Why Actress Sasha Lane Is the Face of Our 2018 Disruptors Issue
Sasha Lane is a total Libra. Astrology is a nonsense system that I wholly buy into, and everything about Lane being a Libra is true: She would disagree with this characterization, as she does when we meet, because that is a classic Libra attitude: They have a steel sense of self. Libras are empathetic souls who spend their days wading waist-deep through intellectual swamps while the rest of us are breathing and sleeping. They are affable and brooding. They are charismatic teachers who speak very quietly. This is everything you need to know about Sasha Lane before moving forward. From here on out, she ceases to be predictable.
Our interview takes place after her Allure cover shoot, so Lane arrives displaying the handiwork of a team of grooming artisans. Rose gold gleams from her eyelids to her cheekbones; her nails are geometrically perfect green ovals; her eyes and lips and skin invite additional metaphors. Her laugh pierces your body and injects it with sunlight. A mane of earth-brown locs cascades down onto her shoulders. She is tiny, but her frame is balanced by a fatigue jacket that is 16 sizes too big because Libras unquestionably crave balance, even sartorially.
We meet at a shoebox-size bar in west Los Angeles at this critical time in Lane’s life — smack-dab in the middle of a seismic shift that took her from Texan psychology student to Cannes critical darling. She and I are sitting in what probably will be her last months of relative anonymity, as her film career barrels ahead, through two premieres this summer and one huge one early next. The demands will mount, and the events will increase exponentially, and the attention-getting roles will reproduce into more and more and more. It’s exciting. But it’s a lot.
The narrative that follows Lane often focuses on her discovery by director Andrea Arnold, who spotted her sunbathing on spring break in Florida and cast her as the lead in the road movie American Honey with Shia LaBeouf and Riley Keough. What that narrative fails to include is what happened right after American Honey: A young woman who never asked to be an actress was suddenly receiving abundant praise from nearly every film critic in America, plus some in France (American Honey won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2016). Two and a half years ago, she was a sunbathing psychology undergrad. Now spring break is over.
We are drinking clear liquor and eating fried pickles while I am trying hard not to freak her out about this. At times, reminding the introverted Lane of her 90-degree ascent into the fame industry feels like taking the role of an oracle foretelling doomsday. “Yeah, I’m terrified,” she admits. “I’m so happy, and I thank God every single day, but I damn near cry every single day, too, because this is so much. I was never the person who was like, I want to be famous. I pray for people to leave me the fuck alone for five seconds, and I keep my hair in my face because I don’t like to be open.” After Arnold arcade-clawed her from obscurity, she moved to Los Angeles on the advice of her managers (who produced the film). “I smoked a lot of weed. I cried a lot. I would go from the bed to the window to the floor, just move in that triangle continuously. I wrote a lot, I wrote a lot of poems, and I fucking went crazy. I talked to the pigeons at the park....”
I would like to follow up about the pigeon thing.
She laughs, and her laugh lights up the bar. “It was wild. I literally went to the park specifically to hang out with the pigeons because they’d get really close to me. I’d give them part of my bagel, and that was it.”
She is extremely funny without intending to be. Even when she is reflecting on one of the most challenging parts of her career — this stall between finishing American Honey and its debut at Cannes — she radiates mirth and candor. This summer, she’ll appear in The Miseducation of Cameron Post, set at a Christian gay-conversion camp in Montana.
The film stars Chloë Grace Moretz as the eponymous Cameron, who is sentenced to an indefinite stay at God’s Promise after being caught smooching (et cetera) the “incorrect” gender to smooch after a high school dance. Lane costars as Jane Fonda, a character whose name is never thoroughly explained to me and who is one of the wokest campers at God’s Promise — she more or less ignores the teachings and smokes weed instead.
In the movie, Jane and Cameron are victims of circumstance and spend their time at the straight farm slightly more than inconvenienced while their peers writhe against the competing forces of passion, self-acceptance, and a religion that condemns both. Jane is a self-assured confidant of Cameron and a messenger of comic relief. It is not easy to make gay conversion camp funny (the movie is not a comedy), but Jane is hilarious, a hawk-eyed commentator with perspective inside and outside of her current situation, not unlike Lane herself.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post won the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Lane’s other upcoming film, Hearts Beat Loud, a comedy with Nick Offerman and Toni Collette, also premiered at the festival. She took the role because she thought the movie was very funny, but she also liked the story line: Lane plays the biracial girlfriend of Offerman’s daughter, who is also biracial, but it’s “not a message, throw-this-in-your-face thing. It is what it is.” (Lane is also biracial and queer, and it is what it is.) In 2019, Lane is set to star in her first superhero franchise, Hellboy. Her character, Alice, hears the voices of the dead and is British.
“When I’m filming, I’m either learning or I’m healing,” she says. Hearts Beat Loud was the latter, a comedy she could smile throughout, but most of her roles touch on the former — pulling out pieces of her identity and magnifying them by 1,000. In The Miseducation of Cameron Post, it was her queerness. American Honey’s Star reminded her of how she took care of her sisters at a young age. “My work gets to be therapy. My work gets to be fun. It gets to be something I can put all of my thoughts and pain into. And when it stops doing that for me, I’ll be done. And I’ll go write poetry on an island and say ‘Deuces’ to everyone.”
She is the opposite of a cinema buff. On film: “Jurassic Park is my shit. I don’t know about that other stuff, but I know when I like it.” Part of her success is attributable to her authenticity (a buzzword these days meaning both “honest” and “endearing”), and part is attributable to the fact that Hollywood is not sacrosanct to Lane. In fact, it’s the opposite: It’s kind of the enemy here. “Something about it makes my skin crawl, it’s weird,” she says. “It’s never been my vibe. I’ve never cared about it. Being in it now, it’s even more like, ‘What the fuck is this?’”
Though it’s not her vibe, Lane has famous friends. She’s gone to a party thrown by an A-list rapper that I would love to tell you more about, but I’m bound to secrecy. She wore Céline to a movie premiere. But she’s also a homebody who talks to pigeons. She struggles daily, she says, with a particularly gnarly case of obsessive negative thinking, that, no, does not go away just because she gets to be an actress. The institution of Hollywood caters almost exclusively to gorgeous rich white people and is not particularly kind to anybody else. Lane, in her Céline dress or her oversize fatigues, is a symbol of a new American starlet — talented, driven, complex, and yes, a little fucked up.
At one point, I do a bad journalist thing and I turn off my recorder so Lane and I can just hang out. We are both several drinks deep, and as it is a weeknight, we mutually decide to do the responsible adult thing and adjourn to another bar for even more drinking. Los Angeles is soaked in nighttime while we amble single file down a narrow sidewalk. We do not stop laughing. Even in the dark, I’d follow her anywhere.
A version of this article originally appeared in the May 2018 issue of Allure. To get your copy, head to newsstands or subscribe now.
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