Halsey

Ashley Frangipane never wanted to limit herself to singing in front of sixty thousand people. In the American film and TV industry, almost every musician tries to slip through the door of festival prestige, and most fail outright. She preferred to get her hands dirty in productions where mud and cinematic artifice truly rule.

In 2021, she put her first major aesthetic statement on the table with If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power. This fifty-minute short film, directed by Colin Tilley and scored by Trent Reznor with Atticus Ross, bypassed the usual circuits to screen in select IMAX theaters. Box office came close to 735,000 dollars through special screenings across several cities around the world.

No one expected such a lavish period visual display to accompany a conceptual album.

And the move caught the attention of independent directors looking for faces free of Los Angeles's usual mannerisms. In that film, Halsey played a queen haunted by medieval paranoia, avoiding conventional dialogue and relying entirely on rhythmic editing.

The Novice Filmmaker's Misstep

In 2023, she made the leap to acting with Americana, an ensemble thriller written and directed by Tony Tost that premiered at the South by Southwest festival. Halsey shared the screen with Sydney Sweeney and Paul Walter Hauser under suffocating heat on locations in South Dakota.

But the commercial release was an absolute disaster. The film barely earned half a million dollars in its opening weekend in U.S. theaters, hurt by a chaotic marketing campaign and the public's limited appetite for a postmodern Western.

Far from hiding behind box office figures, the actress defended the director's final cut in public interviews. She quickly understood that American auteur cinema has no patience for commercial timidity.

Dying on Time in 1980s Hollywood

The B-movie horror changed the rules of the game.

In 2024, director Ti West cast her to close out his trilogy with MaXXXine. To land the role of Tabby Martin, a nightclub dancer chasing stardom, Halsey sent a self-taped audition from her home without informing the A24 executives.

West didn't hesitate after seeing the film. On screen, the singer built a sullen character, modeled on the stage presence of Annie Lennox and Debbie Harry, who is torn apart by the plot just before the climax.

The film performed well at the box office, earning 22.1 million dollars worldwide on a budget of less than ten million. So the director decided not to end the partnership after filming.

Studio Deals and Script Control

In late 2024, Amazon MGM Studios greenlit development of Bloodlust, a television black comedy conceived entirely by Frangipane. On this project, the artist took on writing the script and executive producing, handing directing to Ti West and the showrunner role to Mark Friedman.

This time, there will be no room for her in front of the camera.

The production agreement set filming at studios in California under the direct supervision of her agency and Prime Video's scripted division. The budget per episode was locked in before the first final version of the script was completed.