Photography Thurstan Redding, styling Isabelle SayerDateInMeta
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2025Film & TVThe Winter 2025 IssueChase Infiniti: One breakthrough after anotherOscar-tipped for her turn as a teen on the run from the fascist authorities in One Battle After Another, Chase Infiniti confronts America’s shadow side once again in The Testaments, a dystopian sci-fi sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale
ShareLink copied ✔️December 3, 2025Film & TVThe Winter 2025 IssueTextSimran HansPhotographyThurstan ReddingStylingIsabelle SayerChase Infiniti – The Winter Issue 2025
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This story is taken from the winter 2025 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally from December 5. Pre-order a copy of the magazine here.
One day in early September, Chase Infiniti was sitting in her new apartment in Chicago, surrounded by boxes and quietly freaking out. The 25-year-old actor had recently returned home from Toronto, where she’d spent the summer filming The Testaments, the sequel to the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale. In Canada, “I was disconnected from everything,” she says. But Infiniti knew her life was about to change. In a couple of days, she was leaving for Los Angeles to join castmates Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio del Toro and Teyana Taylor to promote One Battle After Another, her debut feature film. “Emotionally, it felt like it wasn’t real,” she says.
When she landed in LA a few days later, everything went boom. As her black SUV pulled up outside the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, Infiniti smoothed the champagne-coloured fabric of her custom Louis Vuitton gown and took a deep breath. “I was about to get out of the car, and I told myself, ‘You have nothing to prove and everything to show. Enjoy the moment, because you’re gonna blink, and it’s gonna be over,’” she remembers. The day of the film’s world premiere was also “my first carpet, my first ever time promoting a movie, my first time ever doing an interview”, she says. The red carpet passed by in a blur, but when Infiniti stepped on to the stage to introduce the movie, time suddenly froze. “I had a moment of reality,” she says. “I remember looking to my side, like, ‘What just happened?!’”
All clothes and accessories worn throughout Louis Vuitton Cruise 2026. All fine jewellery worn
throughout Louis Vuitton.Photography Thurstan Redding, styling Isabelle Sayer
Infiniti is the breakout star of One Battle After Another, the most ambitious movie to date from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. One of the defining auteur filmmakers of his generation, Anderson has never made a film on this scale – or this budget, which was reportedly upwards of $140m. A sprawling, madcap caper featuring car chases, freedom fighters and a convent of nuns who run a weed farm, it tells the story of star-crossed revolutionaries Perfidia (Taylor) and Bob (DiCaprio), who are forced apart and into hiding by Sean Penn’s tyrannical Colonel Lockjaw. Infiniti plays the couple’s 16-year-old daughter, Willa, a karate purple belt who has grown up off-grid and without her mother. When Willa goes missing, Bob must scramble to find her before white supremacist Lockjaw does.
“Free borders, free bodies, free choice and free from fucking fear,” is the mantra of the French 75, the film’s fictional revolutionary group, who fight racism and the inhumane detainment of migrants. In One Battle After Another, Anderson forces the audience to confront America’s shadow and then dares them to laugh at it. “He really loves comedy,” says Infiniti. “You’re literally laughing at the absurdity of the circumstances for every single character.” For Infiniti, to “tell a story that’s holding up a mirror to modern-day society but have it be funny” feels like a radical act. “It feels significant because we’re in an era where new stories aren’t being told. Especially stories that are considered risky.” The riskiness is making the industry sit up: in October, Variety announced Infiniti’s campaign for the best actress Oscar.
One Battle After Another feels significant because we’re in an era where new stories aren’t being told. Especially stories that are considered risky
We meet early on a Saturday morning, at a cafe in South Kensington. I arrive a few minutes late to find Infiniti already sitting at our table; she pulls a pair of wired earphones from her ears and greets me with a huge smile and a hug. The actor is incognito today, hair freshly braided and dressed in a cream knitted jumper, baggy blue jeans and trainers. Although her face is currently splashed across London buses, she insists that “nobody ever recognises me”. I warn her that might not be the case for long. “Trust me!” she says. “When I tell you I be roaming the streets…” she gives me a conspiratorial grin as two coffees and an orange juice arrive at the table. Stirring honey into her espresso, she insists: “Nobody can pick me out, especially when my hair is different.”
One Battle After Another is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern novel Vineland, but the dynamic between its central father-daughter duo is shaped by Anderson’s own family life. In the film, DiCaprio’s Bob is the white father of a mixed-race daughter; in real life, so is Anderson. “Their relationship is nowhere near as crazy as Bob and Willa’s, but there were pieces I could pick up on through what he would tell me about his experience of being a father to a biracial daughter,” Infiniti explains. She says she could relate to being biracial “and feeling like you’re missing a part of yourself”, adding that she didn’t look like the other mixed-race kids at school in Indianapolis. “I can definitely understand feeling like you don’t fully belong in your environment.”
All clothes and accessories worn throughout Louis Vuitton Cruise 2026. All fine jewellery worn
throughout Louis Vuitton.Photography Thurstan Redding, styling Isabelle Sayer
That understanding helped her get into Willa’s head. A stoic and self-sufficient 16-year-old, the character lives in “a neighbourhood that literally has no other Black people, no one to help her with her hair, or any sense of community, or her connection to her mom.” Bob is fiercely protective and occasionally bumbling. “Bob can’t see. The only way to help her is to introduce her to somebody in her life who looks like her,” she adds.
Chase Infiniti Payne was born in Indianapolis to a Black father and a white mother. She grew up on the cusp of the white neighbourhoods and the Black neighbourhoods, just outside the city. A sporty child who spent her time playing tennis and football, as well as doing track and field, Infiniti and her younger sister would ride their bikes with their parents on weekends. It was a creative household: her dad ran a construction company but he was also a drummer. “He used to be in a jazz band, so I grew up with music constantly playing at home,” she says. “I was always singing and putting on shows for my parents.”
All clothes and accessories worn throughout Louis Vuitton Cruise 2026. All fine jewellery worn
throughout Louis Vuitton.Photography Thurstan Redding, styling Isabelle Sayer
At ten years old, Infiniti gave her first official performance, a showcase of songs from musicals she performed in a group for her school. From the first day of rehearsals, her fate was decided. “I was like, ‘I want to do this,’” she says, her face lighting up as she recounts a story of being taken to see a production of Grease as a pre-teen. Infiniti sat next to her mother and watched from the balcony in awe. “I distinctly remember Rizzo singing “There Are Worse Things I Could Do”. That’s when I got the ‘I love watching theatre’ bug,” she says with a beatific sigh. When I tell her that musical theatre isn’t something most people think of as cool, she starts laughing. “Yeah, I know,” she says.
But the last year has seen Infiniti leading a Paul Thomas Anderson film, starring in a Tyler, the Creator music video (“Darling, I”), and sitting front row at the Louis Vuitton show at Paris fashion week. I wonder where the earnest theatre nerd finds herself among all of that. “I’m very big in my expressions,” she says, although I find her more poised than goofy. “I go into projects with theatre-kid energy.” It’s a part of herself she hasn’t lost; she still listens to musical soundtracks all the time and talks about them to anyone who will listen. One day, during the filming of One Battle After Another, she bumped into DiCaprio on the street.
“We ended up grabbing ice cream and I was telling him about [the musicals of] Catch Me If You Can and The Great Gatsby, because there was a production [of Gatsby] that was about to go on Broadway.” She beams. “So, trust, it’s my first love.” In high school, she says people would roll their eyes when they learned about her passion for musicals. “I think that falling into the, as you said, ‘cool’ world I’m in now was something I didn’t think was possible,” she explains. “I’m being pushed in ways I couldn’t have been pushed on stage.”
The Handmaid’s Tale felt insane because I was like, ‘There’s no way these things could happen.’ But Margaret Atwood didn’t write anything that wasn’t happening in the world
Still, the stage has brought Infiniti to where she is today. She trained in musical theatre at Columbia College in Chicago, where she’s lived since she was 18. Studying during the pandemic meant a lot of classes shifted online, but it also taught Infiniti about working to the confines of a screen. She also learned the art of the self-tape. “I’ve actually never done an in-person audition for a TV show or a movie, and I’ve been auditioning for almost three years now,” she admits.
Her first successful audition took her to LA for Presumed Innocent, a thriller series starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga. She lived in LA for five months; it was the furthest she’d been from home for more than a week. “I didn’t know anyone. It was my first TV show, my first job ever,” she says. Learning the culture of a set was one thing; she knew she’d have to learn technical things. More nerve-racking was being on her own in the city, with no one to show her around. “I was scared about being by myself,” she says, but she left the show with two friends: the series’ key costume designer, and Ruth Negga, who played her mother.
All clothes and accessories worn throughout Louis Vuitton Cruise 2026. All fine jewellery worn
throughout Louis Vuitton.Photography Thurstan Redding, styling Isabelle Sayer
Infiniti’s next challenge will be to shed light on another aspect of America’s dark side. Where One Battle After Another satirises the country’s festering racism, The Testaments explores its deep-rooted misogyny and takes it to a brutal extreme. Based on the sequel to Margaret Atwood’s seminal dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, the story is set in the fictional totalitarian state of Gilead, where women are stripped of their most basic rights. They are forbidden to own money or property, banned from reading and writing and, if fertile, forced into pregnancy. With the hard-won constitutional right to abortion overturned in the US in 2022, today, Atwood’s dystopia feels less and less like fiction. Infiniti plays Agnes, a student and one of three narrators. “You’re getting to see what it’s like growing up in Gilead from somebody who has no opinion of the world outside,” she says.
The Handmaid’s Tale series came out in 2017, when Infiniti was still in high school. “It was not one of my shows because it was too heavy at times, for what I needed,” she recalls. “At 17 it felt like a world that was so insane to conceptualise because I was like, ‘There’s no way these things can actually happen in real life,’” she explains. “But, as I’ve learned, Margaret Atwood didn’t write anything that wasn’t happening in the world.” Many of the things in the show, she says, “feel very close” and will hit home for a lot of people. “I hope that it wakes people up.”
All clothes and accessories worn throughout Louis Vuitton Cruise 2026. All fine jewellery worn
throughout Louis Vuitton.Photography Thurstan Redding, styling Isabelle Sayer
Infiniti tells me she always wanted to be thought of as “the serious actor who doesn’t let anything stand in the way of their craft”. But since booking a slew of serious jobs, something has shifted. In her theatre training, she used to be “very specific about everything” – disciplined and precise, to a fault. “I was like, ‘I have to make sure that I’m perfect, or I’m saying everything at the correct time, creating the replication of emotion every single night.’” She realised it wasn’t possible. “That’s not creating – that’s planning, preparing and keeping everything in check.” Her perfectionist streak, she learned, could be a stumbling block. “On Presumed Innocent I was trying so hard to show up and show out every day, and I think I was harsh on myself,” she says. Now, she’s learning to be more present with her fellow actors. “Instead of showing off, I just want to make myself proud.”
A few weeks ago, when Infiniti was on stage for a Q&A in New York, the moderator asked the cast to share a victory they had felt while filming One Battle After Another. “That I’m proud of what I did,” said Infiniti, becoming emotional. “For me personally, it’s hard for me to say I’m happy with what I did.” But in the moment, she felt it. “I’ve been trying to make sure I don’t forget that feeling.”
Hair Cyndia Harvey at Art Partner using L’Oréal Professionnel, make-up Mel Arter at Julian Watson Agency using La Beauté Louis Vuitton, nails Lauren Michelle Pires using The Gel Bottle, set design Samuel Overs at New School Represents, movement direction Yagamoto at New School Represents, lighting Simon Wellington, photographic assistants Sam Hendel, Dylan Massara, styling assistants Cait Hallam, Olivia Blewitt, hair assistant Karen Bradshaw, nails assistant Megan Cumming, set design assistant Henry Hawksworth, tailoring Takudzwa Chigaduro at The Lede Company, production Thea Charlesworth at the Arcade, on-set production Claire Nichols, production assistant Cecelia Kerwin, printing Sarah England, post-production artpost, casting gk-ld.
This story is taken from the winter 2025 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally from December 5. Pre-order a copy of the magazine here.
More on these topics:Film & TVThe Winter 2025 IssueChase InfinitiPaul Thomas AndersonLeonardo DiCaprioThe Handmaid’s TaleFilmTelevisionTeyana TaylorShareLink copied ✔️
