QUEEN of the YOUTH

Hunter Schafer has built a career by saying yes: to activism, to modeling, and then to acting, where Euphoria made her a star. Now, with a budding movie career and big plans in just about every field you can imagine, the Gen Z icon is figuring out exactly what sort of creative life she'd like to lead.

- EMMA CARMICHAEL

HUNTER SCHAFER STIEL 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 May-Schafer learned how to handle a butterfly knife and play bass, filmed her first action scenes, and brushed up on American Sign Language.