WINTER 2025 ✦ INTERVIEW
Total look STELLA MCCARTNEY
“As much as I am one person, languages bring out different sides and different facets of the self. It's a delicate balancing act of living in between those two things.”
— PAULINE CHALAMET
Total look DOLCE & GABBANA.
PHOTOGRAPHY KEVIN SINCLAIR STYLING ODILE ITURRASPE GARLAND INTERVIEW DANIELA HERNANDEZ
Pauline Chalamet is a study in contrasts. New and vintage. Serious and comedic. Prepared and spontaneous. Her artistry and storytelling is deeply rooted in her multicultural upbringing. Raised in a bilingual French-American household, she grew up navigating two languages and two cultures, an experience that brings a layered complexity to her work. Much of it investigates the in between. The 2023 short film she produced and starred in, called What Doesn’t Float, explores the lives of New Yorkers on the brink of major life transitions. Similarly, her character, Kimberly, on The Sex Lives of College Girls, struggles with fitting into a world of privilege that is wholly unknown to her. In one scene, she is the only one among her peers who has a job to help pay tuition. Still, Kimberly demands respect. Like Pauline. Her production company’s dark comedy/satire, Nepotism, Baby!, chronicles the miserable life of a wannabe actress aching to break free from the shadow of her mother’s movie-industry success, while simultaneously benefiting from it. (It echoes themes from The Seagull by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, whom Pauline grew up reading.) The film, which was an Official Selection of the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, feels like both an indictment of the New—our tech-fueled celebrity culture—and a nuanced exposition of the Old: the ageless quest to develop one’s own identity. Both are part of Pauline’s story plot. But the real horror of the piece is that its “protagonist” seems unrooted, from herself, from the world she inhabits, and from reality. As I came to learn, roots are among Pauline’s most treasured assets: “When I don't feel rooted, I get very anxious and I don't know where to situate myself.” The film was produced by Rachel Walden, who helped Pauline find her footing as a producer. “We just really got along as artists.”
Dress and shoes VERSACE, jacket PRADA, earrings GIORGIO ARMANI. ( opposite ) Blazer and coat STELLA MCCARTNEY.
Daniela Hernandez __ When we met at the photo shoot for Vestal, you were speaking with your family in French. Is that your first language?
Pauline Chalamet __ It was a very interesting dynamic. My father's French and my mom is American. She's from New York, but they each spoke the other language. My dad speaks English and my mom speaks French, which meant that both parents could speak in their native tongue. So growing up, I had the exact same amount of French as I did English, and it was just kind of the norm. I think when you grow up in New York, you're so used to hearing people speak so many different languages that it never really struck me as strange in any way. I went to public school in New York, and English really became the language I used most. When I was around thirteen, I did a three-year stint in a private school in New York called the United Nations International School from the fourth to the sixth grade, and my classes were in French. It was the first time I was reading and writing in French. It was hard because you can speak a language, but learning how to read and write is very different. I made an executive decision at home that I was only going to speak French to my father. I told him, "If I don't speak French, pretend you don't understand."
DH __ What does that feel like?
PC __ It's just second nature. My life is split between Paris and the U.S. Because of that, the languages are evenly split too. It sometimes feels like I'm two different people. I think language does that. When I was discovering different playwrights during high school in New York, I remember reading Chekhov. I remember liking him, but I didn’t understand the point of his plays. It felt like there was a sensibility that I was missing. When I moved to Paris, I started reading translations of Chekhov in French.
“As much as I am one person, languages bring out different sides and different facets of the self. It's a delicate balancing act of living in between those two things.”
Total look ERDEM, shoes STELLA MCCARTNEY.
That’s when I finally totally understood the comedy of Chekhov, how it was dark comedy, but also endearing. I saw the nuance. I saw the sarcasm. I saw the depth of the characters. I was talking to a Russian friend who said there's a melancholy that exists in both Russian and French that doesn't really exist in the English language. Ever since he told me this, I can't stop thinking about it because I see it in who I am, especially when I’m in the U.S. speaking French or in France speaking English. I see how influential a language is on your comportment—how you are in the world. As much as I am one person, languages bring out different sides and different facets of the self. It's a delicate balancing act of living in between those two things.
DH __ Are you speaking to your daughter in English or in French?
PC __ Both.
DH __ I thought it was lovely that you brought her to the shoot. Do you think there’s a cultural shift around that?
PC __ I don't know how much I believe in bringing your personal life to work or bringing your children to work. I think it’s important to continue to live your life and have your responsibilities. When a baby is so young and you're feeding the baby, you're its source of food, so where a baby goes, you go. It's also a learning period, right? The baby lived inside you for nine months. For me, it feels unnatural that all of a sudden you wouldn't spend almost every moment with your baby for at least three months. It’s a learning period. In parenting—or in life—you always have ideas of how things are going to go, and then as this life presents itself, things aren't always the way you imagined. It's the same for this. You may have ideas of wanting your kid to be with you all the time or not wanting your kid to be with you at times. But now you just have another human being. So, it's actually not just you making the decisions anymore even though you are the authoritative figure responsible for this being. I felt like I didn't really ask myself the question because I felt that I had no other choice. That's really my answer.
DH __ In The Sex Lives of College Girls, your character, Kimberly, is also navigating a lot of new experiences and transitions. Do you draw from your own life to bring her to life?
PC __ What's really interesting about a character like Kimberly is that she's kind of like a blank page because she's so naive in many ways. Most experiences for her at college are totally new life experiences. There are ways in which I relate to Kimberly. I had to work when I was in school too. But we aren't very similar in our upbringings. She's from a city in Arizona called Gilbert. I grew up in New York. She hasn’t really traveled, and I have been traveling since I was born. There are major life differences that we share. I do try to channel what it would be that age again and to relive all those experiences and actually be honest with the fact that you are living them for the first time. I had a little bit of a jaded attitude when I was that age, like been there, done that. That’s one of the most fun things about playing Kimberly. Everything for her is very first degree: What is, simply is, for better or worse.
Total look STELLA MCCARTNEY. ( opposite ) Total look DOLCE & GABBANA.
DH __ Have you learned something from her that you've applied to yourself?
PC __ Something that Kimberly has that I'm admirative of is that she's not shy. I think I'm someone who can take risks, but Kimberly is quite intrepid! She's fearless in just being herself. She has such tenacity. That's something I really admire about the character. I might have certain elements of that in my personality as well, but it's a very inspiring thing to go after what you want so brazenly.
DH __ In one of this season’s episodes of The Sex Lives of College Girls, Kimberly gets a robot coworker. In your production company Gummy Films, are you using AI?
PC __ That's the first time I've gotten a question about AI. We have not used any AI yet. I'm producing a project in Paris for Patou that my partner is directing. We’re making the teaser video for their upcoming show at the end of January, and we have tarot cards in the piece. We thought about copyrights for tarot cards, and then someone, at some point in a production meeting, was like, ‘Should we have AI make them?’ I thought, ‘Oh my god this is the craziest world. My mind doesn't even go there.’ Ultimately, we did get the rights so we didn’t have to use AI.
DH __ Why tarot?
PC __ I don't know anything about tarot. I'm maybe a little stitious. I'm not superstitious. I'm a little wary of anything that predicts my future. I worry about what these predictions can do to your psyche more than the readings themselves. But we were really drawn to how beautiful tarot cards are. As we brainstormed, we thought tarot cards and Patou’s new line would pair well together. Our idea is that there's this psychic and three different women who come to get their tarot read. And each of the women represent different types of Patou women. There's the mysterious girl, the romantic girl, and there's the confident girl. We wanted to create a very short fashion film with an interesting narrative focused on people, while still highlighting the clothes. I thought that tarot could offer actors a lot of room to play with.
DH __ So the readings were scripted?
PC __ Yes. My partner did a lot of studying. He has a very good friend who is what he calls a good witch. She’s very into tarot, and she helped him figure out things like: ‘If I want to tell this story, what cards would I need to pull?’ What’s incredible, what I learned as someone who is quite wary of tarot, was how open to interpretation it is and how there's not one way of pulling cards or one way of getting your tarot read. It's very similar to therapy or really the interpretation of anything, a book, a movie. How you interpret it is based on who you are.
DH __ You’re both an actor and a producer. What do you think about the impacts of AI, which has been a contentious topic in Hollywood and other industries?
“AI is part of the conversation. You can’t ignore it, but you also can't let it be your life force, because you lose sight of so many important things.”
Dress and gloves VERSACE, earrings GIORGIO ARMANI. ( opposite ) Dress and jacket GIORGIO ARMANI, shoes MANOLITA.
PC __ I think it's dangerous to be on the extremes of anything when it comes to technology. I think to be completely anti-AI is to not be in the world as it is right now. And to be completely pro-AI and letting it do as much as it can is to not be at peace enough with the way the world is. It’s like you're so excited about what the future is holding that you're losing touch with the now. I think there's a happy medium. The reality is that AI has new things to offer us. To use ChatGPT or any of these AI platforms and to understand what they're capable of is very important. You need to learn what the benefits and drawbacks are and form your own opinion. AI is part of the conversation. You can’t ignore it, but you also can't let it be your life force, because you lose sight of so many important things. There was a very interesting article in The New Yorker that I recently read called A Revolution in How Robots Learn. It's very interesting because I see an article like that pop up, and there's a part of me that goes: ‘I can’t! It's too much!’ And another part of me that goes, ‘What is that reaction?’ Because learning about what technology is capable of is not a threat. It's actually in how you choose to use it. I don't believe that the everyday person is using AI for nefarious reasons. I think that they use it to make life a little easier.
DH __ Coexisting with technology can be difficult. I read you banish your phone from your room at night.
PC __ This is how I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. [pulls out a gold medieval-looking candlestick with molten candles] Not really. This usually lives on my bookshelf. I don't know why it's on my desk. [laughs] If my phone is in the room while I sleep, I can't go into a deep sleep. This is how I know I'm addicted. If the phone is next to my bed, even if there's nothing going on, nothing to worry about, I will think of something I have to look up or desperately need to know Or I’ll check if someone sent me a message. As soon as the phone is out of the room, the bedroom becomes a sanctuary. It really helps reorient space and time and presence. Especially as I travel a lot between France and the U.S., it's so easy to feel like the world is super connected. But when your phone isn't next to you, you realize ‘I'm far away. It's the middle of the night.’ You look out the window. All the neighbors’ lights are off. The city is sleeping, and you realize where you are. That’s very helpful. If I can’t fall asleep, I read.
DH __ So you read a physical book?
PC __ Yes. I also have a Nook because I am an avid New Yorker reader, and when I’m in France, the issues arrive too late. But otherwise, I have all these different contraptions for reading in bed. I have a light that you put around your neck. I have the typical nightlight that you clip onto a book and then I have my regular bedside lamp.
DH __ What are you reading now?
PC __ I’m reading two things. I'm reading Nightbitch which I'd always wanted to read. I haven't seen the movie, but I'm reading the book. And I'm reading this book that was recommended to me called You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again by Julia Phillips. It’s a page-turner! She was a really big-deal producer in Hollywood, and then she had a fall from grace. It's such a good title, too. It came out in 1991. I’m maybe 50 pages in, but she seems really feisty. I think it always helps to be feisty, whether it was in the 70s or now.
DH __ You mentioned that you’ve traveled all over the world. Is there a place that you're aching to go to that you haven't been to yet?
PC __ I’d love to go to Japan. I'm fascinated by the structure and order that seem to exist in typical Japanese life. And I want to know what it's like to be in an environment where society is like that, not just individual people. That's somewhere I'm aching to go. I've never been to Louisville, Kentucky. I haven’t been to many cities or towns that are not on the coasts. I’ve done one cross-country road trip and I would love to do another. I want to really take my time. I did something amazing that I would love to do again, which is I took a train across the country. It was incredible. I want to do that again.
DH __ What draws you to that?
PC __ When you grow up in New York, you spend so much time thinking, ‘I'm a New Yorker. New York is its own thing.’ And if the political situation in the United States has taught me anything recently is that that's very problematic thinking. It’s problematic because we all hold the same passport. We are all American. But there’s a lack of cohesiveness across America. It's very hard to understand how other Americans are living. The same reason that I'm like, "I'd love to go to Japan to witness an order and structure that is somewhat foreign to me" I feel the same way about parts of America, where I really don't understand what day-to-day life is like. And I'm curious to know what it is.