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By Emma Carmichael
Photography via Bryce Anderson
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Hunter Schafer still has a few boxes to unpack. A few months ago, the 25-year-old actor and model bought his first home in Los Angeles and then temporarily left the city to promote his role in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. the space remains half-furnished, with framed artwork, plus a poster of Paris Is Burning, leaning against the walls. In the room that will become Schafer’s art studio, boxes filled with his old newspapers clutter the floor, along with stacks of clothes and books. and a life-size neon green skeleton. In the middle of it all is a box full of mismatching hangers.
“I have about 10,” Schafer says with a laugh. “It’s very bad. “
Space is a painting in progress and she’s learning as she goes. He now knows how the paintings in custody work and has reviews on the other types of grass seeds. “These are things that are very reserved for big girls,” she says. That he can do whatever he wants with design, in particular, is exciting and overwhelming to him. She recently visited a neighbor and came up with the idea of building a cozy library corner around the fireplace in her living room.
“Can you believe there’s a fireplace here?” He asks, his eyes alight. “Having one live sounds pretty scary, but I’ll understand.
Hunter Schafer covers GQ’s 2024 Global Creativity Awards portion. Subscribe to GQ.
That doesn’t seem to be the purpose of Schafer, who approached life and art with self-taught zeal. In 2018, when she starred in HBO’s Emmy-winning drama Euphoria, she was 19 years old and had never acted before. on the task and made his character, handsome movement student Jules Vaughn, a generational touchstone. For his first starring role in a film, Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo Mind Mystery, which opens in theaters this summer, Schafer learned to handle a butterfly. knife and bass player, he filmed his first action scenes and perfected American Sign Language.
“He’s brimming with artistic energy,” Dan Stevens, his Cuckoo co-star, tells me. “It’s like I’m going to get out of it. ” One day, between scenes, he recalls, he, Schafer and a few others were waiting in an old classroom with a whiteboard. Schafer, who studied art at a high school, took the markers silently. “We were chatting and we looked up. ” And there’s a lovely face that he drew on this board,” Stevens says. “Everybody’s like, ‘Fuck, is there anything she can’t do?'”
Just six years into her acting career, the talented Schafer is in high demand, with a small role in an upcoming Yorgos Lanthimos film and a role opposite Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway in David Lowery’s Mother Mary on the horizon.
But it would be surprising if Schafer stopped there. She is, among other things, a visual artist-turned-activist, model-turned-actress, the kind of passionate, natural, multi-traited mathematician that happens to be the norm. for the artistic types in your cohort.
Schafer has a vivacious and attentive energy, although she describes herself as “a real girl with ADHD” and usually doesn’t know what day it is. (The only time he looks at his phone in front of me for two days in a row is to use the “one year passed” feature in his Photos app, to what he was doing last January. ) It is fed through its vaporizer, matcha, and Coca-Cola. She’s silly and curious, and only refuses to answer a query once. , when I ask her about her time at the legendary and selective Berlin nightclub Berghain, an avid techno fan, plans to return and doesn’t “want to ruin my vibe with them. “
There are no posturing here; This is the Schafer that his friends and collaborators know and love. Her friend and stylist Dara Allen says Schafer has an “obsessive understanding of art, fashion and culture, and we can communicate about all of that very deeply. “But also: “He’s in a position to clown. “
Schafer has been in the public eye since the age of 17, when she became the youngest plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging North Carolina House Bill 2 (HB2), which banned trans people from using public restrooms that did not conform to the gender indexed on their birth certificates. Schafer’s activism propelled her into the spotlight. She’s become a highly sought-after model and, thanks to her role in Euphoria, perhaps the most high-profile young trans star we’ve ever seen, a trajectory she’s traveled. with cunning and ingenuity. Every day, new doors seem to open and she can’t wait to see what they are. Over the past decade, it hasn’t really stopped moving.
“Some other people say, ‘Oh, I’ve been here a few times before,'” Schafer tells me, slumped onto the floor of her living room. “I don’t think I’ve been here many times before. But I think that in this life I’ve been through a lot of things that require you to grow up pretty quickly. And whether it’s trans aspect or celebrity, either of those things is vital to the extent that. . . She snaps her fingers. ” I can’t settle for this. I have to be intentional about how I move in the world.
“In a way, it’s lucky because I feel like it prepares me for the life I have now,” she continues. “But in another sense, it’s like, I don’t know, you deserve to have been just a girl. “And I’ve been an idiot. “
Coat and jeans via The Row. Tank top via Judy Turner. Zapatos 424 through Guillermo Andrade. Socks through Comme Si.
Schafer has big plans for his art studio. He’d like to tear up the rug and then move to sewing tables, a drawing desk, and all of his oil paintings from the area he rents on the other side of town, so he can paint clothing designs, paintings, and drawings. At home, she feels like it. I like that.
Before she became an actress, Schafer thought she could simply be an artist. He grew up in Raleigh with 3 other young siblings, where his mother, Katy, is a youth minister and his father, Mac, is a pastor at the local Presbyterian church. Churches. When she was bored, she would be placed on the coffee table with paper and pencils, and she would make paper dolls and play with them. In high school, Schafer was bullied and struggled to have compatibility and her artistic abilities. The opportunities have become something of a lifeline: she already knew a little about ASL before filming Cuckoo because the only children who greeted her at the cafeteria table were the deaf students. He liked comedy books: Skottie Young’s illustrations in the adaptation of The Grand Wizard of Oz was one of his early favorites, and he dreamed of becoming an illustrator. Drawing, he says, has been “my one and only wonderful artistic love. “Creating female characters and designing their compatibilities was also a way to explore their emotions about their gender.
“I’m pretty sure I needed it to externalize what I didn’t think I could externalize with myself,” Schafer says. “I was a trans kid who didn’t transition until high school. I had all those other people and this user in me, who maybe won’t faint as intended. I think I needed it as a tool.
Schafer came out as gay to his parents in high school and then transgender in ninth grade. In 2016, Schafer joined the ACLU and Lambda Legal in the fight against HB2. She joined the lawsuit not only in hopes of defying the law, but also in hopes of raising awareness and acceptance of other trans people more broadly. She was thrust into national attention and culture wars almost overnight, writing poignant op-eds and visual essays for Teen Vogue and Rookie and appearing in local news segments. His parents were by his side. He was terrified of public speaking, so his father, comfortable behind a pulpit, rarely made public statements on his behalf, and he and Katy gave interviews to help Schafer and his legal battle.
“It’s been a great duty and it’s replaced my life with tactics that I don’t think I even figured out until it happened,” Schafer says now. “I think they felt a duty to me. “
Erdem dress and gloves. Shoes for Paris, Texas.
When HB2 was repealed in March 2017, Schafer was a senior at a major arts school in Winston-Salem and had been accepted to study fashion design at London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins. But she put those plans on hold when she was given her first job as a designer in New York City. He remembers letting out a cathartic scream during the flight. “It was deeply painful to be, quote-unquote, in the wrong frame growing up,” he says. Even with the help he had at home as a teenager, this feeling had narrowed his vision of the future. And then I was on a commercial shoot, paid to be filmed. It was validation: “I couldn’t get my fucking life,” he says. The paycheck from that job was enough to cover a move to New York City, so at age 18 she signed with a design firm and moved from North Carolina to a switched knitting mill in Bushwick with four and often five more roommates.
At his Los Angeles home, Schafer pulls out his old newspapers and shows me some of his illustrations, adding trendy designs he used to draw when he was about 10 years old. One of the cuts is a cropped orange T-shirt that makes sense with other people holding hands. On it, paired with flared blue jeans that say “friends” at the hem. She digs up a high school newspaper and flips through it, landing on a page with a pink and orange skeletal silhouette flipping the bird next to the caption: “Shit school, shit school, shit school. I just need to move on to New York and never again. “Go away!! I need to start living.
“Ew, that’s so bad,” Schafer says, grimacing affectionately at his serious teen art. But, “Hey, it happened. I did that. “
Schafer recently spoke with Zendaya, his Euphoria co-star and one of his most productive friends, about the strange interruptions they’ve had to endure in their acting careers. The series was interrupted by COVID delays and the writer-actor’s moves from last year. Unforeseen setbacks for a fast-moving cast of trendy celebrities.
“It was a little disorienting,” says Schafer. In March 2020, he moved into an apartment directly across the street from the studio where they would be filming the second season. The actors went to a reading table in early March; Soon after, production was suspended indefinitely. Schafer, then 21, spent the next few months alone, searching the box where she was supposed to work. Like so many others, I was struggling. But it wasn’t like any difficult time I’d been through before.
Schafer talks about this time in interviews with some nonchalance: “I probably had a nervous breakdown, then I bought a truck and drove all over the country,” is how he first described it to me. But when we talk about it over lunch the next day, it becomes clear that this was an intense and protracted private crisis. “I can’t forget a moment when I knew something was wrong,” Schafer says. I was isolated in a relatively new city, thousands of miles away from any family, newly famous and feeling suspended in time. “I knew I needed help. “
All the clothes and from Maison Margiela.
In May, he loaded up his truck and began driving east toward his sister’s space in Boone, North Carolina. Along the way, he felt a quick uplift. ” That’s when I was happiest with COVID,” she says. “It was anything to do, keep your eyes on the road. “It flew via Arizona, Texas and Kentucky, and landed in Boone five days later.
He ended up staying a few months. While there, she and Euphoria author Sam Levinson began writing what would become “Fuck Anybody Who’s Not a Sea Blob,” the Jules-centric special episode that aired between seasons of the series on a delayed basis through of COVID. Schafer co-produced and co-wrote the episode, the only time Levinson shared writing credits on the series, and she felt lucky to be able to pour a lot of that “twisted shit” into it. “To this day, it remains one of the most artistically satisfying things I have ever done,” she says. Euphoria is told firmly from the point of view of Rue, Zendaya’s character and Jules’ most productive friend and love interest, and when Schafer and Levinson began writing, Rue’s team was “roasting” Jules on Twitter. “Sea Blob” was an opportunity to give more nuance to her story. “I definitely wanted to give more of her perspective,” Schafer says. “Television is a beast, but what I love about it is that it’s a character that I can return to, that I continue to paint and develop. ” Levinson is reportedly writing the third season of Euphoria and it has been reported that it will include a time jump. “I can assure you that I have also noticed this rumor in the news,” is all Schafer can say about it.
He now sees this dark age as a kind of baptism of fire: it’s the first time in his adult life that he makes a selection for his own sake, not because a task requires it.
“I lived where I had to live to model and I went where other people told me to go,” she says. For Euphoria, “I moved right across the street from the studio. ” “I have to stay in control and make a decision about how to do it,” she remembers thinking. “It was dark, but I faced a lot of things. “
All garments consistent with commission.
Schafer knows that one day he will pass up Jules, the role that has so far explained his career. “It’s deeply tied to who I am as a user and who I am at that age,” he says. “It feels like an artifact from my youth. ” In the meantime, he seeks new challenges and finds expansion and pain along the way.
Filming Cuckoo in Germany in 2022 is his first time on a film set and the first time he has worked on a task not supervised by Levinson. It makes me nervous that I won’t be able to offer the same kind of functionality with other absolutely new people in a new country, “on a new set and in a completely different shooting format,” he says. “There were barriers that I felt I had to break. It was like taking the wheels off my education.
Stevens says she never would have imagined Cuckoo was Schafer’s first film set if she hadn’t mentioned it. But he also saw how she seemed to know something about herself in the process. “Maybe you see her grow up in the role and pretty much herself in terms of [directing], Oh, I can do that,” he says.
Its director was equally impressed. ” There’s something special about Hunter,” says Singer. “He has a unique way of expressing his feelings and he’s not afraid. She’s relaxed, but it’s not casual. They have also made friends on the dance floor in Cologne, where on weekends they would go out dancing techno: “She likes tough things,” says the German director admiringly.
This experience was eye-opening for Schafer. ” Now that I’ve figured out what acting is and it’s not this scary thing that I feel like I’ve been thrown into, I get it,” Schafer says. “I can find in it a certain lightness and a little joy. “
At the time, she was still reeling from a breakup with actor and singer-songwriter Dominic Fike, whom she met during the filming of the second season of Euphoria in 2021. “I had all these pent-up emotions,” Schafer says. Like her cute character, Gretchen, “I was able to exorcise a lot of the breakup emotions that I experienced. “(The two met after he returned from Gerguyy, but called off last April. )Schafer had never dated a guy before Fike and had no idea she ever would. “I’d had really bad relationships with men before, not because I dated them, but just in life,” Schafer says. “I think he had built too thick a wall around him. “
“And then I fell in love,” she says with a smile.
Being with Fike allowed Schafer to “overcome a lot of the emotions of disdain I felt for men in general,” she says. “I think this inhibits a lot of my friendships with men, and a lot of that has deteriorated as well. I had a great date with [Fike] and that opened me up that way.
It was also, Schafer says, the first time she publicly dated another prominent person, which made the breakup even more exposed and painful. “I had dated other prominent people before, but other people didn’t know about it. “”It’s absolutely different,” he says.
Like whom? I ask and she shakes her head amicably. “People who care enough and have studied know what’s going on. “
Did you recently go furniture shopping?
Schäfer laughs. Yes, he admits, but he hasn’t said their names yet. She’s not really sure about communicating it, so I let it go and we moved on.
All Prada clothing.
The next day, I ask Schafer if she’s registered with Rosalía, the Spanish pop star and friend with whom Schafer has been seen shopping for furniture and whom he’s been dating for a long time. Schafer smiled. She spoke to Rosalía about it last night, she says, and she’s pleased to see that they dated for about five months in the fall and winter of 2019. (Schafer says it took him a few moments to get used to the vibe and figure. (As it turned out, they did, in fact, date. ) Today, they’re friends, of which Schafer is proud. They were recently spotted in town, munching on smoothies and sampling canapés. “I’ve had great friendships with other people I’ve had a romantic date with,” she says. With Rosalía, “she’s a relative no matter what. “
“We’ve been speculating for a long time,” Schafer says. One part of us just needs to get this over with, and then another part says, ‘It’s nobody’s business!Ultimately, though, “it’s anything I’m willing to share. “. And I think she feels that way too.
When we speak, Schafer isn’t married and in no rush to replace him. “I’m still in a healing matrix of the latter,” he says, referring to last year’s breakup with Fike. “I need to make sure I’m OK, all of that before I move on to anything else. “
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It is also recovered by other means. Last summer, his beloved colleague and close friend Angus Cloud died of an accidental drug overdose, devastating Euphoria’s tight-knit network. When it’s time for our lunch, Schafer starts crying and I move cautiously, not knowing if it’s something she needs. to communicate publicly. She and Cloud, who played the laconic and protective drug dealer Fez, were the same age, and Euphoria was also her first acting role. In many ways, they grew up together, both inside and outside of the program. But Schafer says he feels in a position to take a moment to pay his respects.
“I’ve never had such a close friend and before that I was my age,” he says, wiping away tears. “It’s surreal. It doesn’t make sense. And yes, it’s new. It’s a new kind of grief.
“It just happened by chance,” he continues. He’s going to beat me up when I’m in the bathroom. It’s Array. . . I don’t know. The pain is strange.
But she needs other people to know that her friend was special. “People really fell in love with Angus,” Schafer says. Actually, he was one of Euphoria’s heartbeats. It’s the other people who are too smart for the world and the world. “A little too pure. He was a fucking angel, he was a ray of sunshine.
Loro Piana jacket.
Many of Schafer’s best school paintings were in direct discussion with HB2, such as a pair of red underwear with giant hands covering the crotch and the words “Peel off all perceptions” inscribed on the hands and belt. “My art is a reaction to everything that was happening in North Carolina, when it wasn’t necessarily what I was looking to do artistically,” he says. “I think I thought, ‘Oh, I’m trans. I make art about it.
She is less and less compelled to create art paintings that encourage or speak directly to her story, or that conscientiously provide the trans experience. She would like to concentrate on paintings that feel increasingly free, and that do not limit her to her identity.
Schafer knows that her portrayal of Jules, a young trans character written with depth, complexity and care, made a difference, especially at a time when trans youth are being disenfranchised across the country: last August, the Schafer’s state locality in North Carolina becomes the 22nd state to pass a law restricting or prohibiting trans minors’ access to gender-affirming health care, even as more youth identify as trans nationally. The Human Rights Campaign estimates that, as of November 2023, 35% of school-age trans youth resided in states that have banned gender-affirming care. But she also hopes for a long-term moment when her identity (and that of other queer and trans people living and running in the spotlight) will no longer be the first thing discussed, or perhaps not even discussed at all. . According to Schafer, gradually moving toward this point has been strategic. “This by no means happened naturally. If she let this happen, it would mean putting “Transsexual Actress” before every article. More recently, she has even tried to avoid saying the word trans altogether in interviews.
“As soon as I say it, it takes off,” he says. It took me a while to be informed of that and it also took me a while to be informed that I don’t need to be reduced to that, and in the end I find it humiliating for me and for what I have to do. Especially after high school, I was tired of talking about it. I have worked very hard to get to where I am, after those difficult moments in my transition, and now I just need to be a woman and still keep going.
“It’s a privilege, but it’s very intentional,” he continues. I’ve been introduced to tons of trans roles and I just don’t need to. I don’t need to communicate it. “
Artifact T-shirt. Shirt via Raymond Langlois. Shorts via Supreme. Necklace through Bare Collection in Roseark.
She understands better than anyone that her particular job requires more extracurricular work than some of her fellow Euphoria stars. “I know for a fact that I’m one of the most prominent trans people in the media right now, and I feel a sense of responsibility, and maybe a little bit of guilt, for not being a spokesperson anymore,” Schafer says. But at the end of the day, I actually think that not making it the center of what I do will allow me to go further. And I think going an extra mile and doing wonderful things, for the sake of “movement,” will be a lot more helpful than talking about it all the time.
De-centering the transience of her story is a privilege Schafer earned by spending her formative years defending the rights of trans people and betting on a trans character in her early twenties whose story has become so intertwined with her own life. And there’s a meta-quality at play here that we’re aware of; having to recognize it in plain language so that it may not be mandatory to recognize it one day. Schafer knows that to get to that point, other people like her want to break the mold continuously, smile, talk about it. , and help others understand. But her years as a young lawyer and cheerful, fun-loving star have obviously taken their toll. It’s not so much that Schafer has hardened, but that he’s learned to accept a bit of cynicism as a protective measure. In short, it has grown.
“I’ve lost interest in knowing some kind of utopia,” Schafer says. “I totally agree with other people who hate me because I’m trans or who call me a man. I don’t need to check it to be convinced. You’ll never leave them again. As long as you stay in your lane,” he says across the room, “work. Works! Do that. And I’ll be here with the other people I love.
“I think I’ll probably keep betting for a while, depending on how things go, which is great. But there are a lot of other things I need to do in my life that I’ve put aside that I don’t need. “let go. “
At this point in her life, Schafer is much more interested in taking care of the inner and spiritual aspect of her trans and sharing it with the other people who make her feel safe and supported. Last year he directed the music video for “Why Am I Alive Now” through Anohni and the Johnsons?And he reflected on a verbal exchange he had with Anohni afterward.
“I don’t have a lot of trans seniors in my life, and that thing burned my brain,” Schafer says, before paraphrasing him: “Mother Nature persists. There have been other trans people for so long” and they continue to accept it more and more as truth for us. So there’s something there. There’s something there.
“I think there’s something cosmic and mystical about that,” Schafer continues. “When I look at other trans people’s art, there’s this frequency, this kind of non-unusual thread, whether it’s a sound or an aesthetic, that’s coherent. I think it probably comes from the shared experience that we all have and that it’s pretty unique. There’s something spiritual and magical about it. And of course, it sucks, but I wouldn’t need it any other way either.
Because Schafer didn’t need to become an actress, she has a tendency to talk about her acting career as if it’s a fulfilled twist of fate or a dream she can wake up from at any moment. When she’s in between projects, like When We Communicate, she’s used to thinking about all the paths her life can take. “I get into a spiral of questions: ‘Do I intend to do this?'” he says. “I think I can probably keep betting for a while, depending on how things go, which is really cool. But there are many other things I need to do in my life that I’ve put aside and I don’t need to let them go. »
Stevens, her Cuckoo co-star, has noticed this work before. “The mistake other people make is saying, ‘Well, you have to pick one,'” he says. “And in fact, it’s not. I believe you can succeed in whatever direction you decide to take. It doesn’t seem too ambitious to say that, as he has the ability to help you.
In particular, she would like to resume her artistic practice and have her own exhibition in a gallery. He needs to found a fashion house, but not as a half-celebrity; She would first like to go back to fashion design school and learn how to cut and sew. “I want to participate in my Alexander McQueen,” he says. There are also other things to do as an actress: she’d like to do a romantic comedy and maybe a musical; He has recording credits for a song on Cuckoo, and his favorite karaoke song is, intimidatingly, Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet. “
That’s all? I ask. ” No!” says Schäfer. She also needs to host a party as a DJ. He loves New York and plans to buy a space there. “My social life is greater there. Sex life is higher there. She celebrated her 25th birthday in Manhattan, jogging down Dimes Square with her closest friends. “I’ll be honest: We use a little acid,” Schafer says. It was enough to make them laugh. “”This, there was a lamp in my friend’s room and the lamp gave a lot of energy and we were yelling at the lamp. “
Shirt via Noah. Jeans via Willy Chavarria. A ring on the abdominal button, hers.
He will also continue writing and directing. She has long dreamed of having a career like that of Michaela Coel, the British actress and filmmaker who directed Chewing Gum and I May Destroy You, and now she finds herself in a position to have just that. (And more! Since Schafer filmed Mother Mary, Coel and her co-star Hathaway have become friends. ) She’s rewatching Girls, a series she loves and which she calls a “period piece. ” » – a valid point, but a lesson in humility. however, a millennial journalist to listen to. “In the aesthetic sense, I mean,” she explains. (“Their outfits are very striking,” she said, in the tone of someone considering an ancient civilization for the first time. “Was that like that?”) He asked some of his friends to watch Array and it sparked concepts about what narrative is. projects that he would like to do: “We dreamed of a series about trans women like that. »But he needs to dabble a little more in directing (directing a few more music videos and then a short film) before allowing himself to think about directing his own series or feature film. However, he knows that he has the right qualities for the position: “I am a true Capricorn. I need everything.
It’s a sensibility she’s had since she was little, when she imagines an outfit and then puts it on a paper doll. Since then, he has cultivated it assiduously and implemented it in all aspects of his artistic life. ” There’s a special feeling that happens when you think about something in your head and then you’re able to suppress it. It’s incomparable, it’s bigger than drugs.
“You can enjoy creating things,” Schafer says. I think it’s an explanation for why we should live. “
Emma Carmichael is a journalist and screenwriter based in New York and Los Angeles.
An edition of this story appeared in the April/May 2024 issue of GQ under the headline “Queen of Youth. “
PRODUCTION CREDITS: Photographs via Bryce Anderson Style through Heidi Bivens Ward Stegerhoek’s hair at Home Agency Jo Strettell’s skin for Walter Schupfer Management Shiseido Ashlie Johnson Nails for The Wall Group Haute Couture by Yelena Travkina Set design through Robert Doran at Frank Reps Produced by Mara Weinstein at Luckystar Productions
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