Odessa A'zion
Odessa A'zion is an actor, born 2000.
Horror keeps calling, and it has good reason to. A'zion, born Odessa Zion Segall Adlon in 2000, has been working since her late teens, starting with the CBS comedy Fam in 2019 and then Grand Army on Netflix in 2020, where Joey Del Marco was the series' centre of gravity and by some distance its hardest role.
The thing she does that few young actors can is play exhaustion. Her characters tend to be the ones absorbing damage rather than causing it, holding a scene together while visibly running out of the ability to do so, which is precisely why genre directors want her. Riley McKendry in the 2022 Hellraiser is a lead built on guilt and withdrawal rather than screaming. Tara in The Inhabitant, Madison in Let's Scare Julie and Nina Riley in the film of Until Dawn work the same territory.
The recent stretch is a step up. Marty Supreme brought an Actor Award nomination and a British Academy Film Award nomination, and I Love LA on HBO gave her Tallulah Stiel in a register much closer to comedy than anything before it. Around those sit Corinne in Sitting in Bars with Cake, Sky in Am I OK?, Charlotte in She Rides Shotgun, Jaclyn in Supercool, Kennedy in Pools, and voice work as Nikki in Stranger Things: Tales from '85. Fresh Kills, another of the films she is known for, is not among the credits listed here.
Movies (12)
TV (7)
Where to start with Odessa A'zion
Open with Grand Army. Joey Del Marco is a demanding, unglamorous lead and A'zion plays her without asking to be liked, which is the reason the series lands at all.
Hellraiser is the best argument for her in genre. The film hands its lead an addiction storyline that could have been a cliche and she plays it with a flatness that makes the horror worse. Until Dawn is the more commercial follow-up in the same lane.
Marty Supreme is the prestige swing, the film that brought her award nominations, and I Love LA is the surprise, since almost nothing before it suggested she could be this funny. For the smaller, gentler side, Sitting in Bars with Cake and Am I OK? are both worth an evening, and neither asks her to survive anything.