’Keeffe. There are a lot of artists who had incredible style and designers too. Miuccia Prada has probably our current-day best style. Although, I’m obviously very biased.

Why do you think you gravitate toward Miuccia Prada?

She helms one of the most fascinating brands everyone’s dying to see every season. And yet, even the most anticipated moment of that show is when she takes the bow at the end. For me, it’s like, What is she going to be wearing? I think this is what makes personal style so interesting. It’s why everyone’s obsessed with Carolyn Bessette Kennedy—trying to replicate someone whose personal life is elusive. What you wear gives a glimpse of what might be going on behind the scenes, and so it’s much more fascinating than a model who’s been styled. Personal style actually embodies something that’s going on behind the scenes.

All of her references—whether it's an old film from the ’60s or these five different books she’s reading about women’s role in society—she’s questioning that as much as she can while still running her global fashion brand, and it’s really fascinating. She just has a great eye as well. She has incredible antique jewelry. She has a really modern way of wearing really luxe items, like a beautiful pointed silk heel and then a gorgeous vintage diamond brooch, but she’ll put it on a very simple sweater, obviously Prada, but you could also find something aesthetically similar at J.Crew or Uniqlo. But she’s got these little touches. I think accessories are very, very helpful as well.

Obviously, there are a lot of people who have a minimalist style, with The Row being so popular and especially with Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. Do you have any advice for people who gravitate toward that kind of style?

Even just a cute little knee-length skirt and a kitten heel. When you go online, so many people’s style looks so similar that it’s hard to tell them apart. They’re all getting the same resources, looking at the same things, shopping at the same places. So it could be going and looking through a family member’s wardrobe, and being like, Oh my god, I love that, and maybe they let you borrow something. That’s what’s really unique. It’s so clear when people are trusting their instincts and going searching in other places.

What’s something that you never wear and doesn’t really have a place in your wardrobe?

I never really wore sneakers outside of the gym. However, I love the soft sneaker trend of the past few years. The Loewe Ballet Runner. When that first came out five years ago, I was like, Oh my god, this is the softest—there’s just no structure to it. I still have those The Row mesh flats. I essentially love a shoe that’s basically not there, as much as possible. I don’t like big chunky, bulky sneakers or footwear in general, unless it’s very much a fashion thing, like Wedge Balloon heels—it has to be completely absurd. I did give in to a puffer jacket—a short black one for going to the dog park. It's a Uniqlo one that I’ve had for like five or six years.

What’s your process for vintage shopping?

It’s an addiction. This is why I have an old stone house in northern Tuscany that I’m restoring now. Because when fashion wasn’t enough, when late-night scrolling on Vinted and The RealReal wasn’t enough, I started going to local, small real estate websites in rural villages in Italy because I was like, Oh, I’m never gonna be able to buy a house in America. I’m a millennial—this is a dream that has tragically passed my generation—but in rural Italy, maybe. So I’m working on that now. That’s my best vintage find.

Are you loyal to a specific nail polish color?

It’s exactly the same as getting my hair done, which is just complete and sheer terror—color paralysis and cut paralysis. I can only really do my hair on a completely random walk, in Milan, at a place that’s 25 euros. I can’t plan it. When it comes to nails, I didn’t paint them at all for the last year or two—really never did anything. But I am so in love with Diana Vreeland and her style that all it takes is seeing one photo of her in her completely red living room on the Upper East Side with her long red nails. Then I go into the nail salon, but I’m horrified because they give you so many options. I basically try to go somewhere in that kind of Chinese red, a lacquered shade you sometimes see on furniture from the '60s. Sometimes I call it "spaghetti red," something with a little bit of orange in it, like a nice pomodoro sauce. I don’t like too dark; I don’t like too bright.

What are your most repurchased beauty products?

I’m obsessed with Fara Homidi—have you ever tried the lip compact? The color is perfect, and so is the liner. It’s so chic. Then there’s the lip liner that goes with it, the Smudge and Contour Lip Pencil. My favorite lip product of all time is the Glossier Generation G in Zip. It’s a little coral. I’ve had it since it came out, and nobody’s ever been able to touch this color.

For eyebrow pencil, I love Gucci Beauty. They have a waterproof pencil in Brown 04, and sometimes I also use Boy Brow. I also use a Gucci foundation in 210N, which is good for 24-hour wear. Recently, I became obsessed with these K18 hair treatments because I dyed my hair blonde, and my hairstylist in New York said my hair needed it. Any black eyeliner works for a cat eye, but right now I’m using the Glossier one. I also keep a Kiko pencil on hand—it’s a cheap makeup brand in Milan, but I always have one. Hermès makeup is amazing too, and everything’s refillable.

Is there anything that you learned that has forever impacted the way that you do makeup?

I mean, I have always done a cat eye, and I really like doing that. I remember asking a makeup artist how to know where the line should go, and they told me you should basically just extend the curve of your bottom eyelid and follow that line up. That’s how you get a cat eye because it’s so hard to know whether to go down or up. Sometimes I’m doing it, and I think, Am I living in the 1960s? Should I be doing this? But I paint a lot, so I really like painting things. It feels like a modern version of painting, in a way. It’s kind of fun, but stressful.

Where are you living now?

Actually, I just moved out of Milan. I’ve been renting in Milan the past few years, but my fiancé is from California, so we’re looking to find a place there. I moved my stuff from Milan to Tuscany, and the plan is for it to hopefully be at least livable in the next few months so I can spend the summer there because it’s two hours below Milan but only a half-hour from the sea.

What's one thing you like to do whenever you're in Pennsylvania where your parents live?

My number one thing is finding a vintage store—it could be clothing, it could be a bookstore. There's an amazing free library in the basement of this little library nearby parents in Pennsylvania, and I found the most incredible book there. It's called Plant Dreaming Deep by May Sarton. She's an amazing poet, but it's just a little book about how she bought this old farmhouse and restored it. I found it just at the time that I had just bought in Tuscany. There's this little vintage store called Pink Flamingos Vintage, and that's in Brookville, Pennsylvania, also near my parents. Those are the places I'm always wanting to go to, in addition to the cutest coffee shop I can find, especially in Europe. I have to find the cute café, and then I just sit there and bring my dogs.

What kind of dogs do you have?

I have two. I have a beagle, but she's the world's smallest beagle. She's eight kilograms, which is the limit for flying with them by some miracle, and then a wire haired dachshund.

Is there anything you always try to do when you're in New York City?

I always go to The Strand because I just love used books and finding old, strange books. There’s also a great bookstore in the East Village called Bonnie’s Cookbooks. She’s just this New Yorker who tells it like it is. It’s this walk-down-basement kind of store with all these old used cookbooks.

What about in California?

I’ve been spending some time in San Francisco because my fiancé’s family is from the Bay Area. It’s a fascinating city, and they have a lot of great vintage there. I’m really excited to explore California vintage more because there’s so much amazing mid-century stuff. It’s like in the later seasons of Mad Men, when they go to California and the wardrobe just pops off.

There’s a great vintage store called Relic Vintage there that I’ve completely fallen in love with—with a lot of things from the '50s and '60s. To live, I’m thinking more around Santa Barbara County or Ojai. My fiancé went to school there, and I never really spent much time in Santa Barbara, so we’ve been visiting more so I can get a better idea.

Is there an item that wherever you live, your home isn't complete without?

I have a collection of the little coffee cups—the little espresso and macchiato cups. I’ll go to a random little store or café, and if they have a cute cup, I’ll even go to the person and be like, Can I buy this? Please? I’ll give you 20 euros. Usually, the barista just slips it to me. When I’m in the U.S., if I have some of those with me, it makes me feel like my little Italian spirit is still with me.

What is a song that you currently have on repeat?

I love the new Harry Styles album. It’s so good. Track five is called "Taste Back," and it mentions Paris, so immediately you’re like, yes—croissants, Paris, the whole mood. I’m very tied to him because his last album came out four years ago, right when I moved to Milan. I was breaking up and had to stand on my own two feet, and my girlfriend was with me. Then, four years later, when Harry’s new album came out, she was helping me move out of Milan again. We always have this kind of tied feeling. We were checking on the house in Tuscany, picking out flooring, and then drove back along the coast the morning the album came out.

What are some of your favorite movies?

I watch a lot of old movies, especially when I’m painting—beautiful ones that inspire me and have incredible cinematography. One of my favorite movies to rewatch is The Red Shoes. It’s about a ballet dancer who loves her art so much it kind of drives her to insanity. It’s stunning—the set decoration, the costumes, and the Technicolor are just gorgeous. All the reds and blues are extra saturated; it’s very cinematic and so fun.

I also love the old Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis movies with really strong women. Recently, I saw Hamnet. Here’s a beauty tip: Don’t wear mascara to see Hamnet. I wore mascara and cried nonstop for two hours because Jessie Buckley is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. I was jaw-on-the-floor amazed. The last film I saw that hit me that way was Perfect Days from Japan. I kept going back to watch it.

Are there any books that you would recommend?

I always go back to certain ones from high school that I just always reread, like The Great Gatsby. I have my old copy of it that I keep together with a ribbon because I was reading it on the beach in Portugal, and the pages were literally falling apart. I love Salinger as well because I’m just eternally an angsty teen inside my head. I like Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey.

Do you have a hot take?

Cold foam is just whipped cream. I’m not saying it’s bad—there’s no shade. It’s just that cold foam is basically a rebranding of whipped cream. I started going with my dad when he would go to Dunkin’ Donuts last year, and I was writing the book in Pennsylvania. He’d be like, Do you want cold foam? And I was like, What is that? It was whipped cream basically.

For me, the perfect drink is a café macchiato, taken at the bar. I put in a little dolcificante, which is like a tiny sugar pill that comes out of a dispenser in my house. It’s not the kind of fake sugar that causes cancer—or so Google tells me. I have it at the bar like four times a day. It’s quick, easy, fun, and a great way to learn Italian and see how people actually speak because you’re just hanging out at the bar. Italians have been drinking coffee like that for ages.

What’s something that living in Italy has imposed on you?

The best thing about living in Europe in general is the work culture. And this is coming from somebody who works for herself, by herself, walks her dogs, does whatever she wants. The fact that they take a long, nice lunch together—and they eat lunch together as an office—is amazing. They know how to be normal people, have fun conversations, be silly, and even have a glass of wine at lunch. When you do that, you can be more productive because you’re not going crazy, pulling your hair out, and super stressed.

The salad-at-your-desk culture—that’s nobody’s fault, but it’s just the culture we created—is psychotic. Italians have a really good work/life balance. People make fun of it, but it’s so much healthier. They take off the entire month of August. If you go to Milan in August, it’s legitimately scary—it’s a ghost town. Everyone goes to the sea, the mountains, Thailand—they travel. A lot of them are out of office by the end of July, and then they come back refreshed. The whole culture appreciates that. They’re much healthier this way. I really love that—I’ve learned a lot from it.

Is there a piece of advice you’re living by right now? Or, alternatively, the classic question of what advice would you give your younger self?

When you’re trusting your instincts and being true to yourself, you know when you’re kind of faking it to make somebody else happy or going into people-pleaser mode. I’ve done that, whether it’s been in relationships or working a job that didn’t feel right for me. And there was always that voice in the back of my head that was like, Is this… Jenny? That’s what I really wanted to show in the book as well—knowing yourself. I have another essay called "Mistakes Make Style" about how I hold my pen in a really weird way. In third grade, the teacher tried to rubber-band my hand to the pen to make me write "the right way." But all of these little quirks make you who you are, and they’re reflected in your style as well.

I have another essay called "Perfect as a Prison." I started off talking about how my dog, Aurora, the dachshund, is my favorite knitwear designer. I’ll go to bed wearing a sweater, get hot in the night, and take it off. Aurora went through a phase for months where she would chew holes in everything. It was so funny—like, you go into a Yohji or Comme des Garçons store and see a 1000-euro sweater with holes everywhere. There’s also an Italian idea that means "a little messed up." Style should be a little bit messed up—it shouldn’t be perfect—and that’s what makes it unique. Even Prada last season, all the cuffs were really stained, and people were like, Ah…! But those things make style unique. Leaning into what makes you unique is always the right way to go. That’s the advice I would give my younger self: Trust yourself, and know it will all work out, even if it’s scary.

"Everything is going to be fine," Carey Mulligan croons from her London flat, her voice lightly charred from a lingering winter bug and her blonde bob—which is now kissing the top of her shoulders—finger-combed to the side. She's preparing me not for an upcoming root canal or some other mundane torture but for a steady life with my partner, who I married five months ago to this day. It's a far cry from the standard squeals one might expect from declaring their newlywed status, but the reassurance is fitting in the wry, evocative way only Mulligan and her saucer-eyed gaze can convey. After all, we've just spent the last 40 minutes rehashing season 2 of Beef, an eight-episode dark comedy-drama exposing a relationship that is decidedly, uh, not fine. Resentment, blackmail, and a crippling sense of "How the hell did I get here?"—spooky stuff for a blushing bride.

In Lee Sung Jin's (also known as Sonny Lee) latest installment landing on Netflix on April 16, Mulligan plays Lindsay Crane-Martín, an aspiring interior designer married to the general manager of an elite country club. Ever the doting wife—at least in public—she helps her husband Josh (Oscar Isaac) with various to-dos, planning fundraisers, picking out pillow fabrics, and the like. Beyond that, Lindsay's identity remains… uncertain.

"I came up against this question constantly with Sonny and Oscar when starting this job. Who is she? I was struggling to pin her down because she adapts herself for lots of different situations," Mulligan says. "I think the ultimate answer to it was she doesn't really know." It's a terrifying realization to brush up against, especially for someone who's attached her entire existence to a marriage that ultimately unravels at the seams. And so comes the titular beef.

In the first five minutes of episode 1, what starts with simmering marital rage ends with an explosion of violence and a gasped confession from Mulligan: "You've wasted my whole life." (Lee wrote the line day-of, she reveals.) The panic that time has evaporated is something she can empathize with, albeit on a much smaller scale. She tells me of the time one of her children was learning to play the recorder, and Mulligan, in a moment of headache-induced exasperation, decided to hide the instrument on top of the dresser. It lay there completely forgotten for two years. "I was like, 'God, I could have gone another 15 years without noticing that was up there had I chosen not to dust the top of my dresser,'" she says. It's unnerving how stretches of life can slip through your fingers just like that.

"I think that's where Lindsay starts in episode 1," Mulligan continues. "[It's] like, 'Fuck, this time has passed. What am I going to do? How do I get it back?' That sends her into this slightly manic burst of energy in lots of different directions." That initial burst has an audience: the recently engaged Austin Davis (Charles Melton) and Ashley Miller (Cailee Spaeny), who wind up using this knowledge to leverage their own lower-level positions at the club. And so comes more beef.

Fans of the miniseries will be pleased to learn its next chapter is just as artistically berserk as its Emmy-winning first season with opulent visuals, cringey plot twists, and manipulative, The White Lotus–esque characters you love to hate yet somehow find yourself rooting for. Yes, this includes the insufferable Lindsay. "God, she's really awful and annoying," Mulligan says of her initial reaction to the script. "I love the idea of playing that."

I can imagine it's quite a thrill to try on your polar opposite for size. Mulligan, swathed in a simple black sweater and sipping on a cauldron-sized beverage when she joins our Zoom call, has a cool, unfussy energy that's the antithesis to Lindsay's frenetic meltdowns. Her delicate features—a heart-shaped face, those saucer eyes—are offset by a throaty English accent that's a pitch deeper thanks to the cold she can't shake. "I'm fine," she vows. "I've got my giant mug of tea." She breaks out the dimples, ready to work.

This wouldn't be Mulligan's first time portraying the unlikable woman, but something about Lindsay felt different—frenzied, free, and just plain fun. "I didn't know what I wanted to do next work-wise. I had just done the whole run for Maestro, and I was waiting for the right job to come along," she tells me. She did the coquettish romantic lead in The Great Gatsby. She aced the grief-stricken, revenge-seeking survivor in Promising Young Woman, a role that earned her an Oscar nomination. She played the troubled, free-spirited sister in Shame; the tenacious investigative journalist in She Said; and the tragically lost, narcissistic socialite in Saltburn. "I don't want to be the super serious person in every film or dying in every film," Mulligan adds. "I don't want to get stuck in a rut of any particular 'known' thing."

Then Lee pitched her episode 5 of Beef, which, in my opinion, has one of the most unhinged scenes in the entire season. (Without spoiling anything, I'll just say that no animals or animalistic wives were harmed in the making of this show.) "I was like, 'Oh, that's insane and feral,'" Mulligan laughs. "And I loved it."

Lee also has strong ties to music and meticulously selects songs to match the emotional weight of each scene, ticking another box in Mulligan's mind. "I love when a director has a playlist. It helps so much with the tone of things," she says. Music cues scored by 11-time Grammy winner Finneas O'Connell were already written into the script prior to filming, which helped Mulligan and Isaac further connect to their characters during particularly intense moments. Isaac even suggested wearing earwigs while they filmed so they could hear those cues in real time.

"I've never listened to music while doing scenes. Most of the time, I'll listen to [a playlist] on my phone in the morning while I'm in the trailer or whatever," Mulligan says. "Oscar had done this on other jobs where he had the earwig in, so he was like, 'Let's just try it.'" Her dimples resurface when she adds, "Sonny said it cost them a huge amount of money to paint out in [post-production], which I feel really bad about, but it was great."

Mulligan created her own playlist prior to filming—prep work she completes for each role to help her enter the mind of that character. Lindsay's track list (simply named "Lindsay") includes "All in Good Time" by Iron & Wine and Fiona Apple; "Antarctica" by Divorce featuring her own husband, Marcus Mumford ("That's a song that we listened to a lot," Mulligan says as she thumbs through her phone, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear); "Song for Zula" by Phosphorescent; and, hilariously, Carol Burnett's "Little Girls" from Annie. "For whatever reason, one day I was like, 'That's Lindsay! She's Miss Hannigan!'" she laughs. "It's a little bit all over the map."

Growing up, Mulligan was enamored with musical theater and, up until her late teens, dreamed of performing on Broadway. Still, music remains central to her work in one way or another, whether she's stuffing headphones into her ears to distract herself from a crowded theater audience or swapping playlists with her film costar during moments of downtime. As if she attracts instrumental roles, many of her projects have a musical nucleus. Maestro explores the relationship between composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein and actress Felicia Montealegre; Inside Llewyn Davis follows a struggling folk singer (portrayed by Isaac); in The Ballad of Wallis Island, estranged bandmates reunite for a final private performance; and let's not forget about Mulligan's soul-crushing rendition of "New York, New York" in Shame, which sends a chill up my spine every time.

"I've always loved music as storytelling. I've always found it very emotional," she says. Of course, she also credits Mumford for inspiration. "I love watching musicians. I just think it's the coolest thing in the world to be able to pick up a guitar and sing a song or play the piano," she notes. "Doing Ballad of Wallis Island was so fun to pretend to be one of those people because I am around it a lot."

This season of Beef kicks off with a literal bang ("It's quite fun, smashing up a trophy cabinet," Mulligan admits), and the physical and emotional turbulence refuses to pump the brakes. I mention it must have been taxing to harbor so much hate—especially toward someone like Isaac, who she considers a close friend since they met on the set of Drive 15 years ago—but she tells me the tense fight scenes were actually some of the most exhilarating. "I really trust him as an actor and as a person. I felt like I could do my worst acting, and he wouldn't be judgmental," she says. "This show requires you to do stuff that's slightly mad. You have to put [everything] on the table, and he was the perfect person to do that with."

Funny enough, "The timeline of Josh and Lindsay's relationship is the length of mine and Oscar's," she adds, which helped them create a narrative around their on-screen marriage. "We mapped out our little fake life from the time that we met on Drive. Over the years, our families have stayed really close, so we had so much history to pack into it." Coming together for Beef felt like slipping back into a well-worn sweater, the 15-year gap nothing more than a blip in Mulligan's eyes.

"It was weird for Oscar and I to feel like the grown-ups. We were the kids on Drive," she says. To be fair, the age difference between the two couples isn't actually that vast (Mulligan and Melton are five years apart, for reference), but their respective roles are meant to reflect the great millennial and Gen Z divide. "Everyone called [Melton and Spaeny] the kids. We'd finish a scene and be like, 'Okay, we're done. The kids are in next, right?'" she adds.

Unlike Lindsay's Miss Hannigan–esque sneer, the label was steeped in love. Rest assured, there was absolutely no beef on set. "I didn't know those guys at all beforehand. We met in L.A. a week before we started shooting, and the fact that we all got on so well was beautiful," Mulligan shares. In fact, Spaeny and Melton came to watch Mulligan and Isaac film the very last scene in the entire series. "We all stood in a circle, Sonny came in, and the five of us just sobbed in the middle of the street," she recounts. "We were all really emotional to have done this thing together. I think we could have carried on for a bit longer."

It's this closeness—and the thought of reuniting all dolled up for the upcoming press tour—that makes Mulligan less wary of what viewers will think of the sophomore season. (Beef season 1 was, by and large, a smashing success, securing eight Emmy wins and three Golden Globes.) "It's always nerve-racking to do a follow-up," Mulligan tells me. "I think [any pressure] has been superseded by the excitement to create a story that's really worth telling." Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, who starred in the critically acclaimed season 1, remain intimately involved as executive producers. "We all had a big cast dinner before we started shooting. It feels like a big team effort," Mulligan shares. When you have that strong of a support system, all the comparison chatter fades to the background.

In Beef, Lindsay and Josh's union could not be further removed from Mulligan and Mumford's ("It made me grateful for my relationship," she says), who tied the knot nearly 14 years ago in 2012. Perhaps subconsciously for my own newlywed gains, I decide to ask her if there's any marital advice she would give Lindsay as a friend. "I always think the best advice is keeping short accounts," she responds. "Don't hold on to grudges, and if you're annoyed about something, just say you're annoyed about it and figure it out. Don't let it simmer."

Oh, and one more thing. "Put your phone down. Stop living online," she declares. "[Lindsay] has such crushingly low self-esteem that she's just looking for an immediate hit to make herself feel better for two seconds, and then it inevitably crumbles. That would probably be my biggest advice. Get yourself a dumbphone, Lindsay."

While Mulligan herself has succumbed to the smartphone ("I'm on, like, 50,000 different parenting WhatsApp groups for my children, and I'm inevitably going to forget to send someone to school with some crucial piece of uniform if I'm not on them," she jokes), she keeps the digital world at arm's length. Unlike Lindsay, who's constantly DMing old flames and stalking their profiles, Mulligan doesn't have any form of social media. She's notoriously low-key, residing in a dreamy 16th-century farmhouse in the Devon countryside. Instead, she provides glimpses of glamour through selective fashion campaigns (Mulligan is currently an ambassador for Prada) and award-circuit appearances—such as her 2024 Oscars ensemble, which is frequently cited as one of the best looks to ever exist. "It's in my flat! I have it!" she says of the archival Balenciaga dress.

I can't help but ask about the style moments in her next major project Narnia, Greta Gerwig's highly anticipated Netflix adaptation premiering in theaters on Thanksgiving Day and on the streamer in December. Mulligan has remained rather tight-lipped about her character and the experience as a whole, but I'm curious if there's anything she can spill about the film's fashion vibe. Alas, no dice. "I literally can't say an actual word, as much as I would love to, except that it was just heaven," she smiles. "I've always wanted to work with Greta and want to work with Greta forever."

She wrapped the project just before Christmas and has reveled in the nice stretch of normalcy before she soon embarks on the whirlwind Beef press run. From there, she's looking at an infinite horizon. "I'd love to do theater again," she muses, propping her chin on her palm, when I probe her about any dream projects. "That's tricky. You need to figure that out with children." But when it comes to her next role, Mulligan doesn't have a specific North Star in mind, except that it should feel somewhat scary. "All [my characters] have been slightly daunting prospects to play, in a good way," she says. What jumps out to her on the page is a role she doesn't immediately know how to embrace—something that plays hard to get before she firmly decides it's the one.

"Hopefully, it'll come along," she shrugs with a curl of the lips and the easy confidence of someone who knows, without a shadow of a doubt, everything is going to be just fine.

Photographer: Gina Gizella Manning
Stylist: Jenny Kennedy
Hairstylist: Shon Ju at The Wall Group
Makeup Artist: Valeria Ferreira at The Wall Group
Manicurist: Sabrina Gayle at Arch the Agency using Bio Sculpture
Creative Director: Amy Armani
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Video Director and Producer: Sarah Al Slaity
DP: Charlotte Croft
Special thanks to Dennis Severs' House

Step into the universe of the coolest creatives in the fashion industry with our series My World, where readers will discover how the top stylists, designers, and tastemakers built their careers and get a peek into their favorite restaurants, beloved albums, fashion finds, etiquette rules they stand by, and so much more.

It's 2 p.m. ET on a Wednesday when I log on to my computer to meet and chat with Elaine Welteroth. She immediately apologizes for keeping her camera off, explaining she's been awake since 5 a.m., having landed early in Minnesota to talk with college students about feminism and journalism. It doesn't come across as a complaint so much as a glimpse of her demanding schedule—early alarms, numerous flights, and a calendar that spans multiple time zones.

This is what life looks like for Welteroth: a constant movement between stages, red carpets, meetings, and motherhood. It's why people often say she wears many hats. But talk to her for just 45 minutes, and it becomes clear that those "hats" don't feel like a juggling act to her. To Welteroth, they're simply different passions that shape how she spends her time.

Many first came to know Welteroth through her tenure at Teen Vogue, where she made headlines as the publication's editor in chief. At the time, she became the youngest person and the second African American ever to hold the role. Under her leadership, the magazine evolved into something more than a fashion title, publishing political and social justice content that resonated with a new generation of readers. But that chapter was only one layer.

Since then, Welteroth published her memoir, More Than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are, which encourages readers to recognize their value and challenge existing norms. Shortly after, she began serving as a judge on Project Runway. In 2024, she launched her nonprofit organization, BirthFund, to improve access to maternal healthcare while making appearances as a host on The Talk, cohosting the SAG Awards preshow and Hulu's The Conversations Project, and contributing to major publications like The Washington Post and British Vogue.

The grind doesn't stop there. The most recent gig for Welteroth was an Allbirds campaign, which, as a sneaker lover, Welteroth mentions, was a very organic partnership for her. While there's a lot on her plate, she retains a confident, can-do-it-all attitude and tells me that her secret to balancing it all is "allowing myself to be present fully in whatever role I'm embodying in that moment." Plus, knowing her work has impacted others makes all the effort worthwhile.

"It's easy to get caught up and forget that my work—the TV shows I've been on or the book I've written—actually resonates with people," Welteroth says. "I had the sweetest reminder of this when I was in San Francisco shooting the Allbirds campaign. Two separate groups, mothers and daughters, approached me and said, 'Can we take a picture? We love watching Project Runway with you.' And I'm like, oh my God. The fact that the moment meant something to someone, a special bonding moment, is truly so sweet."

Ahead, she shares her humbling first job and how it made a lasting impact, how she balances being a mom of two with numerous professional roles, the importance of choosing versatile pieces that support the life she's actually leading, and so much more.

Your résumé is incredibly extensive, but let's start at the beginning—what was your very first job? What did it teach you that you still carry with you today?

Funny enough, my first job was actually dancing in a life-size bee costume at HomeTown Buffet. What it taught me is never to take myself too seriously. It reminded me of the importance of just having fun. I've led a very serious career, helped grow organizations, and built my own organization—it's hard work, and it's serious. However, I feel like I've carried that spirit of the dancing bee with me into every chapter of my career. It's served me really well.

You became the youngest editor in chief in Teen Vogue history. What hard truth about leadership did you learn that no one prepared you for?

As an editor in chief and a founder of anything, it's hard work and isolating. You truly devote your life to building something you believe in. Sometimes it can feel a little lonely. Then there are moments when you step out into the world and see how your work has impacted others. There's nothing quite like that. It refuels your tank, reminds you of your why, and encourages you to keep pushing. It reminds you that your work matters because sometimes, when you're working in a silo, you wonder, Is anyone gonna read this? Does anyone care? When you get to connect with someone who has encountered your work, and it's meant something to them, there's no greater feeling.

In your New York Times best-selling book, More Than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are, you write about ambition and belonging. In honor of International Women's Month, what advice would you give to young women who want to lead without shrinking themselves?

Do you. I mean that in every way because there are no rules. It used to be that there was a ladder you climbed to the top of whatever industry you wanted to be in. That ladder no longer exists, which can be scary for some people. However, for entrepreneurs or those with an entrepreneurial mindset, it's exciting because you have full permission to let your enthusiasm guide you, to become self-directed, and to build that muscle of self-trust. And it informs the career you'll create. Understand who you are, what you want to say, how you want to spend your days, and do that. There's no formula you need to follow, and no mold you need to fit into. This world is changing so rapidly, and it's making space for people with unique perspectives and pursuits. So go after it.

In April 2024, you started your nonprofit organization, BirthFund. What about that initiative are you most proud of, and why do you think this work matters right now?

All of the safety nets and social safety provisions in this country are disintegrating before our eyes. Things that we never thought would disappear have been rolled back, leaving many people vulnerable. In times like these, we desperately need mutual aid initiatives like ours that lean into the power of community support more than ever. This is the way forward. This is the way now. It’s the way to support people in meaningful ways without waiting for lawmakers to act or relying on broken systems that were never meant to serve everyone. Why don't we come together as a community to address the problems we see and build solutions? Essentially, BirthFund is a response to a major issue I encountered when I was pregnant, and nothing in my career has been more rewarding than creating something I saw a need for. It truly blew my mind because women's health has long been underfunded, undervalued, and under-researched. However, that is changing thanks to women rallying together, raising these issues, and elevating the conversation. One thing I'm very proud of is that in our first year, we raised over $3 million. To anyone who thinks maternal health is an unrelated issue not worthy of mainstream focus, think again. People have rallied around this mission and the families who need support so desperately. The world is changing, but babies will never stop being born, and despite robots taking over, care in human hands is irreplaceable. We will always need midwives. Now more than ever, with maternal health deserts, hospital closures, and increasing maternal mortality, communities are relying more on dedicated birth workers like midwives. We're here to support them, to grow that pipeline, and to keep doing this work. We're excited about all the possibilities.

Tell me what work/life balance looks like to you. How do you juggle parenting and having a successful career?

I don't just say yes to things. I say, "Hell, yes." I bring my best energy and full self to everything. I won't feel guilty about being where my feet are. I allow myself to be fully present there. When I move to the next moment, my attention follows. This mindset has helped me a lot. Support and comfort in your own skin are crucial, and having a community and a wardrobe that adapts to my mood helps. I think about what I'll wear each day and step into that character. I enjoy switching roles and dressing the part, allowing myself to be fully present in whatever role I'm in.

Do you have a dream next step that you would like to take in your career?

I'm in creation mode right now. I haven't been able to do this in a long time. I've been out in the world, out front for a while, and I've pulled back. It feels really good as a storyteller to focus on being creative, to spend my days heads down, building something I'm excited about. While I can't exactly say what I'm doing or what my next step is, I will say that I'm such a glasses girlie, and I've always wanted a line of eyewear. I may or may not be working on something in that area.

What are three words that you feel define your personal style right now?

Moody, comfortable, and thoughtful. I don't necessarily mean comfortable just in clothing, like wearing sweats. I mean dressing in a way that feels right to me each day. Sometimes that's a short skirt, baggy jeans, or a sweatsuit. Thoughtful in the sense that I'm intentional about who I'm wearing, how it's made, and where I show up in the world wearing it.

Do you have style icons who really inform your style?

I'm in my Diane Keaton era right now. And RIP to her because she's one of the greats. I refuse to accept that she's gone, but her style lives on. My forever style icon, though, is Grace Jones. She is so fierce and fabulous. Her spirit makes everything she wears just so iconic. My third pick is Angela Davis. She's not usually discussed in terms of style, but she changed how we see women: Black women, smart women, feminist women. She made glasses cool again—a staple for activists—and her afro is just iconic.

You recently did a campaign with Allbirds. What inspired that collaboration?

This Allbirds campaign feels very authentic to me because I don't have the energy to prioritize style over comfort. I prefer waking up in the morning ready to tackle everything I want and need to do, but I want to do it comfortably. I want to feel good in my skin, and that's what this Allbirds campaign captures. We're showing these busy women on the go, achieving in various aspects of life, wearing shoes that are not only super comfortable and cute but also versatile enough to match everything. They eliminate the need to overthink outfits. I'm a big sneaker fan—I wear sneakers every day and wouldn't bother with heels unless paid. That's why this campaign resonates with me. I love a brand that prioritizes sustainability alongside style. In the campaign, I showcase two looks: one with baggy cargo pants, a long trench coat, and a button-up shirt; the other with a miniskirt and cute frilly socks. I felt comfortable in both. Women are multifaceted and dynamic, reflected in how we style ourselves daily.

What is the most sentimental item in your closet?

I just bought my most sentimental item: my first Rolex watch. I love it. It means a lot to me, and I’ve been wearing it every day since December.

What's one fashion rule you love breaking?

I really break all the rules. I don't even know what the fashion rules are anymore. I don't follow trends, but I try to keep up with Gen Z girls. Subliminally, I'm inspired or influenced by them. They give zero Fs when they get dressed, and it makes me feel like, Oh, maybe I can try that. You know, when you're getting ready and trying to put together your outfit, there's always that split second where you wonder, Should I go for this, or should I not? Usually, there’s a sense of fear there, but I think that feeling has gotten smaller as I've gotten older.

Is there a specific item in your closet that you're looking forward to wearing again this spring?

I live in L.A., so I don't dress seasonally because it feels like summer year-round. However, when I go to the East Coast, I look forward to pulling out my vintage trench coat.

Finish the following sentence: My home wouldn't be complete without ______.

My babies. Also, Gayle King sent me the RW Guild throw blanket, which is so soft and has become everyone in my home's favorite thing. It matches my house perfectly, which has a neutral, tonal color scheme with pops of color—especially from this mixed media artwork by Corey Pemberton, which my house also wouldn't be complete without. It's the centerpiece of our living space—what we look at while eating and talking. For technology, the Samsung Frame TV. It's a fun conversation starter because everyone thinks it's art at first. Lastly, our black Yamaha grand piano. I have a very musical family. My husband is a musician, and he does this thing called Piano and Prayer every Monday.

Where is your safe space? Where do you go when you need some time to yourself?

Airplanes are my sanctuary and my "me" time—where I can think clearly. I have some of my best thoughts and do some of my best work on them.

What's your favorite restaurant in your home city?

One of my favorite restaurants in L.A. is Jamaican Fiyah for authentic Jamaican food. However, the last standout dining experience I had was at International Smoke on the Embarcadero in San Francisco (Ayesha Curry’s restaurant). The cornbread served with red Thai curry butter is a must-order.

If you could get a vacation home anywhere in the world, where would it be?

I've thought a lot about this, and right now, it's a tie between the Amalfi Coast and Tuscany. I went to Tuscany last summer, and I've never felt more peaceful, happier, or more joyful. It was truly the best experience. I would love to build a compound there—that would be my dream. The only thing holding me back from moving to Italy and making this dream come true is that I don't have a community there. I'd have to convince my whole group of friends to come with me, and then it would be really fun. In the U.S., my answer would be Martha's Vineyard. That's our happy place. We go every August.

What's one travel item you'll always pack with you?

My Allbirds sneakers. Ever since I shot the campaign, I've been wearing the Varsity Sneakers. They're airy, so you feel light on your feet, easy to pack, easy to bop around in, and go with everything. I'm in that era where I don't want to sacrifice comfort, and these shoes fit my lifestyle so well.

Is there an artist you are listening to on repeat right now?

This might sound like a shameless plug for my husband, but he's currently recording an album. All our friends jokingly call me Joe Jackson because I'm the type who, if you want to do something, I'll push you so hard—you’ll feel it. I'll be your biggest fan but also your biggest nuisance. I ask to hear every song, and I give notes, acting as the editor in chief of his projects. The songs are so good, and I'm so proud of him.

What's your comfort TV show?

The Morning Show—that's my jam. I will binge that show from start to finish. It reminds me of my newsroom days, even though I was a magazine journalist and not a news broadcaster, but there are similarities in the political dynamics.

For anyone who hasn't read your memoir yet, why should they pick up More Than Enough?

Pick it up if you're at an inflection point in your career and need inspiration or a nudge to pursue the next chapter of your dreams. The world tells you to focus on one big dream, and you'd better not fail at it. But the message of this book is that life is made up of a series of dreams realized, and you're allowed to dream as many different dreams as you want and go after them. It's really about the sequence of dreaming and taking those chances on yourself that helps you become who you're meant to be. When you hold yourself back by sticking to a single dream or identity, you stop growing. Also, read it because I'm writing another one, so you should have the backstory and be able to dive right into the next one.

Were there any other written works that inspired you while you were writing yours?

Becoming was a real inspiration. Michelle Obama is my icon, and I appreciate how candid she was and how personal and deep she went in her quest to convey these broader, universal lessons that are inspiring, motivating, and make us feel more connected and less alone. It gave me permission to do the same.

Any podcasts we should be listening to?

I'm now a full-blown boy mom, so my podcast choices are very diverse. For any moms out there in the car with their kids who need something to keep them entertained, I've been listening to a podcast called Smarty Pants. It takes questions from little kids and then goes into 15-minute, entertaining deep dives into random topics and the questions kids have. I end up learning a lot. I'm also into Adventures of Cairo for my kids. That's like a little narrative podcast for children. I recently binge-listened to Confessions of a Female Founder by Meghan Markle, who is a really good interviewer. Meghan Markle isn't a journalist, but she has excellent reporting instincts; she asks the right questions and pulls out great stories. Another podcast I enjoy is House Guest. You know how people ask, "Who are the five people you'd want to sit with for dinner—dead or alive?" It's that kind of idea in a podcast. You get to be at the dinner table or have drinks with someone you've always wanted to but probably never will. And it feels like you're laughing with them. It's really well-produced.

What's something that's underrated?

Being comfortable. I didn't appreciate it in my 20s, but now, in my 30s, I understand the power of prioritizing your comfort. And from there, all the great things follow—like confidence and a sense of ease in how you move through the world.

What's the best piece of parenting advice you have received?

Sleep train your kids. You'll enjoy parenting much more when you're well-rested and have a clear mind. You have to go through sleep training to get to the other side, and you might think your kids will hate you for it or that it will cause issues like attachment problems. But they won’t remember it, and ultimately, they will thank you because their development benefits from it. They grow while they sleep, and they need to learn how to stay asleep, just as you need to continue functioning in the world. I had to learn this a second time. The first time, I was a drill sergeant about sleep training, preaching it loudly. But then, with my second baby, I totally caved. I let the baby sleep in my bed and got totally attached. Going more than a year without sleep is a very bad idea—for everyone involved. Recently, we've found that the more we let him learn how to cry and find ways to cope and self-soothe, the longer he can stay asleep, and the quicker he can put himself back to sleep next time. As a result, we're all much happier as a family.

What's a luxury you refuse to give up?

Virgin margaritas. Sometimes you want a cute drink when you're out with the girlies, but you don't want to wake up feeling terrible the next day. I bet other moms can agree that a hangover isn't worth it.

What's one piece of advice you have for women in 2026?

Maintain a playful spirit in everything you do. It brings a lightness, and people prefer to work with those who are having fun and doing what they love.

I've been transfixed by actress Victoria Pedretti ever since her breakout role as Nell Crain in Netflix's 2018 adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House. Soon after, she hijacked my brain space as the eerily unbalanced Love Quinn (I'm still not okay!) in the television sensation, You, and later this month, she's sure to pack mega-watt shock value as Cherry in the horror film Forbidden Fruits.

As one of our four cover stars, Pedretti's damp, dewy hair, feathery brows, and shimmering peridot eyes are serving all the spring beauty inspiration, and I couldn't wait to ask her glam team all of my burning questions. From essential hair products to staple skin and makeup MVPs, keep scrolling for every detail behind Victoria Pedretti's Spring Issue cover look with Who What Wear.

"We wanted to create a real runway vibe for this shoot," hairstylist Christopher Farmer shares right off the bat. "The goal was to create a wet look that was cool and textured without looking overdone—a slightly dry finish on the ends of the hair was key."

"The inspiration was fresh, modern glamour that still felt effortless and true to Victoria," adds her makeup artist, Shelby Smith. "We wanted the skin to look luminous and real, with just enough structure to define her features without overpowering them." For example, Pedretti's shimmering green shadow (*drools*) was added to strategically accentuate the actress's blue eyes while still appearing soft, subtle, and wearable.

According to Farmer, the hair was actually the least cohesive element of the glam process in comparison to the clothing and makeup, likening our four cover stars (Pedretti was joined on set by Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung, and Alexandra Shipp) to a "girl group" where every member could showcase their personality via their style and beauty choices. "All the girls had a totally different vibe when it came to their hair, which was great," he says.

That said, nothing competed. "Collaboration on set is really important to me," shares Smith. "We talked through the overall direction ahead of time so that hair, makeup, nails, and styling worked in tandem, not against each other."

"Victoria has incredibly striking eyes and beautiful bone structure, so I love enhancing those features while keeping the look balanced," Smith continues. For instance, Smith emphasized Pedretti's eyes with soft dimension and texture rather than a heavy liner, allowing the actress's shape and color to stand out. She also focused on subtly sculpting the skin using underpainting techniques so the definition would appear to come from within rather than sit on top of Pedretti's complexion. "My goal was simply to enhance the features Victoria already has and let her natural beauty remain the focal point."

Smith started her process by prepping Pedretti's skin with a handful of products from Sofie Pavitt Face—the best-selling Mandelic Acid Exfoliating & Clearing Serum ($54) and the Omega Rich Moisturizer ($64), which worked together to smooth texture and lock in moisture sans heaviness. Smith tells me she wanted to create a hydrated, luminous base so the skin would look fresh and healthy on camera. For the complexion, Smith under-painted the actress's skin using the M.ph by Mary Phillips Underpainting Face Highlight & Contour Palette ($64) to sculpt and add dimension softly, then applied the brand's foundation for a light, skin-like finish.

"The eyes featured a shimmering green shadow for a subtle statement, paired with a feathered brow to keep everything modern and effortless," shares Smith. "I finished with a neutral lip using the Victoria Beckham Beauty Lip Definer in Shade No. 02 ($33) for a polished but understated balance to the look."

Farmer started his own process by blowing out the actress's already-dry strands. "I wasn't concerned about her roots for this look, but I wanted more control of the hair's mid shaft and ends to make the whole thing smoother." Farmer cites Color Wow's Pop & Lock High Gloss Finish ($24) as his key product for achieving Pedretti's runway-inspired wet look at the roots. To polish and add shine to the rest of the hair, he reached for Rōz's Santa Lucia Heat Protectant Styling Oil ($45).

As far as other hairstyling staples Farmer always keeps in his kit (and finds himself recommending to literally everyone), he rattles off four. "Phyto's Phyto Volume Volumizing Styling Spray ($30) is number one," he says. "My mentor introduced it to me, and it's still my go-to." He's also obsessed with anything Rōz. "The hair oil I used on Victoria is amazing, and I can even use it on my clients with the finest hair." The brand's Evergreen Hair Styling Cream ($32) and Milk Hydrating Leave-In Conditioner Hair Serum ($52) are also Farmer-approved favorites.

As for universal makeup recommendations, Smith tells me that the Sofie Pavitt Face Omega Rich Moisturizer ($64) is a go-to for creating a smooth, hydrated base that works beautifully under makeup on almost any skin type. (Pavitt, a renowned facialist in NYC, is known as a skin whisperer of sorts, especially when it comes to acne.)

"I also love skin-like foundations, like the M.ph by Mary Phillips formula I used on Victoria, because they enhance the complexion while still letting natural texture show through." Last but not least, Smith says a neutral lip liner, such as the Victoria Beckham Beauty Lip Definer in Shade No. 02 ($33)—the exact shade she used on Pedretti—is another staple that flatters nearly everyone.

"Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her, we all die."

The first time a woman was blamed for everything, it was biblical.

Long before tabloids crowned their weekly villains and comment sections sharpened their knives, there was Eve—framed as the origin of ruin. It's been more than 2000 years since that line, referencing the fall in the book of Genesis, was etched into scripture and exactly zero days since women stopped being told they are each other's downfall. The narrative might evolve, but the accusation that women are each other's undoing sticks. You see tabloid headlines, Reddit snark posts, and whispers about who did what to get to the top.

Evil doesn't die. It simply reinvents itself. Misogyny has a remarkable talent for sticking around.

Enter Forbidden Fruits, the upcoming indie horror-dramedy from director Meredith Alloway that takes that ancient blame game and twists it into something deliciously deranged. The film, premiering March 27, trades the Garden of Eden for a suburban Texas mall and swaps Eve for a cult of witchy retail employees on the verge of a quiet mental breakdown. Among the creative forces behind it is producer Diablo Cody, who is best known for the teen horror-comedy Jennifer's Body. Starring Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung, Victoria Pedretti, and Alexandra Shipp, Forbidden Fruits is a dark take that sinks its teeth into the complicated nature of female dynamics.

The film—adapted from Lily Houghton's 2023 stage play inspired by the same opening biblical verse—has all the hallmarks of a deeply rotted cult classic in the making: campy outfits, a questionable wig budget, gallons of syrupy fake blood that rivals that of a Final Destination film, and a star-studded cast that makes you question how they got all of these actors in the same room.

"From the beginning, cowriter Lily Houghton and I knew the key was finding actors who could balance the satire and the emotional honesty of the film," explains Alloway. Over the course of several weeks, Alloway and Houghton met with each of the actors on Zoom before they were officially cast, tapping into their inner psyche. "Watching all of them together in rehearsal for the first time was magnificent—it was musical. They were playing off each other in real time, understanding how to balance their different energies as characters," Alloway continues. It certainly helps that the film was shot exclusively from the hours of 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., adding to the delirious state of the actors playing delirious characters. It's peak trauma bonding at its finest.

The chemistry is crucial. Frankly, it's what sucks you in as a viewer when watching Forbidden Fruits for the first time. Beneath the glittery dresses, food court pretzels, and fluorescent store lighting, Forbidden Fruits isn't really about witchcraft or the occult. It's about the tension that exists in hierarchy. The women's underground cult promises empowerment, but its currency is proximity. To be anointed (or, in the case of the film, bullied) is to be adored. To be adored is to be envied, and in this world, envy puts you in a dangerous position—fast.

Take, for example, Apple (played by Reinhart) the fierce lesbian ringleader who drives the narrative forward. She commands the basement cult with a mix of icy-cold stares and intimidation. Her presence is a gravitational force that pulls the other women into orbit. Reinhart's Apple isn't a stereotypical larger-than-life cartoon villain. She's magnetic and manipulative, but by the finale, she feels deeply broken and human.

That duality has become something of a signature for Reinhart as an actor. First catapulted into the cultural zeitgeist as Betty Cooper on The CW's Riverdale, Reinhart proved early on that she could elevate archetype into complexity. Betty could have easily remained the wholesome girl next door, but in Reinhart's hands, she unraveled—darkness creeping in around the edges, trauma and obsession bubbling beneath her perfect ponytail.

Even then, Reinhart demonstrated a fascination with fractured femininity: women who are both soft and sharp, controlled and chaotic. Apple feels like a natural, if more feral, evolution of that interest.

"I looked at her like a really troubled, lost woman who's desperate for sisterhood and control. She's definitely a bitch, but she's a bitch that you want to love you," Reinhart explains. She's sitting across from me on-screen deeply snuggled in an oversize hoodie that is likely a post–New York Fashion Week uniform for the actor, who's been zipping around Manhattan attending shows and beginning the press tour for Forbidden Fruits. "It's sort of the Regina George of it all. It's like, 'Wow, she's so mean. Can she be mean to me?'" she adds.

There's deep-rooted empathy for Apple, though, that practically radiates off Reinhart's end of the screen when we meet over Zoom to discuss the film. Reinhart read the script in 2023—two years before production began—and became attached to the project, namely Apple. "I got on Zoom with Meredith and Lily, and we just vibed for an hour," Reinhart recalls. "I just went in with a really strong vision and was like, 'Oh, I'm Apple, by the way.'"

It's a vision that took shape long before cameras rolled in Toronto, and Reinhart dove headfirst into Apple's world. There were marathon Preacher's Daughter listening sessions ("Apple feels very Ethel Cain to me," she confesses) and a strict rule about nails. She wore just two short ones because Apple needed to look lesbian without overtly announcing it. There were also hours of movement lessons with a dedicated coach who experiments in animal mannerisms. Reinhart settled on a lion, a nod to her character's sensual yet destructive nature.

The most blatant character study, though, comes in the form of a simple, cheeky baby tee Apple wears in the climax of the film post–mental breakdown. Costume designer Sarah Millman inserted the infamous verse "Of the woman came the beginning of sin…"—a clear nod to Apple's character arc in the film and the original title of the play Forbidden Fruits is based on. Throughout the story, she's often blaming misfortune on men and the patriarchy, but is it just projection? Does she actually believe that women are to blame for all that's wrong in the world? Reinhart doesn't skip a beat when I inquire further: "If women are the origin of sin, then they must be pretty fucking powerful, yeah?"

Apple, and Reinhart by extension, has a fascination with powerful, notorious women throughout history. You know, the ones often beheaded or burned at the stake. Just casual, girly things. "Marie Antoinette, Anne Boleyn, Joan of Arc—Apple thinks those women were clearly the most intelligent women and doing something right. I think she idolizes that," Reinhart admits. It's not hard to see why. For the majority of the film, Apple has her other fruits (aptly named Fig, Cherry, and Pumpkin) squarely under her manicured fingers. "Being a woman is so powerful, and throughout the movie, you see all of the women come into their own power at some point or another," she says.

How do the women of Forbidden Fruits define their own path, though? For Tung, it's all about context. It's not lost on the actress that the film is set in the present day, where oppression against women—the real horror, not just jump scares and bloody gore—is the undercurrent that runs throughout some of the scenes.

"Even if it wasn't at the forefront of the movie, the conversations we're having on set play into Forbidden Fruits. Even though the exact way in which we're telling this story is new, there's also so many films that have paved the way," Tung tells me, nodding to the greats in the film's cinematic universe: Heathers, Jennifer's Body, The Craft, and, of course, Mean Girls. Notably, the cast filmed in the same Toronto mall that Lindsay Lohan and the Mean Girls cast filmed iconic scenes from the 2004 comedy. "We're haunted by the friendly ghosts of our past, in the best way," Tung jokes.

The through line of teen girls behaving badly and female friendships spiraling into something feral hangs over Forbidden Fruits, but for Tung, stepping into that canon marks a distinct tonal pivot from the role that made her a household name.

The 23-year-old is fresh off a generational run. If you're living under a rock or simply haven't opened TikTok in the past six months, let me catch you up to speed. Tung recently concluded her work on the television series that gave her her first big break—Amazon Prime's The Summer I Turned Pretty. (A movie is now in the works.) For three seasons, tweens and TikTok-savvy mothers alike watched a coastal New England love triangle form on-screen between Isabella "Belly" Conklin and brothers Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher.

While Belly cried in debutante gowns, Tung's character in Forbidden Fruits, Pumpkin, plots in basements. In the film, Pumpkin takes on the role of a quiet, calculated observer who begins to slowly drive a wedge between the other women of the cult.

The tonal whiplash isn't lost on Tung, and it's precisely why she does what she does. "From the get-go, I wanted to do completely different things. That's the fun in being an actor," Tung says. "Forbidden Fruits was such a great thing to do after The Summer I Turned Pretty because it's a totally different world. It is so nice to be able to play roles that push you in a way you haven't been pushed before. That feeling is kind of addicting."

Tung was, by far, the youngest of the main ensemble on set and often had deep, introspective conversations with Reinhart about growing up in front of a global audience who feels entitled to every aspect of your life. It's a challenge she's had to navigate post–The Summer I Turned Pretty knowing that, at the end of the day, she's trying to be her own person while being a part of a generation that deeply craves connection with each other in the midst of a loneliness epidemic.

"Human beings crave a sense of being a part of a pack or belonging, and now with technology and with social media, there's a false sense of thinking everyone is part of your family and that you know them, but you don't," Tung explains. Forbidden Fruits is, at its core, a story about young women desperate to be chosen and initiated into something bigger than themselves. The inverse is true in her personal life. Fans don't just watch anymore. They theorize, they ship, they comment, and they demand. The hunger for access mirrors the film's cult-like intimacy in ways that feel almost on the nose.

If Tung's Pumpkin represents the outsider who slowly finds her way into the deranged world of the fruits, Pedretti's character is the one who's most deeply devoted to keeping up the fantasy that these women are the best of friends. Pedretti plays Cherry, a bubbly, sensual, risk-taking blonde who holds on to trauma that deeply unravels her. In any other universe, the cowboy hats, Bayonetta glasses, and pink paillette Daisy Dukes Pedretti wears throughout the film might make you think Cherry is another ditzy, hypersexualized female archetype. In reality, she's a layered, complex example of what it means to be a woman today.

"The beautiful thing that Cherry has to offer in her decoration of herself has so much merit, yet it's totally diminished by the fact that she doesn't have much confidence. She wants the validation of her sisters and her community," Pedretti, dialing in from a production in New Zealand, explains.

The actor speaks deliberately and slowly. Pedretti tells me she turned 30 while on set of Forbidden Fruits, which could be another layer to the deep emotional connection she feels toward a younger, perhaps more emotionally insecure Cherry. You can feel her deep reverence for her character despite being nothing like her in real life. She sees Cherry almost as a cautionary tale. "There's a moment in which Alexandra Shipp, who plays Fig, says that Cherry becomes a lipstick shell of herself. She's put so much attention into the way she presents herself and this loyalty to Apple that she's lost sense of who she is," she says.

Pedretti, who garnered critical acclaim for her roles as Love Quinn in Netflix's thriller You and Nell Crain in The Haunting of Hill House, knows a thing or two about playing an emotionally bruised character. Unlike her past performances, though, Cherry felt different—almost too elusive to parse through at times. The actor spent hours dissecting biographies and documentaries chronicling the lives of tragic women, people like Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Anna Nicole Smith.

Just like Cherry, Pedretti suggests, these women did what was expected of them in order to protect their truest selves from the gaze of the outside world. "Cherry has this ideal of wanting to perform this perfect idea of her best self because it keeps her safe," Pedretti adds. "I'm really grateful to live in this time where our existence and safety is not solely dependent on the validation of men."

Rather than viewing Forbidden Fruits as a straightforward feminist psychoanalysis of female friendship, Pedretti sees it as something more uncomfortable—a story about the ways patriarchy infiltrates even our attempts at solidarity. "When we move throughout the world as women, we're often so categorized before we're even allowed to be people, and within that process, we're objectified," she notes. "It's incredible how, in our attempts to support one another, we can dehumanize ourselves. It feels like an impossible thing to make our way out of."

For Pedretti, the film interrogates a quieter pressure: the expectation that womanhood alone should guarantee intimacy, that shared lived experience should automatically translate into trust, loyalty, and devotion. Cherry clings to Apple and the other fruits not just out of desire but also out of obligation and a belief that this is what sisterhood is supposed to look like. The tragedy, Pedretti says, is that solidarity built on expectation rather than choice can curdle into something just as suffocating as the system it's meant to resist.

It's an idea that Shipp, who plays Fig, understands intimately. Over the past decade, Shipp has built a career on playing women navigating power structures much larger than themselves, from teenage mutants in X-Men to pop culture icons in Greta Gerwig's Barbie. She brings a grounded, emotional intelligence to characters that could easily tip into stereotype. She has a way of locating the humanity inside spectacle, which makes her portrayal of Fig a compelling presence in Forbidden Fruits.

Though the women on-screen are unraveling—gaslighting each other in mall basements and weaponizing sisterhood—the atmosphere behind the scenes was anything but chaotic. Shipp describes a set defined by mutual respect and creative rigor, where each actor arrived prepared to go toe-to-toe.

"It was really fun to play characters that are so far from who we all are as individual women," she gushes, looking back on the experience of working with Reinhart, Tung, and Pedretti. "I knew right away, being surrounded by this incredible ensemble, that I had to step my game up."

That competitive generosity, each woman pushing the other to dig deeper, bleeds into Forbidden Fruits itself. Despite being an original member of the mall coven, Fig feels like an outsider within the confines of the system. She's Black, a bit goth, and refreshingly self-aware in a group that thrives on delusion. Shipp plays her with a quiet sharpness, like someone constantly calculating the temperature of the room. But at the end of the day, she admits, Fig goes along with the hexes, the drama, and the chaos largely out of proximity. She's there, so she stays.

"I had conversations with Meredith [Alloway] because Fig is obviously a college-educated, strong, willpowered individual. She can't just be in this world because of the store discount she gets from working at the mall," Shipp says, dialing in from her home in Los Angeles. "She eventually snaps because, at the end of the day, we can only take so much shit from someone. Fig came to the store for the community. Someone who wants to make friends will do some really fucked-up shit.”

For Shipp, that contradiction is the point. Fig isn't naïve—she's lonely. And loneliness in Forbidden Fruits is just as dangerous as devotion. "It's like trauma bonding," she jokes, referencing the similarities between the dynamic between the women in Forbidden Fruits and her own experience of working at a retail store in her pre-acting days. "We don't get to choose who we're around when we're working retail, sure, but we can both hate the boss. We can both hate the long hours."

It's a flippant comparison, but it's a valid one. Shared dissatisfaction can feel like intimacy. Mutual resentment can masquerade as alignment. In the fluorescent purgatory of a retail job—or the dimly lit back room of a cultish girl gang operating in the basement—solidarity often begins with a common enemy. The problem, Fig eventually realizes, is that bonding over what you hate isn't the same thing as building something you love. "In particular for Fig, it was really important for me to showcase that she just wanted friends, low-key. There's something so sweet and innocent about that," Shipp admits. "She was accepted and appreciated by the fruits. It's a really intoxicating feeling, but it doesn't mean you have to be around all of these bad people, and she comes to find that out."

Although each of the women come to realize the toxic nature of their friend group, Fig is the first to snap. It's a deliberate choice, acting as the first domino in a set to fall over and cause the fracturing of the larger ensemble. In that way, Fig is the realest character. The result is a fight during a tornado lockdown that drives the women farther apart than ever. Everyone is in it to save their own lives. The illusion of girlhood—a glossy means of salvation—collapses in on itself at the end.

From Eve to the mall basement, the temptation's always been the same: Pit the women against each other. You call it jealousy, call it hysteria, or call it sin, but ultimately, it isn't that simple. The danger that Forbidden Fruits puts on full display isn't about female power. It's what happens when that power gets warped, when belonging becomes transactional, and when sisterhood becomes performance. The film grants its women the freedom to be messy, manipulative, hedonistic, horny, wrathful, and, most importantly, fully in command of their own stories.

In their made-up Garden of Eden, no serpent is required. There's no forbidden apple. It's just a group of women trying—messily, imperfectly, and often destructively—to carve out space for themselves in a world that still insists on defining them first.

Two thousand years later, the accusation about whether women were the origin of sin lingers, but Forbidden Fruits dares to ask a different question. What if women were never the cause of it and are simply the most convenient scapegoats?

Photographer and Super 8 Director: Emman Montalvan
Stylist: Lauren Eggertsen
Hairstylist for Lili Reinhart: Ericka Verrett
Hairstylist for Lola Tung: Dana Boyer
Hairstylist for Victoria Pedretti: Chris Farmer
Hairstylist for Alexandra Shipp: Miles Jeffries
Makeup Artist for Lili Reinhart: Cedric Jolivet
Makeup Artist for Lola Tung: Misha Shahzada
Makeup Artist for Victoria Pedretti: Shelby Smith
Makeup Artist for Alexandra Shipp: Dana Delaney
Manicurist for Lili Reinhart: Erin Leigh Moffett
Manicurist for Lola Tung: Thuy Nguyen
Manicurist for Victoria Pedretti: Stephanie Stone
Manicurist for Alexandra Shipp: Queenie Nguyen
Creative Director: Alexa Wiley

Set Designer: Isaac Aaron
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Producer: Lindsay Ferro
DP: Sam Miron
Producer: Kellie Scott

If you have yet to watch Industry, I have a few words of warning: do not watch if your anxiety levels are quick to rise, do not watch if you like your plots neat and characters tidy and absolutely do not watch with your parents. Which is to say that it is brilliant, blistering television; smart, spiky, shocking and scorching-hot appointment viewing.

The HBO/BBC show, which wraps its fourth season tonight, follows the plotting and scheming of a sprawling cast of characters in the world of finance. At the centre of it all is Marisa Abela as Yasmin Kara-Hanani, now the marvellously named Lady Muck following her marriage to Sir Henry Muck (played, brilliantly, by Kit Harrington). Damaged, ruthless, vicious and vulnerable, she is complex; a walking contradiction swaddled in expensive knitwear.

"She’s a provocateur. She likes to shake up a room," says Abela, over a coffee in East London before her Who What Wear UK cover shoot. Thoughtful, engaged and with a sparkling laugh, in person, Abela shares Yasmin's charisma, though none of her character’s snooty brusqueness. Saluting the "richness" of the character, Abela adds: "She has intense moments of darkness and intense moments of levity and humour. That keeps people guessing with her but also draws them in. ... She presents as a predator, but she is the ultimately well-evolved prey. She completely fits into her environment in order to survive."

An unknown 22-year-old when she got the part of Yasmin (Abela was still at drama school, RADA, when she auditioned), the role has not only won her plaudits, including Best Leading Actress at the 2025 BAFTA Television Awards, but catapulted her to being-stopped-in-the-street fame. There was also her turn as Amy Winehouse in Back to Black, and a part in Stephen Soderbergh’s espionage thriller Black Bag alongside Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. The day before our interview, she was doing a new play reading with James Norton, whilst she’s also currently filming action fantasy Highlander with Russell Crowe and Henry Cavill.

Given this schedule, downtime has been somewhat limited for Abela over the past few months. "I just went on my honeymoon. That was probably the last time I was like, phone down, whatever. My husband [actor Jamie Bogyo, whom she met at RADA] and I really love to travel. I train a lot, I read a lot." She loves that Highlander is a really physical job. "It’s a lot of training in a martial-arts-y-jujitsu way, which is really fun, and it takes the sort of 'I am exercising' thing out of it; you just realise after two hours that you are." Abela is also a big Real Housewives stan (New York, Beverly Hills and Salt Lake City are her jam, and she has hung out with Dorinda Medley in New York), so she's palpably buzzing over the just-announced news that the OG New York crew are getting back together for a TV return.

Although there are enough rumours and nastiness in any episode of Industry to make even the bitchiest Housewife blush, season 4 has a particular potent sting in its examination of issues around sexual exploitation and consent, highlighted by Yasmin’s boundary-busting relationship with young assistant Hayley, played superbly by Kiernan Shipka. Viewers have been quick to note parallels between Yasmin and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Abela says she understands the cultural fascination we have with "women that fill up spaces, that are so close to power—especially power that feels slightly sour", like the current White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt. Sometimes rightfully, sometimes not, there’s a deep distrust of these women, she says. "We’re like, how do you reconcile this to yourself? We don’t necessarily ask the same question of men. We might [ask], 'How do you sleep at night?', but we know how they sleep at night; they’re fine! It feels like women ought to have higher social [and] moral responsibility than men."

If Industry is unflinching in its exploration of the ugliness of ruthless ambition, off-camera is a different story. "It’s a really fun set. We really are all just best friends working together," says Abela. She loves working with Harrington ("We’re so fearless with one another."), and co-star Myha’la was a bridesmaid at her wedding last year.

Abela grew up in Rottingdean near Brighton with her brother and mother (she and Abela’s father, a director, divorced when Abela was young but remain close). To make ends meet, Abela’s mum, a TV and stage actress, took on extra jobs, including a call centre role. "I was really lucky to grow up in an incredibly creative household with a super-talented actress as a mother who [also] had to work other jobs. That did not look like failure to me; it looked like being an artist and making sacrifices for something she believed in."

Winning a place at the prestigious public school Roedean on a drama scholarship, Abela was introduced to the world of the 1% that Yasmin occupies. "I think it was really useful for [portraying] Yasmin in terms of understanding what privilege really looks like. No one who's entitled thinks they’re entitled," she says. "Those kids never walk into a room and think, 'How embarrassing I’m here,'" she notes, adding that she thinks everyone has a right to that kind of unshakeable self-confidence.

In a crinkled plaid shacket, loafers and a floor-length coat, in person, Abela reads more low-key cool girl than high-maintenance aristo. But, given all the premieres and award ceremonies, fashion is an important part of her off-screen work. "I really love it when it works. I feel like it’s all about trying to find your voice in your clothes," she says, acknowledging that the tone of different projects calls for a tailored approach. "It’s all about calibrating everything with intention. You can tell a bit of a story [with the clothes]."

Red carpets, however, are much more exposing for Abela than being on camera, even compared to a role like Yasmin that requires her to really go there without inhibition. "I think the worst I’ve ever felt about my body is when I was, like, 16, going to a party and [I] wanted a boy to fancy me. Even now, the hardest I’ve trained to be in a specific shape—other than Back to Black, which was a completely different thing—was for my wedding," she says. "I will train or eat or whatever in a different way if I’m going on holiday than I will if I’m doing a sex scene on Industry. I don’t feel that vain because I don’t feel [a] responsibility to an audience to look a certain way to be naked on camera."

In the early days of Industry, she remembers talking to Lena Dunham (who directed the pilot episode) about whether Yasmin is "one of those girls" who pushes food around her plate. And what did they decide? "I think Yasmin eats whatever the fuck she wants!" she laughs. "There’s no scarcity mindset when it comes to Yasmin; I think she has a high opinion of herself, I don’t think she suffers with self-confidence issues [or] what she looks like, and that’s so freeing to be able to play."

Photographer: Charlotte Hadden at Together Associates
Stylist: Sophie Cloarec
Hair Stylist: Gareth Bromell at AFrame Agency
Makeup Artist: Neil Young at AFrame Agency
Manicurist: Ami Streets
Editor-in-Chief: Jane McFarland
Managing Director: Hannah Almassi
Art Director: Natalia Sztyk
Executive Director, Entertainment: Jessica Baker
Movement Director: Liam John
Writer: Laura Jordan
Video: Natasha Wilson
Photography Assistant: Lucy Rooney, Lily Sadin
Digital Technician: George Zenko
Styling Assistant: Layla Desjardins
Production: Town Productions

Step into the universe of the coolest creatives in the fashion industry with our series My World, where readers will discover how the top stylists, designers, and tastemakers built their careers and get a peek into their favorite restaurants, beloved albums, fashion finds, etiquette rules they stand by, and so much more.

The cover star of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, W, and countless other magazines worldwide. The face of campaigns for Chloé, Ferragamo, Gucci, Miu Miu, Tory Burch, and Valentino. A graduate of the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London with a degree in classical theater and an acting debut as the leading lady in Sean Baker's 2012 Starlet, followed by roles in Alex Ross Perry's Listen Up Philip and Noah Baumbach's While We're Young. These are just a few of the highlights from Dree Hemingway's career thus far.

Adding to her impressive résumé, the Sun Valley, Idaho-raised, Los Angeles– and Rome-based actress is currently playing Daryl Hannah in Ryan Murphy's long-awaited series Love Story alongside Paul Kelly as John F. Kennedy Jr. and Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, which recently premiered on February 12. Her next performance will be in The Girl, a film that examines Roman Polanski's abuse scandal through the perspective of the victim, Samantha Geimer. It is the feature writing and directing debut of French filmmaker Marina Ziolkowski.

If her well-known last name looks familiar, it's because she's the great-granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway himself (and the daughter of actress Mariel Hemingway and businessman Stephen Crisman)—the subject of The Hemingway Files, an upcoming film she's executive-producing. The project is a candid portrayal of the final years of his life, including his struggles with mental health, his complicated relationship with his daughter Gloria, and his paranoia-induced belief that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were watching him.

Over our video call, Dree's easygoing, fun-loving energy is quickly apparent. She has that "lit from within" quality, and the same warmth comes through in a scroll of her Instagram. She comes across as glamorous yet grounded, confident yet approachable, well-traveled, stylish, and uninhibited.

Below, take a look into the world of the actress, model, and soon-to-be producer.

You started your career in modeling. When do you feel like acting became serious for you, or was that always the goal?

I always wanted to be an actress. I felt like I actually started modeling because, in my mind, it was an exploration of character. It was kind of like an intro into the acting world when I felt like I wasn't ready to be an actress quite yet. I feel like you have to draw on life experiences to better a character on-screen. I had been a ballet dancer, so it felt like a natural path toward the acting world. But I mean, acting has been my dream forever. As long as I can remember, I was like, "I'm gonna be an actress."

Between going to school for acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and landing your first role in a Sean Baker film, was there an experience from either that shaped you early on?

I feel like working with Sean was a really magical and unique introduction to the acting world. It was very improv-heavy but also so character-driven. It was such a guerrilla-style project, and to this day, it's one of my favorite things I've ever done because it really made me fall in love with this industry beyond anything else, and it solidified that this is exactly what I want to do and need to be doing in my life. I also grew up watching Turner Classic Movies, and I feel like women like Katharine Hepburn and the leading ladies in Hitchcock films were really why I wanted to be an actress. There's elegance but also such power in these women. I really fell in love with Old Hollywood. I think we're in a different era today, but I still think that essence exists in some way.

With Love Story, how did you get into the role? Do you have a standout memory from being on set?

In terms of getting into the role, it was mostly interviews. There were a couple of different interviews I would quickly watch to ground myself in it. But my favorite thing on set was just being with everybody. I think every set is special, but this one, in particular, was incredible because I really loved everyone. It's a beautiful machine unlike anything I've ever experienced, and I really enjoyed working with everyone. Jesse Peretz specifically was so magical. And then Jason McCormick, the DP, was really fun to work with. It's like a dance, and you can just feel that he's creating something amazing.

You're also producing The Hemingway Files. Is there any part of your great-grandfather's legacy or stories you've heard about his personality that you feel like you relate to or see in yourself?

One-hundred percent. I feel like he was a people person and really enjoyed being around strangers and hearing their stories, and I'm very much that person too. I like talking to the people I'm working with and knowing what's going on with them. I'm very curious about that. He also loved to travel and loved nature. I remember the first time I went to Africa and thinking, "Oh, I get it. This runs through our blood."

I would love to know three words that you feel define your personal style right now.

I think my personal style right now is very '90s and minimal. I don't like to overthink things. I want to just throw things on. If I'm wearing a pattern, I pair it with something simple. If I'm wearing something colorful, everything else needs to be undone. There has to be a juxtaposition. I never like to be over-the-top. At the same time, I like making bold statements that surprise people. But overall, I think I've consistently, my whole life, been a little more grounded in the way I dress.

Do you have style icons who really inform your style?

I feel like Gwyneth Paltrow in the '90s is kind of a style icon of mine and Julia Roberts too. I also feel like Katharine Hepburn is a huge style icon for me. She wore pantsuits in such an elegant way, but there was also an androgynous side that I really enjoy. Who else? I think my style is very intuitive. There can be someone or something I've seen that inspires me, but there's always my own take. Lauren Hutton is a huge style icon for me as well. I like when it's playful, undone, but with a splash of something unexpected. For hair and makeup, I can't really do over-the-top. I've tried, and it looks cool, but it really becomes a character thing.

What would you say is the most sentimental item in your closet?

I have a Tiffany's watch that was either my Aunt Margot's or my mother's, and it's falling apart. It has a black strap, and I keep trying to push it down. I keep taking it in to get it fixed. It's very sentimental to me. It's funny because I love things, and I have a lot of things, but I feel like memories and the people around me are more important than the objects themselves. I do have a sweater that I wear every time I travel, which was my father's. It's falling apart, and I kind of look like a ratty sack bag, but it's become a habit, and I could never give it away even though I'll probably stop wearing it at some point. The sleeves are ripping, and I keep getting them sewn, so now, it's starting to look a little wild.

What would you say is your most repurchased beauty product?

There's this brand called Mimoh by Dr. Ellie, who's a Korean acupuncturist. It's a PDRN spray and cream, and I've seen the most change in my skin with that. Then there's another brand called Osmosis. I take two vitamins from them that help with hormonal and environmental changes. It's all-natural and called Skin Defense, and it's kept me from breaking out completely.

Are there any other products that you're loyal to?

Have you seen Bonjout? It's a cream that I really love. I also use Kosas concealer, and my go-to is the Super Tinted Hydrator from U Beauty. If I need more coverage, I'll layer it, but normally, that's just what I put on for daytime. For cheek tint, I use the Merit one in Rouge.

Do you have a go-to lip liner?

I really like the Saie Beauty in Twist.

What about a nail polish color you're always getting or coming back to?

I feel like it's Mademoiselle. I've been craving going red for months now, but when I was on set, I could never do red. Then, I keep doing shoots, and they want natural colors, so I can't do red. But I really love a cherry cherry.

Do you have a favorite one? I feel like a lot of people have their one red polish.

It's called Big Apple Red. Then there's another one—Ferrari red… Or is it Lamborghini? It's a really aggressive poppy, but I really like it because it has orange undertones.

You grew up in Idaho. I've never been—how do you usually describe it when people ask, "What's it like growing up in Idaho"?

It's beautiful. I grew up in a ski town. I call it a less-bougie Aspen situation. It's nice, but people are still wearing their Patagonias and hiking boots. It's not a fashion thing at all. A lot of Old Hollywood would vacation there in the 1950s, and they even had a train from Los Angeles up to Sun Valley. It's where the first chairlift ever was. It's very green. It's a valley, so it sits between mountains, and it's stunning. My whole heart and soul is there, and I don't think I fully appreciated it as much growing up. Now, I just cherish everything that it is, and I'm so grateful that I was able to grow up there. Winter is really beautiful, but in the summers, there are lakes, rivers, and hiking, and it's so lush.

What's your number one Idaho recommendation?

There's Craters of the Moon, which is really funny. It's all this volcanic rock. Then you go down into it, which is very entertaining. Redfish Lake is gorgeous. I'd also recommend hiking there. That's a great spot. And my favorite, favorite, favorite restaurant for Thai food is a place called Rickshaw.

You split your time between L.A. and Rome. Do you have a favorite restaurant in each place?

Maybe Damian for Mexican food downtown. It's like heaven. Oh, and there's a restaurant in Rome called Pierluigi, which is my favorite—expensive but so good. In L.A., Speranza. It's a cheap Italian spot, but it's so yummy. I like a character-filled restaurant that feels homey and cozy.

If you could bring one thing from L.A. to Rome and vice versa, what would it be?

There's this desk sewing table that I found. It was in a secondhand store. It's by Ponti, who's like the creator of mid-century modern, and I got it for next to nothing. I would love to bring it here, but it really needs to stay there. I also have really good rugs and really good art out there.

Do you have a favorite family ritual that you do?

My dad passed away, and his birthday was on Christmas Eve, so every year on Christmas Eve, we eat his favorite meal. I don't really eat meat, but I have steak every year with mashed potatoes on his birthday. It's really fun and really celebratory [with] a really good glass of red wine. I think that's my favorite tradition.

What music do you have on repeat right now?

Rosalía.

Letterboxd top four?

The Fifth Element, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, The Philadelphia Story, and Spirited Away.

Is there a film or book that you feel like really changed you?

Yes, you know what? I don't know if it changed me, but watching Pride and Prejudice, I was like, "Why am I not British and living in the countryside during this time period?" All of the Jane Austen books and films had that effect on me. … I remember watching Sophie's Choice. Again, it didn't change me, but it devastated me to the point where I was like, "Wow." At the same time, it's exquisite acting. It's a hard movie, but just… wow.

Favorite book?

The Catcher in the Rye is one of my favorites. There's Autobiography of a Yogi that I really love.

One etiquette rule that you follow?

Please and thank you. Kindness.

Is there a trend right now that you will not participate in that you feel strongly like is not for you?

Um, yeah. Some of the 2000s trends, like low-rise jeans. I attempted to get back into that again, but I don't know if it's for me. I'm not sure I can pull it off.

What is the best parenting advice that you've gotten?

I think the best parenting advice is to be present—be present with your child. Also, try not to overreact because kids have no control over their emotions.

Is there one piece of advice from either of your parents that you feel like you think about a lot or that you feel is a defining thing for you.

My mom always used to say, "Pretty is as pretty does," meaning that it's not just about outer beauty. It's really about internal kindness. That's something I hope to instill in my daughter.

Madison Beer is no stranger to turning heads, but when we meet at a Glendale coffee shop on a windy January afternoon, she's surprisingly anonymous. After the lunching animators sporting matching DreamWorks lanyards clear out of the establishment, the remaining group of elderly Armenian gentlemen at the adjacent table appear to be totally oblivious to the pop star's presence. Truthfully, had I been about 40 years older and enjoying an espresso with my fellow retirees, I wouldn't have batted an eyelash either—except maybe to admire her belted gray herringbone minidress.

For Beer—who is in the midst of rolling out her highly anticipated third studio album, Locket—moments of anonymity like this are few and far between. While this particular group of men may not have recognized the Grammy-nominated Gen Z pop star, it's safe to say their granddaughters would have certainly been starstruck.

Amid the enormity and pressure of this album cycle, Beer quickly defies all the usual tropes of a pop star—feedback she often gets from people she meets outside of the industry. "I have existed as a signed artist longer than I existed not being a signed artist," she calls out. "It's been my normal for a really long time. Fame never came into my life and turned into something that I let consume who I am."

In the throes of her press tour and prep for The Locket Tour, which kicks off in May, Beer is on the precipice of several significant firsts. "When I perform at Madison Square Garden, I'm gonna probably shit myself twice," she laughs. "That's just been my dream for forever." She is notably inquisitive, observant, and down-to-earth. To my shock and horror, she almost immediately clocks that we are from neighboring corners of the tristate area. "It's just an essence, you know?" she says when I press her to reveal my seemingly glaring tell.

Locket, which was released in mid-January, sonically and lyrically communicates the continued complexities of her experience straddling normal life and celebrity, all the while being constantly dissected under a microscope. Whimsical arpeggiation, dreamy chimes, and brutally honest softness in songs like "Bittersweet" and "Bad Enough" juxtapose the electric energy and brash, magnetic confidence of "Yes Baby" and Grammy-nominated "Make You Mine." This contrast, in many ways, mimics the duality of her own experience. Conceptually, Locket feels like a reclamation of a girlhood sabotaged by a system that forced Beer to grow up way too fast.

Considering she's just 26 years old, the longevity of Beer's career is particularly notable. It's also likely why I admittedly cannot place when or where I first became aware of Beer as a public figure, which is something Beer and I laugh at. Apparently, this sentiment has been frequently echoed throughout the years. Instead, she feels like a ubiquitous presence in the industry, yet during our interview week, Beer's single "Bittersweet" debuted at 98 on the Billboard Hot 100, and Locket itself debuted at 10 on the Billboard 200—both firsts in her 14-year career. On the topic of these particular firsts, she's learned to avoid tying her artistic integrity to statistics. "I've kind of come to a point where I'm like, 'I'm okay with or without it. I'm proud of the music with or without it,'" she says.

Her streaming numbers have historically been surprising considering her level of fame. With over 40 million Instagram followers and another 21 million on TikTok, her fan base is massive. In October of 2025, she performed songs off her forthcoming album at the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, which was streamed live by over 2.5 million viewers. Her music has also consistently remained critically acclaimed with overwhelmingly positive reviews from major publications, even securing Grammy nominations in both 2024 and 2025. Yet her fame seems to precede her, diverting our attention from her impressive and lengthy music career.

She's also received frequent praise from the influential and highly respected fixtures in the industry. In 2023 at the Billboard Women in Music event, Lana Del Rey shouted out Beer alongside chart-toppers Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo as representative of just how far the industry has come for female artists. "She changed me," says Beer, reflecting on the happenstance moment Del Rey approached her at a coffee shop and introduced herself as a fan. "I literally dropped my knees, and I was like, 'Am I hallucinating right now?'"

Even with all the accolades, Beer's inescapable noteriaty as a social media icon feels misguided at best and completely disregards her impressive technical, musical skill. It's a "chicken or the egg" scenario where, in our black-and-white world, it's difficult to trace which came first: internet fame or musical fame. Upon reflection, this is something I, a professional purveyor of internet rhetoric, am also guilty of. It's this erasure of a narrative focused on talent as opposed to marketability that feels like a reflection of the state of celebrity—particularly for women who enter the industry as children.

In many ways, her career has been entirely unprecedented. In 2012, a 12-year-old Beer was inspired by her favorite YouTuber and artist Christina Grimmie to begin uploading covers from the comfort and safety of her Long Island home. "I literally owe my life to her. I wouldn't have posted that YouTube cover if I wasn't inspired by her," she says. It wasn't long before none other than Justin Bieber, who famously got his own start on YouTube, shared one of the preteen's videos, making it go instantly viral. Shortly after, Beer signed a deal with Island Records and was thrust into the incredibly adult world of fame and navigating the emergence of social media as a necessary evil of the entertainment industry without the backing of traditional institutions like Disney or Nickelodeon that have, for better or worse, guided and propelled teenage girls to stardom. Instead, she was thrown into the industry among the grown-ups, where the lines of what should and shouldn't be commonplace for a 12-year-old are murky at best.

Soon, the jarring reality of celebrity began to rear its head, both in her personal life and in the industry at large. Just a few years after Beer posted the YouTube cover that set her career in motion, Grimmie, who was just 22 years old, was shot and killed by an obsessive fan during a meet and greet after an Orlando concert. The tragedy had a significant impact on Beer. "It was beyond devastating," she reflects. "She's, in my opinion, one of the most talented people that ever lived, and I don't think she got the recognition I always thought she deserved." Beer pauses thoughtfully and adds, "I never got to really meet her, and I just… I don't know. I just wish she knew how much I loved her. I feel kind of sad that I never really let her know."

Simultaneously, Beer was being actively hypersexualized by both traditional media and the now all-too-familiar vitriolic internet mob. Beer is undoubtedly striking. Her sharp cheekbones; dark, almond-shaped eyes; and thick, flowing brown hair have drawn attention for the entirety of her career. Even as a teen, she was frequently compared to much older, highly sexualized celebrities of the 2010s, most notably Megan Fox—a comparison she hilariously flips on its head in her 2024 Jennifer's Body–inspired music video for "Make You Mine."

After an incredibly traumatizing nude photo leak at the age of 15, Beer was subjected to endless and unrelenting cyberbullying and sex shaming well before she could legally drive, let alone buy a drink. In her 2023 memoir The Half of It, which she wrote hand in hand with best friend and writer Lena Fultz, Beer shares the impact of the experience on her mental health with blistering detail and honesty. After multiple suicide attempts and a borderline personality disorder diagnosis, her success as a musician is a testement to both her resilience and her passion.

With Locket, Beer rewrites her own narrative. Producing alongside frequent collaborators Tim Sommers aka One Love, Lostboy, and Leroy Clampitt, she describes the comfortability and safety that come with a long-term working relationship. "Trust is a big thing for me," she says. "And it's hard sometimes to go into a room with writers you've never met and sit down and be like, 'Here's all my trauma. Let's write a song about it.'" But it's that creative connection that allows her to trust the process.

"When I started it, I had no idea where I was headed," Beer says, explaining that the majority of the tracks on the album came to fruition in a particularly productive three-month span. "It takes a while to take off. That's kind of how I explain it. The beginning feels really slow, and then once it starts working, it's just go, go go."

The songwriting of Locket reflects that trust in its brutal honesty. Beer describes the process of writing what she describes as "the ballad of the album,"You're Still Everything": "I wrote that song in a really vulnerable state and at a time where I felt just totally desperate for someone who I felt like didn't really care at all. The line 'I only exist in the moments you're talking to me' is literally about feeling like I don't have a reason to be here if we're not talking." This candor, as scarily vulnerable as it may be, ultimately pushed Beer to include the song on the album despite the ways it exposes a piece of her she finds complicated.

"Am I ready to openly tell people how I get so attached and how it literally feels like the air is being taken from me when someone is ghosting?" she asks. "But I know so many people can relate, so it feels like [it's] worth doing. I know there's so many people out there, girls like me, that might feel validated. That makes it worth it."

That intimacy is also palpable in the creative direction of the world of the album. Locket opens with a soft winding reminiscent of turning the key of a music box. It instantly transports the listener to a nostalgic, whimsical youth bedroom where an unlocked diary detailing confessions of young love in cursive ink rests abandoned amid gently strewn hair ribbons and lacy baby-doll dresses. "I wanted it to feel both magical and hopeful," says Beer.

As visually rich as the album is in its final form, for Beer, the holistic creative direction of her work never comes to her first. "To me, it's the music first always, and then everything else can fall into place after," says Beer of her process. "I'm really bad at creating something beforehand and sticking to it because then it starts developing, and you're like, 'This is not at all what I thought it was gonna be.' So I don't even do that anymore. I just go in, and I let it take shape. At the start, I had no idea, and then once it started taking form, I could really see the aesthetic, and I could see the colors, and I could see everything just start to come to life in this cool way. But that happens when the music develops."

What most people don't know about Beer is how deeply involved she is in every aspect of her album's conception. Not only is she a cowriter on every song on the album, but she's also a coproducer. From technical instrumentation decisions to music-video direction alongside frequent collaborator Aerin Moreno, Beer remains incredibly hands-on in developing the visual language of the album.

This naturally trickles down to styling. Her vision? Delicate vintage lace corsets; puff-sleeve, fairytale-inspired dresses; and, of course, dainty dangling lockets. She credits her stylist, Harper Slate, with bringing the look to life. "She's just really cool about letting me feel comfortable but then also pushing me where it's necessary and having a clear vision," she says. Beer especially appreciates Slate's direction and describes her personal style as comfort first. "On a normal day, I'm in sweats and a hoodie, and I have no shame about it. I thought that would change when I turned 25, but I'm turning 27 soon and not feeling like it's changing anytime soon," she continues. "I've found what I like, and I think that's really important. I can still look put-together but be comfy. My go-to is just a baggy pair of jeans that feel kind of sweatpant-y and a cashmere sweater and a cool leather jacket."

Beer's affinity for comfort, however, runs deeper than just her wardrobe. As her three-month international Locket Tour approaches, she shares that much of her love for touring has been the product of strong boundary setting that allows her to put her mental health first. Yet over the past decade, this has been met with significant pushback from not just industry executives but also the court of social media. "People have been like, 'If you don't step up and do this, someone else will.' I'm like, 'Cool, then the floor is yours' because I'm not going to be played like a pawn," she says.

She has also taken the wisdom she's garnered from previous stints on the road to make sure the complex logistics of touring support her rather than burn her out. "I love touring, and I'm excited to tour because I've made it so I can do it and love it," she continues. "My last tour was eight months long, which some people are like, 'That's normal.' I'm like, 'Not to me.'" There's nothing normal about that. She hopes that standing up for herself and pushing for better boundaries has a positive effect on the expectations of the industry. "I would love to be someone that people could look to [say], 'Wow, she does a really good job of maintaining a healthy balance between both,'" she adds.

Beer is especially grateful for her longtime fans who have supported her in the moments she has needed to take a step back. "I have a community that's not just going to up and abandon me," she shares. "I know how precious time is, and I feel like I give so much of my life to my career. … I'm good with where I'm at. I'm proud of all my achievements thus far, and if I can maintain a healthy work/life balance, that, to me, is the true epitome of success."

As the baristas begin to close the coffee shop around us and we are suddenly made aware of the time, Beer excitedly shares her leisurely plans for the rest of the day: "I'm literally going home [and] taking a bath." A Pisces through and through. "I have an epic bath, so I'm in the bathroom all the time," she admits. "I'm in the bath, then I'm back in my bed, then I go downstairs and make food. Then I'm like, 'Can I go back in the bath?' And then I go back in the bath." We laugh while comparing step counts, screen times, and our shared love for a day spent entirely horizontal. "Forget the couch. I can't even get to the couch. I'm in bed," Beer concludes. Stars, I sigh, they're just like us.

Talent: Madison Beer
Photographer: Chantal Anderson
Stylist: Gemma Ferri
Hairstylist: Mel Dominguez
Makeup Artist: Cherish Brooke Hill
Manicurist: Analysse Hernandez
Creative Director: Amy Armani
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Producer: Lindsay Ferro
DP: Sam Miron
Video Producer: Kellie Scott