Hunter Schafer
Hunter Schafer is an actor, born 1998.
Hunter Schafer was a public figure before she was an actor. Born in Trenton, New Jersey and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, she transitioned as a child and came to national attention in 2016 as a plaintiff in the lawsuit against North Carolina's Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, the bathroom bill that barred transgender people from facilities matching their gender identity. Teen Vogue named her to its 21 Under 21 list the following year. She was also working as a model.
Then Euphoria happened in 2019, and Jules Vaughn made her one of the most recognisable young performers on television. The role is worth being precise about: it is a part written to be looked at, and what she does with it is refuse to perform for the camera. She underplays almost everything, holds still, and lets the show's enormous stylistic apparatus crash around her.
The film work since has been deliberately unglamorous. Tigris in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Anna in Kinds of Kindness, and Gretchen in Cuckoo, which is the first thing she has carried outright and a genuinely strange choice for a breakout lead: a German-set horror film with a very odd sense of humour.
Born in 1998, she has six credits to her name, with Mother Mary and Cry to Heaven still ahead. It is a small filmography assembled with unusual care.
Movies (5)
TV (1)
Where to start with Hunter Schafer
There is no route in that avoids Euphoria, and it comes with a warning: the show is aggressive and sometimes exhausting. Jules is the reason to stay: the performance is quiet inside a series that is anything but, and the two-part special episodes are where it is at its best.
Cuckoo is the one to watch next and the better argument for her as a lead. It is a horror film with a bizarre streak of comedy, it asks her to be exhausted and furious and physically capable in the same scene, and the whole thing rests on her.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is the blockbuster credit, where she plays Tigris in a franchise prequel that is far better than it had any need to be. Kinds of Kindness is a small part in a deeply peculiar anthology, worth it for the company. Mother Mary is the one still to come.