Emily Alyn Lind prides herself on ‘knowing everything’ Movies Counter

Emily Alyn Lind was seven years old when her first film was screened at a major film festival.

“I didn’t go,” the 24-year-old says via Zoom from Nova Scotia. The actress wears a cozy-looking fur hat and sits cross-legged on the ground, Canadian road traffic slightly muffling her voice. “But I have experience working with auteur filmmakers. We shot in Montreal, and everyone was very creative. People were drinking at lunch. I loved staying up late. It felt like the best thing in the world.”

The New York-born star talks about director Gaspar Noe’s surreal art film Enter the blankwhich premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009. Lind, a child actress born to producer and assistant director John Lind and actress Barbara Alyn Woods, had only known the entertainment industry, but Argentinian director Noe had her first experience with world cinema – a photo shoot seared in her memory. “I was able to sit in a trailer for hours and talk to women in their mid-50s about relationship problems when I was nine years old, you know?” She says about her upbringing in the industry. “That’s what my environment was, so I didn’t really know anything else. I just knew people in all shapes and forms, and I think I found myself trying to be a chameleon and match whatever entity sought to contain me.”

She often wonders what life would have been like if she hadn’t started so young, on shows like Criminal Minds, revenge and Code Black. She’s matured a little beyond her years, Lind says. “I’ve been lucky enough to have some things that I’ve done in the last year that have really lived up to that feeling I had at the beginning, especially when you’re working with legends,” she says, having starred in about four times as many projects as her peers. “Getting your nerve back for the first time is exhilarating. You’re like, ‘Oh, that’s why I keep doing this.'”

But every now and then, Lind wishes she could rediscover this world again. “It can be conflicting, like, ‘Is this what I would have chosen?’ My first answer is, ‘Yes, every time,'” she explains, “but there’s also a part of me that says, ‘I want to explore what that is again,’ and I think a lot of people who are becoming adults are finding ways to do that.”

Her big adult success — “My big vacation! I love old Hollywood catchphrases” — came with the HBO Max revival gossip girlin which she starred as the blond-haired, sharp-tongued Audrey Hope (a reincarnation, most audiences agreed, of Leighton Meester’s Blair Waldorf’s Upper East Side queen bee). With the majority of the heavy lifting done by the original show’s cult following and shared nostalgia for an entire generation, the reboot quickly broke the record for the most-watched HBO Max original series over the weekend.

Lind says the exposure was a gradual reckoning. She uses the flu analogy: “You feel like you’re going to be sick forever, and then it’s over, and you don’t think about it anymore… I thought this was the thing that was going to happen that I was going to fully realize in this moment and it was going to change the course of my life. But it was slow and steady, and things changed, and they haven’t gone back since.”

She admits that the course of her life has been permanently changed because of this gossip girl. In fact, Lind believes the show was at the beginning of the “reboot era.” “Everything has been rebooted,” she continues, “and you don’t see anything that isn’t rebooting of some sort.” Being at the bottom of that mountain was overwhelming. “Even without the premiere, we were on billboards. Months and months ago.” But she felt as if none of the work had been done yet. “There was a fear of saying, ‘Okay, but what about proving it? Let’s put on a good show.'” “That’s where I’ve always stood,” Lind says. “So there was a weird uncertainty about: ‘We haven’t even shot. Why are you suddenly interested in me?’

Perhaps surprisingly, the weight of her popularity was not a burden for Lind. “That weight is for the people who write the thing, direct it, and mostly[who]show it. And the studios,” she says. THR. But there is a misconception among the general public that actors have “more control than they actually have.” She laughs as she recalls some of the reactions to Audrey online: “I remember getting canceled a few times because of something my character said. And I’m like, ‘Dude. Delete Twitter!'” Fortunately, even though she has a “very addictive personality,” the actress never finds herself turning to social media these days.

Lind’s comprehensive industry communications precede this gossip girl phenomenon. Veteran Venice Casey Affleck, director of competing films a companya friend from a previous movie 2021 every breath you take. His latest work is a mystery film set on a winter night in 1975, co-starring director Nick Nolte, Ben Mendelsohn, and Sidney Chandler.

Lind was not asked to test. Affleck knew he wanted her to be Evelyn, the driving force of the film’s narrative. “She arrives as someone who stepped out of a legend,” the star explains. “She walked into this house in 1975 and started telling a story, and then suddenly the whole room was hers. It’s a doorway into the movie.” It has, as she describes it, “the atmosphere of an old Russian fairy tale,” a depiction of what fear and pain turn you into; Whether you carry it forever, use it against someone else, or release it entirely. “It has a mythical, supernatural veneer. “But in the end, it’s a painful human thing,” Lind says. a company. “It treats storytelling as survival.”

Affleck’s directorial style is unlike anything I’ve ever known before. “He is very interested in accidents,” explains an impressed Lind. “He doesn’t want you to show him the scene. He wants to catch the second scene before you find out.” It’s not a mechanical process, working with an Oscar winner, but it’s a very loose process. “He has a carefree energy that not many people can shake off. (There’s) a certainty that everything will be okay.”

She has no doubt that Affleck’s strength will emerge in her (long-awaited) debut at the Venice Film Festival. “It’s surreal, because making a movie is really unglamorous — night shooting, ADR, repeating lines over 50 times,” Lind says with a smile. “Then suddenly someone says you’re going to Venice, and he’s like, ‘Fuck yeah!’ Let’s go get dressed!”

That carefree feeling—attributable to nearly two decades of experience—will carry her through the raucous premiere on the Lido. She has “zero expectations” for the Venice audience (“This was instilled at a young age. I don’t expect anything from the viewer”), but Lind expresses admiration for that, 17 years later. Enter the blankAs she launches in Cannes, this experience will continue to allow her to disperse herself: “It’s a very pivotal time in your early 20s – exploring different parts of yourself. I want to be very intentional about where I put my energy.”

Right now, Lind’s energy is divided among a group of prestigious filmmaking talent. She filmed David Mamet’s 1988 adaptation of his film Plow speed with Sharon Stone, a chapter that elicits a somewhat self-confident Lind laugh: “When you work with David Mamet, every day is the most difficult day of your life,” she laughs. “I would come home from set every day and I just wanted to write down everything I learned, which is crazy because I know everything and I think I know everything!”

She also has the second season of We were lying (Hence the months-long filming in Nova Scotia) as well as the film Tyler Marie Evans Beautiful childrenwhich has just had its world premiere in Edinburgh. Lind is also directing a film of her own, about young actors and families moving to Hollywood, with backing from Christine Vachon’s Killer Films. The self-professed film student is keen to learn everything she can about the profession, and is thrilled to have put Vachon’s door-opening abilities to work: “She’s done as much for film, if not more, than Miramax and Harvey Weinstein, but she did it better and wasn’t a weirdo.”

Adam McKay, Alexander Payne, Sean Baker, and Ali Abbasi are among some of the writers and filmmakers you’d love to work with. This high-brow list is a testament to her years in the industry. But let it be known: Emily Alyn Lind is eager to free herself from the shackles of child stardom. “This is where it gets kind of deadly, starting early,” she says. “It put me on this path to figure it out. I didn’t get it, and that’s great.”

The 2026 Venice Film Festival takes place from September 2 to 12.