Actresses in Profile: 21st Century Women for CR 13

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In honor of CR Fashion Book‘s 13th issue, we present 13 actresses, advocates, performers, change-makers, and icons of tomorrow who represent the creative force of today.

MJ Rodriguez

Mj Rodriguez’s character Blanca on Ryan Murphy’s television show Pose opens the series faced with a diagnosis. Her purpose is thrown into sharp relief against her time in the House of Abundance, a fictional ballroom house in a reimagined 1987 New York. She feels stymied by her house mother and urgent about her own life. She leaves Abundance and gathers her own fellow fledglings to compete in the city’s ballroom scene. Rodriguez, who previously appeared in a 2011 off-Broadway revival of Rent with Pose costar Billy Porter, says she understood many things about Blanca face innately.

Yet, she adds, “There is one part of her that is hard for me to relate to and that is her being able to step out and move out on her own. There are many things that I am not in fear of, but one of the biggest things is leaving my mom, being that she’s been someone who is so supportive and an active advocate for me in my life.” Rodriguez describes the conversations on the Pose set as informed of ballroom’s history, and she’s particularly touched that the show has reached a younger generation, sharing a comment that “positively pierced” her from a young viewer who saw in her something uncanny to their departed house mother. Rodriguez says that she would return to the stage, but right now she doesn’t have a dream role specifically. Surely, she would rather originate a role for others to dream about.

FASHION CHRISTINA SULPIZIO
MAKEUP MARCO CASTRO
HAIR REBEKAH CALO
LOCATION ROOT NYC


Lauren Wasser

Lauren Wasser lives in Los Angeles, but the model, actress, and activist, who began her career on a shoot with Patrick Demarchelier for Vogue Italia as an infant alongside her model-mother Pamela Cook, describes herself as bi-coastal. In New York, she spends time with her closest friends and at work on a host of projects, with an eye toward even more acting opportunities following a stint last year on the comedy series Loudermilk. She’s also advocating to bring awareness to the dangers of toxic shock syndrome, a disease that Wasser contracted in 2012 from a tampon that tested positive for toxins from methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. Wasser’s right leg was amputated in the fight to save her life, and this January, her left leg was also replaced with a golden one. Wasser is now living pain-free, and relishing being back on set. “My work is not done,” she say. “Unfortunately, a teenager just died a week or two ago in Long Island from TSS. She was 16 years old. One teenager is too many. There’s a bill coming out of [New York] from a congresswoman named Carolyn Maloney. It’s basically for us, as women, to know what’s going in these feminine hygiene products, what the long-term effects are going to do to our bodies. Why has this bill taken 20 years?” This question and others could end up in writing of Wasser’s own. She’s excited to do everything now.

FASHION HENNA KOSKINEN
MAKEUP BEATRICE SANDOVAL
HAIR CAILE NOBLE
PRODUCTION MOLLY WK


NIIA

Niia is deciding where to go next. The classically trained singer, whose debut record, I landed on The New York Times’s Best Albums of 2017 list, has a restless quality to her. It manifests in her lyrics, dispatches from inside a relationship—what the Times called “brutal romantic theater.” It’s in her voice, too, the way it soars above instrumentation that sounds more optimistic than she does. On the first record, there were references to California, where she’d settled after growing up on the East Coast. Lately, she’s been visiting Italy, where her mother hails from, traveling and working on visuals for her next output. Sonically she’s still mapping out where she’s going, though she says she’s continuing to work with her partner Robin Hannibal, one half of the duo Rhye. “If it ain’t broke,” she deadpans, mentioning also an unconscious gravitation to working with more female writers recently. On her new music, she’s parsing together what it means to her to age and to be in a long relationship, saying, “I have a little bit more knowledge and experience of understanding myself, and even when I don’t, being honest about…I don’t know if I’m going crazy. I’m kind of tapping into my psyche a little bit more, where I’m going in my mind.” In addition to honesty, she’s interested in expressing a high level of musicianship, finding ways to be vulnerable without being obvious. Newly 30, Niia is taming her obsessions into an elegant song-craft.

FASHION CHRISTINA SULPIZIO
MAKEUP MARCO CASTRO
HAIR REBEKAH CALO
LOCATION ROOT NYC


Jodie Comer

“Villanelle is in a league of her own,” Jodie Comer says with the bravado of her character on BBC America’s Killing Eve when asked about her favorite onscreen assassins. The show, which tracks Sandra Oh’s MI5 agent Eve Polastri stalking Comer’s Villanelle as she kills, is a vehicle for Comer’s boldness. Created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who helmed the excellent 2016 comedy Fleabag, and adapted from the Codename Villanelle novellas by author and dance critic Luke Jennings, the show was renewed for a second season before its premiere. The idiosyncrasies of its creator’s background infuse Killing Eve with its rare potential, presenting the depths of obsession as something twinned and twisted. It’s a fan favorite, setting both ratings records for scripted television and accruing its audience largely through word-of-mouth viewer testimony. Comer, having loved Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, has been enjoying this moment. “[Waller-Bridge] breaks all stereotypes,” says Comer. “Her voice is so fresh and unique that it can never be replicated.” The male spy epic is dead. Long live Killing Eve.

FASHION ANDREJ SKOK
MAKEUP AMY WRIGHT
HAIR LEIGH KEATES
PRODUCTION CREATIVE BLOOD


Sinéad Burke

Sinéad Burke is a Burberry woman. She loves the team behind the clothes, its British heritage legacy, its collaborative spirit (she cites the upcoming limited-edition Vivienne Westwood collection), and how it’s addressed accessibility in its retail spaces, a fact she’s noted over the course of her patronage. Burke mentions a second visit to Burberry, in which she was struck by how “they had almost redesigned the environment, so I could reach everything.” Design accommodations for little people—Burke is 3 feet 5-and-a-half inches tall—are a central part of her multi-platform advocacy efforts. In addition to her high fashion wardrobe, Burke is also a collector of books. She keeps a list of new words she encounters as she reads, and her love of language is as clear in her 2017 TED Talk “Why Design Should Include Everyone” as it is in her plain speech.

Education is paramount for her—growing up as the eldest of her family, she often instituted schoolroom play for her younger siblings. A primary school teacher by trade, she is now pursuing a PhD from Trinity College Dublin. Her plans for the rest of the year include meeting with other advocates who are also engaged in consultation work with companies that are making their businesses more accessible. Because, Burke says, “We are a solid customer base, an incredibly skilled workforce. The more of us that are calling for these changes to be made, and sharing our experiences, the more the fashion industry has to listen.”

FASHION ANDREJ SKOK
MAKEUP AMY WRIGHT
HAIR LEIGH KEATES
PRODUCTION CREATIVE BLOOD


Gemma Chan

Before being cast as the star of the late-summer comedy Crazy Rich Asians, British actress Gemma Chan was a fan of author Kevin Kwan’s book trilogy of the same name. Chan, known for her roles on television shows including Humans and Secret Diary of a Call Girl, loved the character of Astrid Leong for her contradictions. “To the outside world, she seems like she’s perfect,” Chan says. “She seems like she has a charmed, wonderful life. But really she’s struggling to hold it all together.” She could sense in Leong a grounded-ness despite the trappings of her wealth. Of course, Chan laughs, “She also has this fabulous wardrobe.” Currently Chan herself is weighing her fashion options for the film’s promotional run, wanting to honor the spirit of her character on the red carpet. Next she’ll trade sleek luxury for Elizabethan finery for her role as Bess of Hardwick in this December’s Mary Queen of Scots with Margot Robbie and Saoirse Ronan. Following that, she’ll zip herself into Marvel Universe costumes to play Minn-Erva in next year’s Captain Marvel. Flitting between these characters and their costumes, she leaves the understated for her speech, saying, “It’s been a busy year or so.”

FASHION ANDREJ SKOK
MAKEUP MARY GREENWELL
HAIR BEN TALBOTT
PRODUCTION CREATIVE BLOOD


Taylor Schilling

“Growing with the character of Piper has been a thrilling journey,” actress Taylor Schilling says, of the protagonist she plays on Netflix’s series Orange Is the New Black. “Seeing her evolve and discover herself within the confines of [the show’s fictional correctional facility] Litchfield has been an experience I’ll never forget.” Already a rising star at the show’s inception five years ago, Schilling had appeared in 2012’s Argo, which took home the Best Picture Academy Award the following year. Part of the first batch of original series that the streaming giant created in 2013 to compete with appointment television, Orange Is the New Black is now in its sixth season. Based on writer Piper Kerman’s memoir of serving for money laundering and created by Weeds creator Jenji Kohan, Orange Is the New Black’s impact on the zeitgeist is hard to overstate. Schilling is part of an ensemble cast portraying life in a women’s prison, and her thorny inmate Piper Chapman weaves her way through the show’s storylines, testing the limits of viewers’ empathy with her bluster. Credit is owed to Schilling for how much the role has needled at our ideas of complicated women characters and how much we still want for its star.

FASHION CHRISTINA SULPIZIO
MAKEUP MARCO CASTRO
HAIR REBEKAH CALO
LOCATION ROOT NYC

Carlie Hanson

Pop has a new Hanson—first name, Carlie. Born in 2000, Carlie Hanson is now part of a generation of pop performers young enough to cite Bieber as an elder. “My first memory [of pop music] is watching Justin Bieber’s YouTube channel,” she recalls. “I must’ve been 9 or ten years old when I saw how much fun he was having just posting videos online of himself singing. I really fell in love with music and thought, That’s what I want to do.” And so she did. Hanson has teased an album with a string of singles titled in the verbiage of Generation Z; there’s a song called “Mood,” and another called “Us,” which opens with the line “blame it all on Drake.” Hanson is now readying herself for Troye Sivan’s “The Bloom Tour,” which she will help open this fall. “I’ve heard it’s a lot of work,” she says of the demanding touring schedule. Sharing the stage with Sivan, and opening alongside Kim Petras, one of pop’s most energetic acts, Hanson should have plenty of opportunity to experience the gauntlet of teenage stardom for herself.

FASHION HENNA KOSKINEN
MAKEUP BEATRICE SANDOVAL
HAIR CAILE NOBLE
PRODUCTION MOLLY WK


Julia Garner

Actress Julia Garner selects projects that remarkably differ from one another, yet contain a through-line regarding one’s place in the contemporary family. In 2015, she starred as Lily Tomlin’s teenage granddaughter in Grandma as the two maneuvered to resolve an unplanned pregnancy in moving yet comedic strokes. Garner is also a series regular on the Netflix show Ozark, playing Ruth Langmore, a 19-year-old woman who joins the makeshift crime family of Jason Bateman’s money-laundering Marty Byrde. For Garner’s role in Cary Fukunaga’s Netflix original series Maniac, she drew upon her own birth order as a younger sibling to better understand her character. The actress stars with Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, who are also producing, and the show is based on a Norwegian show of the same name. Garner also signed onto the upcoming Bravo series Dirty John as daughter to Connie Britton’s Debra Newell, who falls for the true crime con man John Meehan, played by Eric Bana. Spending most of her time on sets, Garner relishes the chance to bond with the cast and crew. “Everyone is like family,” she adds.

FASHION CHRISTINA SULPIZIO
MAKEUP MARCO CASTRO
HAIR REBEKAH CALO
LOCATION ROOT NYC


Michelle Rodriguez

Michelle Rodriguez’s first film role was the lead in 2000’s Girlfight, in which she played a young woman who found an outlet for her discontent in boxing. Rodriguez followed it up with 2001’s 3 A.M., directed by Spike Lee protégé Lee Davis, and costarring Donald Glover. Her next choice was a film called The Fast and the Furious, which announced with the alacrity of peeling tires what action films could do in the new millennium. She hasn’t left the screen since; the screens have only sized up. She starred in the highest-grossing film of all time, Avatar. Her career needs no explanations, but she offers one anyway, sharing, “I spent my life watching my mom suffer for her own choices. This is why I’ve always played independent females and focused most of my career in the comfortable lane of commercial action films.” She says she sees something of her mom in her character for her latest role in Steve McQueen’s Widows. The film, out this November, follows four women widowed from their husbands during an armed robbery mission. The script was co-written by McQueen and Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn. McQueen, Rodriguez observes, is capable of shifting from “an assertive commanding male visionary to an artistic, sensitive, feminine auteur.” Joining her as widows are Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, and Cynthia Erivo. For her part, Rodriguez says her life, in all its incarnations, prepared her for this role: “I grew up in the ghetto surrounded by this type of survival and strife. As I am now in my comfortable world of assimilation with collective society I feel a communal sense of responsibility, one brought forth by exposure to women around the world.”

FASHION HENNA KOSKINEN
MAKEUP BEATRICE SANDOVAL
HAIR CAILE NOBLE
PRODUCTION MOLLY WK


Elizabeth Debicki

Elizabeth Debicki relates to women who don’t accept their fates quietly. She liked that quality in Alice, whom she portrays in her role as one of the four female leads in Steve McQueen’s Widows, a character who has “the spark of courage of someone who has reached the end of their tether and wants to survive.” Starring alongside heavyweights Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, and Cynthia Erivo in the film, Debicki says she was struck by the role of “a young woman whose sense of self-worth is dictated by society, by class, by a failing education system, by patriarchal imposed roles and by what others tell her about herself.” The 28-year-old Australian actress has appeared in a range of blockbusters including Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Next up, a role where she’s certain to provoke the contours of fate. She’s starring as Virginia Woolf in Vita and Virginia, depicting the author’s true-life affair with socialite Vita Sackville-West.

FASHION ANDREJ SKOK
MAKEUP MARY GREENWELL
HAIR BEN TALBOTT
PRODUCTION CREATIVE BLOOD


Bel Powley

At 26 years old, Bel Powley is already a veteran of stage and screen. Momentum toward her next roles finds her unexpectedly. During her last Broadway run for the Kenneth Lonergan play Lobby Hero, she spent her downtime bingeing true crime shows on TV, saying, “Knowing that an insane story is true really gives it an extra thrill.” Her latest lead role, alongside Matthew McConaughey in White Boy Rick, was a chance to explore this frisson through the true story of Richard Wershe Jr., a hustler in the 1980s who, by age 14, had become the FBI’s youngest informant. It’s out this September, and as of last year, the living Richard Wershe Jr. was paroled of his life sentence in prison. In the film, Powley plays Dawn Wershe, sister to the young drug lord and daughter to McConaughey’s Wershe Sr. Born in London in the early ’90s, Powley felt worlds away from the Detroit of the 1980s, but quickly found her pace, encouraged by McConaughey’s improvisation. Putting herself in the mindset of a person trying to protect her family was something she understood. When asked about her on-set rituals this time around, she eschewed specifics, saying only: “I like to adapt to my location and character. I try to shed parts of myself to ensure I can really envelop a new place and person.

FASHION ANDREJ SKOK
MAKEUP AMY WRIGHT
HAIR LEIGH KEATES
PRODUCTION CREATIVE BLOOD


Sofia Boutella

“I felt like I was seeing something in a way that I’ve never seen before,” actress Sofia Boutella says, of the first time she watched a film by the Argentinian-born French filmmaker Gaspar Noé. She could also be describing her character Selva’s experience in his latest, Climax, in which she stars as the choreographer of a dance troupe under the influence of a drug-spiked sangria. Of Boutella, Noé told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year that prior to working with her he “only knew her as the best hip hop dancer in France.” The director joins an impressive list of admirers, which includes the queen and king of pop: Madonna cast Boutella in her 2006 Confessions Tour, and the late Michael Jackson chose her to star in his “Hollywood Tonight” music video. As an actress whose credits include Atomic Blonde and Star Trek: Beyond, Boutella slinks into Noé’s underworld deftly, understanding the innate qualities of his unflinching vision. “What I like about his approach is that the kind of drug did not matter,” she says. “It could’ve been LSD, it could’ve been anything, but at a large dose…an insanely large dose.”

FASHION CONSTANCE FERAL
MAKEUP LISA LEGRAND
HAIR JOHN NOLLET FOR THE HAIR ROOM SERVICE


CR Fashion Book Issue 13 is on newsstands now. To order a copy click here, and sign up for our newsletter for exclusive stories from the new issue.

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