Hunter Schafer on Art, Love, Ambition—and Life Beyond ‘Euphoria’ (2024)

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Hunter Schafer still has some boxes to unpack. A few months ago, the 25-year-old actor and model bought her very first home in Los Angeles, and then promptly left town to promote her role in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. When she shows me around, the house remains half-furnished, with framed artwork, including a Paris Is Burning poster, propped up against the walls. In the room that will become Schafer’s art studio, boxes filled with her old journals litter the floor, along with piles of clothes and books and a life-size neon green skeleton. At the center of it all is a box overflowing with mismatched clothing hangers.

“I have, like, 10 of those,” Schafer says, laughing. “It’s so bad.”

The house is a work in progress, and she’s learning as she goes. She knows how escrow works now, and suddenly has opinions about different types of grass seed. “It’s very big-girl things,” she says. The fact that she can do anything she wants with the design, especially, seems to be both thrilling and overwhelming. Recently, she visited a neighbor and was inspired to build a cozy library nook around the fireplace in her living room.

“Can you imagine a fire here?” she asks, eyes lit up. “Having a live one sounds kind of scary. But I’ll get the hang of it.”

That doesn’t seem like a reach for Schafer, who has approached both life and art with autodidactic zeal. In 2018, when she was cast in Euphoria, HBO’s Emmy-winning Gen Z drama, she was 19 and had never acted before. She learned on the job, and turned her character, the beguiling transfer student Jules Vaughn, into a generational touchstone. For her first lead role in a feature film—Tilman Singer’s psychological thriller Cuckoo, due in theaters this summer—Schafer learned how to handle a butterfly knife and play bass, filmed her first action scenes, and brushed up on American Sign Language.

“She absolutely fizzes with creative energy,” Dan Stevens, her costar in Cuckoo, tells me. “It’s just like it’s got to get out of her.” One day between scenes, he remembers, he and Schafer and a few others were waiting in an old classroom with a whiteboard in it. Schafer—who studied art in high school—quietly picked up the markers. “We were just sort of chatting away and we looked up and there’s this beautiful face that she’s drawn on this board,” Stevens says. “Everyone’s like, f*cking hell, is there anything she can’t do?”

Just six years into her acting career, the multitalented Schafer is in high demand, with a small part in an upcoming Yorgos Lanthimos film and a role alongside Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway in David Lowery’s Mother Mary on the horizon.

But it would be a surprise if Schafer stopped there. She is, among other things, a visual artist turned activist turned model turned actor, the kind of multihyphenate and natural, passionate polymath that seems to be the standard for creative types in her cohort.

Schafer has a bright and attentive energy, even though she describes herself as “a proper ADHD girl,” and usually does not know what day it is. (The only time she looks at her phone in front of me over the course of two days together is to use the “one year ago” function on her Photos app, to remember what she was doing the previous January.) She is powered by her vape, matcha, and Coca-Cola. She is silly and curious, and only declines to answer a question once, when I ask her about her time at the legendarily selective Berlin nightclub Berghain—a devoted techno fan, she plans to go back and doesn’t “want to f*ck up my vibe with them.”

There’s no posture here; this is the Schafer her friends and collaborators know and love. Her friend and stylist Dara Allen says Schafer has an “obsessive understanding about art and fashion and culture, and we can talk really deeply about all of it.” But also: “She’s down to clown.”

Schafer has been in the public eye since age 17, when she became the youngest plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s House Bill 2 (HB2), which had banned trans people from using public bathrooms that didn’t align with the gender listed on their birth certificate. Schafer’s activism springboarded her into the limelight. She became an in-demand model and, through her role on Euphoria, perhaps the most high-profile young trans star we’ve ever known—a trajectory she’s navigated with shrewdness and spirit. Each day, new doors seem to open, and she’s eager to see what’s behind them. In the past decade, she hasn’t really stopped moving.

“Some people are like, Oh, I’ve been here a lot of times before,” Schafer tells me, sprawled out on her living room floor. “I don’t think I’ve been here a lot of times before. But I do think within this life, I’ve been through a lot of things that force you to grow up pretty fast. And whether it’s the transness or the fame, both of those are big things as far as really—” She snaps her fingers. “I can’t just wing this sh*t. I really have to be intentional about the way I’m moving in the world.

“In some ways it’s really lucky because I feel like it’s prepared me for the life I have now,” she continues. “But in other ways it’s like, I don’t know, you should have just been a kid and been a dumbass.”

Schafer has big plans for her art studio. She’d like to rip up the carpet and then move in sewing tables and a drafting desk and all her oil paints from the space she rents across town, so that she can work on clothing designs and paintings and drawings at home, whenever she feels like it.

Before she was an actor, Schafer thought she might be an artist. She grew up in Raleigh with three younger siblings, where her mom, Katy, is a youth minister and her dad, Mac, is a pastor in local Presbyterian churches. When she got bored, they would park her at the coffee table with paper and crayons, and she would make paper dolls and stage plays with them. In middle school, Schafer was bullied and had a hard time fitting in, and her artistic outlets became something more like a lifeline: She already knew some ASL going into filming Cuckoo because the only kids who welcomed her at their table in the cafeteria were the deaf students. She loved comic books—Skottie Young’s artwork in the adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was an early favorite—and dreamed of becoming an illustrator. Drawing, she says, was always “my one big love creatively.” Creating women characters and designing their outfits was also a way to explore her feelings about her gender.

“I’m pretty sure I needed it as a way to externalize what I didn’t feel I could externalize with myself,” Schafer says. “I was a trans kid who didn’t transition until I was in high school. I had this whole world and person inside of me that couldn’t come out in the way it was supposed to. I think I really needed it as a tool.”

Schafer came out as gay to her parents in middle school, and then as transgender in the ninth grade. In 2016, Schafer joined the ACLU and Lambda Legal’s fight against HB2. She joined the suit not just in the hope of challenging the law, she said at the time, but raising trans awareness and acceptance more generally. She was thrust into the national spotlight and culture wars almost overnight, writing affecting op-eds and visual essays for the likes of Teen Vogue and Rookie and appearing on local news segments. Her parents were right by her side. She was terrified of public speaking, so her dad, comfortable behind a pulpit, sometimes made public statements on her behalf, and he and Katy often gave interviews about supporting Schafer and her legal fight.

“It was a lot of responsibility, and life-changing in a way that I don’t think I even understood until it had already happened,” Schafer says now. “I think they felt a duty to protect me.”

When HB2 was repealed in March 2017, Schafer was in her senior year at an arts-based high school in Winston-Salem, and had been accepted to study fashion design at the ultra-prestigious Central Saint Martins in London. But she put those plans on hold when she got her first modeling job in New York. She remembers having a cathartic cry on the flight there. “It was deeply painful to be in, quote, unquote, the wrong body growing up,” she says. Even with the support she had at home as an adolescent, that feeling had narrowed her vision of the future. And then she was on a commercial set, getting paid to be on camera. It was validation: “I couldn’t believe my f*cking life,” she says. The check from that gig was enough to cover a move to New York, so at 18 she signed with a modeling agency and left North Carolina, moving into a converted knitting mill in Bushwick with four and sometimes five other roommates.

At her house in Los Angeles, Schafer lugs out her old journals and shows me some of her illustrations, including fashion designs she drew around age 10. One fit is a cropped orange tank top with people holding hands on it, paired with flared blue jeans that say “friends” along the hem. She finds a high school journal and flips through it, landing on a page with a pink-and-orange skeletal figure flipping the bird next to the caption: “f*ck skool, f*ck skool, f*ck skool. I just want to go to New York and never leave!!! I want to start living.”

“Ew, it’s so bad,” Schafer says, cringing affectionately at her earnest adolescent art. But: “Hey, it happened. I did the thing.”

Schafer was recently talking to Zendaya, her Euphoria costar and one of her best friends, about the strange pauses they’ve endured in their acting careers. The show has been halted by COVID delays and last year’s writers’ and actors’ strikes—unexpected hiccups for a cast otherwise speedrunning modern celebrity.

“It’s really been kind of disorienting,” Schafer says. In March 2020 she moved into an apartment directly across from the studio where they’d film season two. The cast went to a table read in early March; not long after, production was suspended indefinitely. Schafer, then just 21, spent the next few months alone, staring out at the lot where she was supposed to be working. Like so many others, she was struggling. But it felt different from any kind of rough patch she’d had before.

Schafer has spoken about this time in interviews, often with a splash of nonchalance. “I had probably what’s close to a mental breakdown and then bought a truck and drove across the country” is how she initially described it to me. But when we talk about it more over lunch the next day, it’s clear it was an intense and extended personal crisis. “I remember having a moment where I knew that something was wrong,” Schafer says. She 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.”

So she got out of her apartment, and Los Angeles. That May, she loaded up her truck and began driving east, aiming for her sister’s place in Boone, North Carolina. On the road, she felt an immediate lift. “It was the happiest I had been in COVID at that point,” she says. “It was something to do, keep my eyes on the road.” She cruised through Arizona, Texas, and Kentucky, landing in Boone five days later.

She ended up staying for a few months. While she was there, she and Euphoria creator Sam Levinson began writing what would become “f*ck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob,” the special Jules-focused episode that aired between the show’s COVID-delayed seasons. Schafer co–executive produced and cowrote the episode—the only time Levinson has shared a writing credit on the show—and she felt lucky to get to pour a lot of that “gnarly sh*t” into it. “It was still, to this day, one of the most artistically fulfilling things I’ve ever done,” she says. Euphoria is told firmly from the point of view of Rue, Zendaya’s character and Jules’s best friend and love interest, and when Schafer and Levinson began writing, Team Rue was “f*cking roasting” Jules on Twitter. “Sea Blob” was a chance to give more nuance to her story. “I definitely wanted to provide more of her point of view,” Schafer says. “TV is a beast, but one thing I really love about it is that it’s a character that I get to go back to and keep working on and keep developing.” Levinson is reportedly writing season three of Euphoria now, and it’s been suggested it’ll feature a time jump. “I can confirm that I have also seen that rumor in the news” is all Schafer can say on the topic.

She looks back at that dark period now as a sort of baptism by fire: It was the first time in her adult life that she’d made a choice for her own good, and not because a job required it.

“I lived where I had to live for modeling and went where people told me to go,” she says. For Euphoria, “I moved right across the street from the studio.” Her choice to leave LA helped her realize something. “I have to be in control and decide how to survive this,” she remembers thinking. “It got dark, but I confronted a lot.”

One day, Schafer knows, she will let go of Jules, the role that has so far defined her career. “She’s deeply intertwined with who I am as a person and who I was at that age,” she says. “She feels like an artifact of younger me.” Until that happens, she’s looking for new challenges, finding growth and heartbreak along the way.

Filming Cuckoo in Germany in 2022 was her first time on a movie set, and her first time working on a project not overseen by Levinson. “I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to deliver the same kind of performance with completely new people in a new country, on a new set, and on a completely different format of filmmaking,” she says. “There were these barriers that I felt like I had to break. It was like having the training wheels off.”

Stevens says he’d have never guessed Cuckoo was Schafer’s first movie set had she not mentioned it. But he also saw the way she seemed to learn something about herself in the process. “You could see her grow into the role and almost grow into herself in terms of [realizing], Oh, I can do this,” he says.

Her director was similarly impressed. “Hunter has a special thing,” Singer says. “She has a really unique way of showing her emotions, and being fearless about it. She’s relaxed, but she’s not casual.” They also bonded on the dance floor in Cologne, where they would go out dancing to techno most weekends: “She likes really hard stuff,” the German director says, with admiration.

The experience was eye-opening for Schafer. “Now that I’ve figured out the craft of acting and it’s not this terrifying thing that I feel like I’ve been thrown into, I get it,” Schafer says. “I can really find some levity and some joy in it.”

At the time, she was still recovering from a breakup with the actor and singer-songwriter Dominic Fike, whom she met while filming season two of Euphoria in 2021. “I had all these pent-up emotions,” Schafer says. As her Cuckoo character Gretchen, “I got to exorcise a lot of the breakup feelings that I was going through.” (The two reunited after she returned from Germany but called it off again last April.) Schafer had never dated a man before Fike, and had thought she never would. “I had had so many sh*tty experiences with men before—not from dating them, but just in life,” Schafer says. “I think I had built up a wall that was way too thick around them.”

“And then I fell in love,” she says, smiling.

Being with Fike allowed Schafer to “work through a lot of the feelings of disdain that I had towards men as a whole,” she says. “I think it had inhibited a lot of my friendships with men, and a lot of that came down as well. I had a really beautiful relationship with [Fike], and it really opened me up in that way.”

It was also, Schafer says, her first time publicly dating another famous person, which made the breakup all that more exposed and painful. “I had dated other famous people before, but people didn’t know about it,” she clarifies. “It was completely different.”

Like who? I ask, and she shakes her head amiably. “People who care enough and have done their research probably know what’s up.”

Is this someone you recently went furniture shopping with?

Schafer laughs. Yes, she admits, but still hasn’t said their name. She’s not sure she should be talking about this at all, actually, so I drop it, and we move on.

The next day, I ask Schafer if she’s checked in with Rosalía, the Spanish pop star and friend Schafer had been seen furniture shopping with, and has long been linked to. Schafer smiles. She talked it over with Rosalía last night, she says, and is happy to confirm that they dated for about five months in the fall and winter of 2019. (Schafer says it took her a few hangs to suss out the vibe and determine that they were, in fact, going on dates.) These days, they’re friends, which is something Schafer is proud of. They’ve been spotted around town recently, getting smoothies and testing out couches. “I have really beautiful friendships with people that I was once romantically involved with,” she says. With Rosalía, “she’s family no matter what.”

“It’s been so much speculation for so long,” Schafer says. “Part of us just wants to get it over with, and then another part is like, ‘It’s none of anybody’s f*cking business!’ ” Ultimately, though, “it’s something I’m happy to share. And I think she feels that way too.”

When we talk, Schafer is single, and not in a rush to change that. “I’m still in some ways healing from the last thing,” she says, referring to last year’s breakup with Fike. “I want to make sure I’m good all the way before I jump into something else.”

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She is recovering in other ways too. Last summer, her beloved colleague and close friend Angus Cloud died from an accidental drug overdose, devastating the tight-knit Euphoria community. When it comes up during our lunch, Schafer starts crying, and I tread carefully, unsure if it’s something she wants to talk about publicly at all. She and Cloud, who played the laconic and protective drug dealer Fez, were the same age, and Euphoria was also his first acting role. In many ways they grew up together, both on and off the show. But Schafer says she feels ready to take a moment to honor him.

“I’ve never had a friend that I was that close to and that was my age pass before,” she says, wiping away tears. “It’s really surreal. It doesn’t make sense. And yeah, it’s new. It’s a new kind of grieving.

“It comes randomly,” she continues. “It will hit me when I’m on the f*cking toilet. It’s really…I don’t know. Grief is f*cking weird.”

But she wants people to know that her friend was special. “People really fell in love with Angus,” Schafer says. “He was really one of the heartbeats of Euphoria. It’s always the people that are just kind of a little too good for the world and a little too pure. He was a f*cking angel. He was sunshine.”

Much of the artwork Schafer made in high school was in direct dialogue with HB2, like a pair of red undergarments with giant hands covering the crotch and the words “Peel away every perception” emblazoned across the hands and waistband. “I felt like I had to make my art a response to everything that was happening in North Carolina when that’s not really what I wanted to be making art about, necessarily,” she says. “I think I felt like, Oh, I’m trans. I should be making art about this.”

Increasingly, she’s less compelled to make art that pulls from or speaks directly to her story, or neatly packages the trans experience. She’d like to focus on work that feels more unfettered and unbound, and doesn’t pigeonhole her to her identity.

Schafer knows her portrayal of Jules—a young trans character written with depth, complexity, and care—has made a difference, especially at a time when trans youth are being stripped of their rights across the country: Last August, Schafer’s home state of North Carolina became the 22nd state to enact legislation that restricts or bans trans minors’ access to gender-affirming medical care, even as more and more young people identify as trans nationally. The Human Rights Campaign estimated that, as of November 2023, 35 percent of high-school-age trans youth resided in states that have passed bans on gender-affirming care. But she’s also looking forward to a moment some time in the future when her identity—and those of other queer and trans people living and working in the spotlight—is no longer the first thing mentioned, or maybe isn’t even mentioned at all. Inching toward that point, Schafer says, has been strategic. “It has not just happened naturally by any means. If I let it happen, it would still be giving ‘Transsexual Actress’ before every article ever.” More recently, she has even tried to avoid saying the word trans in interviews entirely.

“As soon as I say it, it gets blastoff,” she says. “It took a while to learn that and it also took a while to learn that I don’t want to be [reduced to] that, and I find it ultimately demeaning to me and what I want to do. Especially after high school, I was sick of talking about it. I worked so hard to get to where I am, past these really hard points in my transition, and now I just want to be a girl and finally move on.

“It’s a privilege, but it’s been very intentional,” she continues. “I’ve gotten offered tons of trans roles, and I just don’t want to do it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

She understands better than anyone that her particular job requires more extracurricular work than some of her fellow breakout Euphoria stars. “I know for a fact that I’m one of the most famous trans people in media right now, and I do feel a sense of responsibility, and maybe a little bit of guilt, for not being more of a spokesperson,” Schafer says. “But ultimately, I really do believe that not making it the centerpiece to what I’m doing will allow me to get further. And I think getting further and doing awesome sh*t, in the interest of ‘the movement,’ will be way more helpful than talking about it all the time.”

Decentering transness from her story is a privilege Schafer has earned by having spent her formative years advocating for trans rights, and her early 20s portraying a trans character whose storyline has become so entwined with her own life. And there’s a meta quality at play here that we’re both aware of; of having to acknowledge the thing in plain language so that the thing might not have to be acknowledged one day. Schafer knows that getting to that point requires people like her to continuously break the mold, to plaster on a smile and talk about it and help people understand. But her years of being the sunny, people-pleasing young advocate and star have clearly taken a toll. It’s not so much that Schafer has hardened herself, but more that she’s learned to embrace a little cynicism as a protective measure. In short, she’s grown up.

“I’ve kind of lost interest in achieving some sort of utopia,” Schafer says. “I am totally cool with people hating me for being trans or calling me a man. I am not interested in trying to convince them anymore. As long as you’re staying in your lane”—she points away from her, across the room—“work. Work! Do that. And I’m going to be over here with people I love.”

At this stage in her life, Schafer is much more interested in tending to the interior, spiritual side of her transness, and sharing that with the people who make her feel consistently safe and held. Last year, she directed the music video for Anohni and the Johnsons’ single “Why Am I Alive Now?” and reflected on a conversation she had with Anohni in the aftermath.

“I don’t have that many trans elders in my life, and this one thing that she said just kind of burned into my brain,” Schafer says, and then paraphrases it for me: “Mother Nature persists. There have been trans people for so long, and they keep making more of us. So there’s something there. There’s something there.

“I think there’s something kind of cosmic and mystical about that,” Schafer continues. “When I look at other trans people’s art, there’s this frequency, this kind of common thread—whether it’s a sound or an aesthetic—that’s consistent. I think it’s probably yielded from the shared experience that we all have that’s very unique. There’s something really spiritual about it, and kind of magical. And of course it sucks, but I also wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Because Schafer didn’t set out to be an actor, she has a tendency to talk about her acting career like it’s a happy accident, or a dream she could wake up from at any moment. When she’s between projects, as she is when we talk, she has a habit of pondering all the different paths her life could take. “I always kind of get into the spiral of, Am I meant to be doing this?” she says. “I think I could probably keep doing the acting thing for a while, just based on how sh*t’s been going, which is really cool. But there are so many other things that I want to do with my life that I kind of put on hold and I don’t want to let go of.”

Stevens, her Cuckoo costar, has seen this at play before. “The mistake people often make is like, Well, you’ve got to choose one,” he says. “And actually, she doesn’t. I think she can succeed in any direction she decides to go. It doesn’t feel overambitious to say that, because she has the talent to back it up.”

She’d like to return to her art practice, for one, and have her own gallery show. She wants to start a fashion house, but not in a half-assed celebrity way; she’d want to go back to school for fashion design first, and learn how to tailor and sew. “I want to be on my Alexander McQueen sh*t,” she says. There is more acting to do too: She would like to do a rom-com, and maybe a musical—she has a singing credit on Cuckoo, and her go-to karaoke song is, rather intimidatingly, Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet”—and to keep learning the bass.

Is that all? I ask. “No!” Schafer says. She wants to DJ a party too. She loves New York and plans to buy a home there. “My social life is better there. Sex life is better there.” She celebrated her 25th birthday in Manhattan, running around Dimes Square with her closest friends. “I’ll be honest: We had done a little bit of acid,” Schafer says. It was just enough for them to get the giggles. “At the height of it, there was a lamp in my friend’s room and the lamp was giving a lot of energy and we were yelling at the lamp.”

She’ll keep writing and directing as well. She had long fantasized about having a career like Michaela Coel’s, the British actor and filmmaker who made Chewing Gum and I May Destroy You—and now finds herself in a position to have exactly that. (And more! Since Schafer filmed Mother Mary, Coel and her costar Hathaway have become friends.) She’s in the midst of a Girls rewatch, a show she adores and refers to as a “period piece”—an apt point, but a humbling one for a millennial journalist to hear, nonetheless. “In the aesthetic sense, I mean,” she clarifies. (“Their outfits feel so heightened,” she says, with the tone of someone considering an ancient civilization for the first time. “Is that what it was like?”) She’s been getting some of her friends to watch it, and it’s been sparking ideas about the narrative projects she’d like to pursue: “We’ve been dreaming about a show about trans girls like that.” But she wants to get the hang of directing a bit more—to make a few more music videos, and then a short film—before she allows herself to think about helming her own show or a feature. She knows she has the right disposition for the job, though: “I am a proper Capricorn. I want to control everything.”

It’s a sensibility she’s had since she was a little girl, when she would dream up an outfit and then put it on a paper doll. She’s assiduously cultivated and applied it to every facet of her creative life since. “There is a really special feeling that happens, coming up with something in your head, and then being able to hold it. It’s kind of incomparable. It’s better than drugs.”

“You can really find joy in making stuff,” Schafer says. “I find it to be a reason to live.”

Emma Carmichael is a journalist and screenwriter in New York and Los Angeles.

A version of this story originally appeared in the April/May 2024 issue of GQ with the title “Queen of the Youth”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Bryce Anderson
Styled by Heidi Bivens
Hair by Ward Stegerhoek at Home Agency
Skin by Jo Strettell for Walter Schupfer Management using Shiseido
Nails by Ashlie Johnson for The Wall Group
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina
Set design by Robert Doran at Frank Reps
Produced by Mara Weinstein at Luckystar Productions