Hunter Schafer

Activism Before the Spotlight

Hunter Schafer sued the state of North Carolina before turning eighteen. That stand against HB2, the law on public restroom use, already revealed a personality that didn't ask for permission to exist. By 2017, her life was all New York runways and shows for Dior and Miu Miu, but fashion design was her real goal. She had a place at Central Saint Martins in London that she never took up.

The film industry discovered her through an Instagram casting call.

In 2019, her debut in HBO's series Euphoria defied every expectation about her career. Playing Jules Vaughn was not just an acting exercise (it was a full creative collaboration with Sam Levinson). Schafer contributed her own diaries to add depth to the script and steered away from the stock archetypes of mainstream television. Her initial contract called for a supporting role, but the character's weight grew until she was placed at the center of the story alongside Zendaya.

And the plan changed completely.

During production of the special episode titled Fuck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob in 2021, she took a bigger step. She served as co-writer and executive producer, something unusual for an actress with so little prior industry experience. On that shoot, she learned that the camera could be a tool for controlling her own image. But she didn't settle for television success and went after projects that would take her away from the teen glamour of Los Angeles.

The Leap into European Horror

In 2023, she played Tigris Snow in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. It was her first major studio blockbuster and grossed more than $337 million at the global box office. Despite the scale of the project, she chose to focus on the physical building of a character who had to project decadent elegance in a world in ruins.

Because mainstream movies were not her only priority.

In 2024, she starred in Cuckoo, a psychological horror film directed by Tilman Singer and shot in Germany. She plays a teenager hunted by a supernatural entity at a holiday resort in the Alps. The shoot was physically demanding, and Schafer performed many of her own stunts. Critics praised her ability to sustain suspense with almost no dialogue during the most tense sequences.

That same year, she worked under the direction of Yorgos Lanthimos on Kinds of Kindness. Taking part in a work by the Greek director confirmed her interest in more raw and less compromising auteur cinema. In this film, she shared the cast with Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe, fitting into a structure of short stories that demanded absolute technical precision.

Her training in visual arts shapes how she reads scripts before accepting them. Schafer often sketches her characters before rehearsals begin, to understand their volume and presence in space. So her career choices are not driven by a marketing strategy, but by a purely aesthetic and narrative interest.

In June 2024, her casting in the main cast of the series Blade Runner 2099 for Amazon Prime Video was confirmed. Filming for the production began on location in Prague under the direction of Jonathan van Tulleken. The series has Ridley Scott as executive producer and is set fifty years after the last film.