In Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, everything is supersized. It’s his most expensive film to date, to the tune of some $130 million. There are set pieces of a scale previously unheard of for the director — explosions, car chases, bank robberies — as well as his most bankable star yet in Leonardo DiCaprio. Anderson and his A-list cast (which includes Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor) have been on a lavish international press tour, and at the time of this writing, the film is the highest-rated movie of the year on MetaCritic. It’s poised to be an Oscar frontrunner, maybe even the auteur’s best shot at best picture after decades of nominations that failed to translate into a statuette.
Perhaps its most audacious gamble, though, is that for all of the project’s ambitions — to translate auteur pedigree to box office numbers, to continue Warner Bros. hot streak — much of its potential rests on the shoulders of an unknown actress: Chase Infiniti, a 25-year-old from Chicago, making her film debut.
If you don’t know Chase Infiniti by name yet, you’ve certainly seen her. In the film’s first trailer, released this spring, she stands in a field firing off an assault rifle while clad in a frilly ballet skirt and combat boots. In later iterations, she’s shown kicking those boots through the glass partition of a cop car. If you’re on Instagram or TikTok, you’ve watched Infiniti lead the film’s social media campaign, directing DiCaprio, Del Toro and Anderson through their viral video paces (in one, she forces two of them out of frame so that she can pose) or holding her own in a dance sequence with Taylor. She’s been anointed by Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière, too — he dressed Infiniti for the film’s world premieres, adding her to a roster of muses that includes stars like Emma Stone and Blackpink’s Lisa.
It’s a lot of pressure, but Infiniti doesn’t feel any of it. “Obviously, I want a lot of people to watch this movie, but mostly I just want people to connect with it,” she says. “I hope it touches people, that it gets them to laugh. More than anything, that’s what will make this feel like a success.” Part of her ease probably comes from the fact that, while the fate of One Battle remains to be seen, she has a chance to seize this moment in a huge way, and she’s not going to waste the opportunity. Her next role is a starring slot in the ensemble of The Testaments, Bruce Miller’s follow-up to Handmaid’s Tale (it’s a loose adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s sequel), and she’s waiting to get past One Battle’s press tour and potential awards campaigns before she decides anything else.
“She has this long-term vision for herself as an artist, and she knows that about herself,” says Ruth Negga, who played Infiniti’s onscreen mom in Presumed Innocent, her first — and only, so far — TV role. “She’s instinctual.”
It’s Labor Day weekend, exactly one month out from the movie’s release, and the actress has flown to Los Angeles for a single day. A few hours after she wraps this interview, she’ll head back to Chicago to unpack her new apartment before embarking on the aforementioned worldwide press tour. She arrives to breakfast in a Cubs jersey, happy to rep her home base in a city full of myopic industry folks who believe that this is the center of the universe. “I don’t really want to,” she laughs in response to my — very myopic! — inquiry about when she’ll be moving out west. “I love Chicago.”
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She was born Chase Infiniti Payne, after Nicole Kidman’s Batman Forever character Chase Meridian and Buzz Lightyear’s Toy Story catchphrase (“To infinity … and beyond!”). Her parents raised her — and a younger sister, Dolce Imani — in Indianapolis, where they own a construction company. They never had any intention of putting her through the Hollywood paces, but they did hope the name would push her toward general greatness. As a child, Infiniti showed an interest in and an aptitude for performing. “I always loved going to see musicals, my sister and I would constantly put on little shows, and I went through a phase where I watched Hairspray every day after school for six months straight,” she says. Noticing this, her mother encouraged her to audition for a local musical theater revue when she was 10. “I went into it being like, ‘Fine, sure, whatever,’ and then afterwards I was like: ‘I want to do this for the rest of my life.’”
At the time, she thought that meant a career as a workaday actor of some kind; she had no sense of the possibility of a career onscreen, but she felt in her bones that she was a performer. She booked her first role in a local production of Hairspray (fated!) and promptly adopted her stage name. “I dropped my last name when I was 10,” she says. “My parents were like, ‘We gave you a star name, so now you’ve got to use the star name.’ You can look back to any Playbill. I was Chase Infiniti.”
She went to Columbia College in Chicago and majored in musical theater. Her time at the private arts college coincided with several stages of the pandemic, forcing her to take acting classes on Zoom and then in masked, socially distanced rooms — which, fortuitously, prepared her for the cold remove of the modern-day self-tape and Zoom-callback audition process. She graduated in 2022, and planned on moving to New York to grind through theater auditions. But she was signed by a manager who put her up for film and television instead. “I remember my parents saying, ‘This is a different path than you’d always talked about, is this something you’re cool with?’” she says. She thought if she was lucky she’d book a one-liner role in a stray film or series, to earn extra cash outside of a theater career. But then, very quickly, she found herself auditioning for Presumed Innocent.
In a way, it all started with Jake Gyllenhaal. In early 2023, she sent in a self-tape to play Jaden, the daughter of a prosecutor accused of murdering his mistress in Apple TV+’s remake of the legal thriller. Infiniti was invited to do a callback, which became a virtual chemistry read with Gyllenhaal, who would be leading the limited series alongside Ruth Negga. “He was the first celebrity I ever met in my life,” she says. “And a Zoom is so intimate! It’s such a small veil between the two screens, like, ‘Oh my God, I’m sorry for being in your personal space.’”
She got the role, and moved to Los Angeles for the shoot. At 23, it was her first time living in L.A., her first time living alone and her first time on set. “She brought this excitement about being there that felt amazing,” says Negga. “But she was also really instinctual. And she was there all the time, even when she didn’t need to be.” Infiniti says her high attendance was a suggestion from Anne Sewitsky, who directed the first two episodes: “I had a lot of free time, and I wasn’t comfortable being by myself yet, so Anne told me I should come in and observe on my days off.” The first time she showed up, she watched a scene in which Gyllenhaal, Bill Camp, Peter Sarsgaard and O-T Fagbenle acted together. “I decided to do that every day and absorb everything I could, and at the end of the shoot, I felt so much more confident,” she says. “By the time I came back to L.A. for Paul’s movie, I was thriving on my own in L.A. I was going around town, eating at restaurants by myself. And I liked it.”
Infiniti sent in her first self-tape for One Battle After Another in March of 2023, while in production for Presumed. She wasn’t very familiar with Anderson’s body of work, but she felt like she understood the character of Willa, the daughter of two now-dormant leftist revolutionaries (played by DiCaprio and Taylor) who finds herself hunted by their group’s former adversary. When we meet Willa in the film, she and DiCaprio’s Bob are hiding out in rural Colorado; he is a paranoid hippie, she is a rebellious high schooler. “I’m genuinely scared of teenagers at this point in my life, but I thought a lot about how teenaged me would act in that scenario. Willa really is like, ‘I have the whole world figured out,’ so I tried to hold on to that confidence and the feeling that you think you know everything.”
She didn’t hear anything for a month after submitting a tape — the video of which she keeps saved on her phone, along with her first tape for Presumed Innocent — and then she was asked to fly back to L.A. for a camera test and audition right before the writers strike. She brushed up on Anderson’s filmography (she chose to start with Phantom Thread, Licorice Pizza and Boogie Nights) and waited. “I was on a flight home to Chicago from New York when the strikes ended,” she says. “When I landed and saw the news alert, I thought, ‘I wonder if I’m going to hear from Paul anytime soon,’ but I didn’t want to get my hopes up.”
The next day, Anderson called and asked her to come back for another round. This time, he wanted to observe her during fight training; since the role of Willa is so physical (in addition to what’s seen in the trailer, she has tussles with Sean Penn), he wanted to see her literally in action. “I went to a karate class and he watched the whole thing,” says Infiniti. “It was me and 20 other students, and I was the only white belt. Everyone else was brown and purple. I was trying my best not to make a fool of myself.”
Anderson hired her on the spot after the karate class, and Infiniti began months of intensive prep, flying back and forth to L.A. for everything from mixed martial arts training to costume fittings (she wears the same outfit in every single scene of the film). Even for an industry veteran like Regina Hall, who plays a revolutionary tasked with overseeing Willa’s protection, the concept of shooting Paul Thomas Anderson’s largest, most expensive endeavor yet was daunting. “I couldn’t grasp the scope of it, I didn’t understand how it was going to be shot,” Hall says. “Everything he does feels like something you’ve never seen before, and working on this movie meant learning how to give a director a lot of trust.”
Infiniti followed Hall’s lead, giving over to Anderson’s direction and also coming in on as many of her days off as she was allowed to watch the master at work. “People like to call me a sponge,” she says with a laugh. In the end, she felt amazed at her own ability to learn to film fight scenes, shoot a (prop) automatic rifle and drive a car during a chase scene — while her hands are in handcuffs. “Watching her felt like peeling back the onion of a new generation of talent,” adds Hall. “It was so rich to witness, and to respect who someone is as a person in addition to an artist, that’s when you’ve hit the lottery.”
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Infiniti was deep into production on One Battle when Presumed Innocent premiered, so she was shielded from the bulk of the attention and intrigue that came her way. She wasn’t even able to attend the premiere because of her shooting schedule. At the time of her Hollywood Reporter interview, she’d had very little experience engaging with anyone who has seen her work. She taped her first EPK earlier this summer — a junket-like experience in which the studio conducts promotional interviews and featurettes — and says she was terrified for days ahead of time. “I still don’t know a ton of people in this business, so I don’t entirely know what to expect,” she says. “When I heard about what we were going to be doing to promote One Battle, the first person I went to was Ruth Negga. I literally was like, ‘What’s a press tour?’” (Negga says she told her: “Take lots of vitamin C, surround yourself with great people and you’ll have a ball.”)
While the fandom of film bros — and bro-ettes — is sure to come in the wake of One Battle’s release, Infiniti’s profile within the industry is starting to rise, too. When the first trailer dropped online, she started to hear from other directors, and when Tyler, the Creator saw it play in a movie theater, he immediately cast her in the music video for “Darling, I.” Shortly before this interview, she wrapped filming on the first season of The Testaments (it’s expected to premiere in 2026), and is awaiting news on a renewal for season two. Showrunner Bruce Miller spent a long time casting for the role of Agnes, an iteration of the Handmaid’s character Hannah (daughter of Elisabeth Moss and Fagbenle). “I watched her on Presumed Innocent, and then I saw her read for the part, and then I watched videos of her performing K-pop dances, and then I met her,” he says. “And the fact that she can embody all these different sides of herself totally blew me away.”
Though some of the casting department knew that Infiniti had landed the role in Anderson’s then-untitled action film, Miller did not — and says that in any case, it was far too early in the film’s life for that to have influenced their hiring decision. “It reminded me of having Sydney Sweeney on Handmaid’s when she was very young,” he says. “She was spectacular, and you don’t actually feel like you’ve discovered someone, you just feel like you got a peek at their talent ahead of everybody else. When I met Chase, I just knew she was going to explode at some point.”
When Infiniti was auditioning for The Testaments, she still felt lucky to even have the chance to read for a role that felt stimulating and exciting — she couldn’t fathom the fact that in a year’s time, she’d be talking about how to manage a burgeoning movie star career around a long series production. “I know it seems like I’ve gotten everything I wanted, but I really have been rejected a lot, too,” she says, laughing. “I’d say that 95 percent of the things I’ve auditioned for, I have not gotten — it’s just that I’ve gotten very lucky when it comes to what I have booked.” In the meantime, though, she’s just happy for people to get to know her. “As I get more exposure, I keep finding that nobody believes Chase Infiniti is my real name,” she says with a laugh. “But guys, it’s on my birth certificate. That’s really me.”