Hailee Steinfeld Locks In

If Hailee Steinfeld were a water animal, she would be a dolphin. On a recent afternoon in Tribeca, Steinfeld and I are sitting on the rooftop of Fouquet’s, the boutique French hotel, as I’m subjecting her to a rapid-fire version of my favorite dinner party game, called Essence. The idea is to discover the true “essence” of a person through a series of questions.

Steinfeld is obliging, possibly even excited to play along, though it’s also possible she’s just being polite. If, for example, she were a neighborhood in New York City, which one would she be? “Dumbo,” she answers without a beat. She had an apartment in the Brooklyn neighborhood for two years, she explains. “It felt so family-oriented. At the time, I was living there on my own, missing my family, and it felt like I could go for a walk and see kids on their bikes and skateboards and people walking their dogs.”

These days, Steinfeld, who is 28, has a small family of her own, having just married Josh Allen, the handsome quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, this May. They live close to where the team practices and plays, in Buffalo, but she still spends a decent amount of time in New York City and Los Angeles for work.

In April, her latest film, Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler, premiered, and now Steinfeld, Coogler, and the cast are entering the months-long award season campaign. Set in 1932, Sinners follows twin brothers, Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who have returned to their hometown in Mississippi to open a juke joint in an old sawmill. When a band of vampires comes along, the night veers into an irreversible — and supernatural — course. Like Coogler’s other films (Black Panther, Creed), it is a masterful piece of cinema that blends genres and racial and societal commentary about America with an understated brilliance. (Unlike Coogler’s previous blockbusters, Sinners is original IP, derived wholly and directly from his brain.)

“I felt so lost and so creatively stunted. I needed something, a form of connection. What do I do?”

Steinfeld plays a white-passing Black woman named Mary (Steinfeld is of Filipino and Black descent), and a former flame of Stack. She is incredible to behold on screen, at once furious at Stack for having broken her heart but still full of sensuality and feeling. Stack still loves her, but reveals that he left her because he believed Mary would have a safer, more comfortable life passing as white.

“I can’t imagine anyone else playing the role. She brought her whole self, respect, and self-exploration,” Wunmi Mosaku, who plays Annie, a spiritual herbalist, and the love interest of the other Moore brother, tells me. “Hailee is a very instinctive and honest actor. She’s diligent in preparation and discovery and interrogation. I just believe her every breath, and she makes it so easy to just listen and respond.”

In Mary, Steinfeld has found her most mature and critically praised role yet, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s because she has finally found true, grounding love in real life — a fact of life that can anchor an artist in unimaginable ways. “Oh my God, absolutely,” she says. “That inner peace that you have, that rock, that solid, consistent part of your life is indescribable. I literally thank God every day that I found my person, and it’s the greatest thing in the world. Life makes sense. Everything makes sense. I feel like I am stepping into the version that I’ve always dreamed of being, having so much to do with being with him.” When I ask her if she’s thinking about kids, she replies without hesitation: “Of course.”

Her next project is a feature film with Miles Teller, Winter Games, directed by Paul Downs Colaizzo (Brittany Runs a Marathon). If Sinners is any indication, she’s ready to finally own her leading-lady status. “This role wouldn’t have existed in my life at any other time,” she says of Coogler’s Mary. “It made sense in that this is where I’m at in my life. I’m stepping into my own as a woman, understanding who I am in every sense of the word. I’m such a firm believer in the idea that everything happens for a reason. Timing is everything. Where I’m at professionally, mentally, emotionally — if this part had come into my life any sooner, I wouldn’t have been able to take it on.”

Official details related to Steinfeld’s wedding to Allen were kept largely under wraps (though it was inevitable some photos leaked out to the press) until she revealed everything in her newsletter, Beau Society. (The name is a reference to an early family nickname.) Held on a verdant estate in Santa Barbara, California, and surrounded by their family and close friends, the multi-day long affair featured Steinfeld in a strapless wedding dress by Tamara Ralph, an aisle and altar bedecked with hundreds of white roses, and several magnificent outfit changes by Steinfeld. Oh, and an after-party, of course, featuring her very own line of canned Angel Margarita cocktails. She and her mother flew to Paris for the dress fitting right after the premiere of Sinners, with only six weeks to spare for the wedding. When she tried it on, she wrote that she “actually lost my breath. I’ve never felt more like myself and more beautiful.”

“I love that every time I step on a set for the first time or first few days, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing.”

The newsletter, which is published most Fridays, is an intimate glimpse into Steinfeld’s life, told with sincerity, and in her voice — which to its 87,000 subscribers makes Beau Society a refreshing form of literature in a sea of media from celebrities who are eager to build personal brands but still often keep their personal life (and thoughts) private. Steinfeld’s best friend, Greer Gustavson, is a close collaborator. “Honestly, I feel like we were trying to figure out how we could create something that emulated us sitting on the phone talking about everything under the sun,” Gustavson tells me. In October, Beau Society made the move to Substack, something Steinfeld’s very excited about. It has become a true outlet for her, she tells me, a way to explain not only who she is and what drives her, but also how she views the world. “My creative drive is through my newsletter,” she says.

Steinfeld started Beau Society during the SAG strike in 2023, when she couldn’t act and found herself sitting around at home. “I felt so lost and so creatively stunted,” she recalls. “I needed something, a form of connection. What do I do?” Her first post, published in August of last year, promised to “unpack topics far beyond what I can muster in an Instagram caption.” There are frequent recipe recommendations; beauty tips she’s learned from the professional makeup artists she works with, like Patrick Ta; and exchanges with people close to her, like her father, who is a personal trainer. (Important Steinfeld lore: She used to do 3,000 crunches a day.) The overall effect feels like sitting on Steinfeld’s bedroom floor, chatting with her as you both make collages out of old glossy magazines.

“It has been this really great connective way to reach people. We get to talk about everything from the layers that exist in Sinners to this avocado hummus,” she says, pointing to the appetizer I had just ordered. Steinfeld also says the newsletter helps define the rhythms of her weeks when she isn’t working. “I wake up on a Monday, which is my brainstorming day. Tuesday, I’m writing it. Wednesday, sending it off to my designer. And then Thursday, we’re doing revisions, and then we send it off.”

“I literally thank God every day that I found my person, and it’s the greatest thing in the world. Life makes sense. Everything makes sense.”

Most striking, though, is the way that Steinfeld brings readers into her world, something she has never been especially forthcoming with in traditional interviews and press. In one Q&A with Allen from December of last year, where she announces they are engaged, he reveals that Steinfeld almost blew the surprise: “The funniest thing was that we woke up and were getting ready for brunch and you jumped on the bed and said, ‘Can we get married already?!? What are you waiting for??!’ I replied, ‘Just give me a little more time.’ Little did you know I was about to propose to you.”

Of that intimacy, Gustavson says: “I think Beau Society allows Hailee to talk about topics that she genuinely finds interesting and are true to her life, which has in turn created a safe space for her to share more of her personal life than she ever has before. It is essentially a direct line to everything Hailee.”

It’s been over a decade since Steinfeld first lit up awards season for playing 14-year-old Mattie Ross in Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit (2010), based on a Charles Portis novel from 1968. Mattie is on a quest for vengeance, chasing the roguish outlaw (played by Josh Brolin) who killed her father. The role earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress at 14, making her one of the category’s youngest nominees in history, and her youth was a novelty of the festivities. At the Vanity Fair Oscar party, she changed out of her heels into red Converse (“My feet were killing me,” Steinfeld recalls in another delightful newsletter entry).

The Coen brothers have said she beat out some 15,000 young women who auditioned — an especially astonishing fact when one considers Steinfeld first heard of the part toward the very end of their search. Steinfeld knew she wanted to act when she was 8, after seeing her cousin in a commercial at home on the family television. “I wanted to be on that TV that was in my parents’ family room,” she tells me. “I didn’t have any concept of fame or wanting to be famous. It’s funny now, I’m sure that TV wasn’t very big, but it felt enormous to me.”

Her mother made Steinfeld take acting classes for a year before letting her audition. This was partly because Steinfeld was still a child, and her concept of what she wanted to do was constantly changing. “The previous week I had told her I wanted to play basketball and the week prior it was horseback riding,” Steinfeld recalled on Beau Society. But this was also partly because Steinfeld’s mother understood that finding success in Hollywood takes true determination and stamina. Rejection is common, never-ending. If her daughter really wanted to do this, she had to commit. By the time she got to sixth grade, Steinfeld was in, switching to homeschooling after her principal refused to sign her work permit. Steinfeld remembers that she practically “lived in the car going to auditions” with her mother.

“This role wouldn’t have existed in my life at any other time. I’m stepping into my own as a woman, understanding who I am in every sense of the word.”

Steinfeld’s been showing her range ever since. She starred in the Pitch Perfect series(and made credible pop stardom a casual side hustle), led the modern coming-of-age classic The Edge of Seventeen, then dipped into the testosterone-filled world of Transformers with 2018’s Bumblebee. She entered the Marvel multiverse not once but twice — as the titular hero of Disney+’s Hawkeye and as the voice for Gwen Stacy in the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse franchise — and embodied a young, romantic Emily Dickinson in Apple TV+’s Dickinson, full of youthful recklessness and artistic genius. (It was also her first credit as an executive producer.) She admits that she has felt burnout. That it can be difficult when, as an actor, you don’t get what you want. But each project, she feels, offers a building block for growth.

“Within all these things that I do now,” she says, “there are moments that I might not even realize it’s what I needed until it’s over, that I got it out of my system. If it weren’t for that movie or that role or that particular scene, who knows if I would have ever accessed it.”

I ask Steinfeld what advice she might have given to her 13-year-old self, the young teen who was on the brink of stardom. “Geez, I feel like I could get some advice from that little firecracker,” she says. “I would say you have no idea what the heck is about to happen, but hold on. And this feels like such a cliché, but just be unapologetically yourself. It’s far easier said than done, and a 13-year-old wouldn’t even understand how to do that. Just love who you are, love what you do. Do it because you love it, not for any other reason.”

For all she’s accomplished, Steinfeld admits she still feels like that 13-year-old sometimes. “I love that every time I step on a set for the first time or first few days, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing,” she says. “It feels new and scary. There are days where I’m rolling around in mud or I’m covered in fake blood and dirt and I have fangs in my mouth. And that’s work. I wake up at some ungodly hour and realize that I have simply not slept enough. But the minute I get there, my adrenaline kicks in, the magic takes over, and you’re in it. And it’s amazing.”

After the microphone is off, Steinfeld looks up. The sky is bright blue, pretty clouds dot the Manhattan skyline. The hotel terrace is lined with trees, gracefully pruned and coiled, the work of a skilled arborist. Long green pods dangle from the tree branches, and Steinfeld wonders what kind of species it is. She stands and grabs a pod, which we cut open with a dining knife. It’s a kind of almond tree, according to an app. Steinfeld is allergic, but she is gracious and calm, quickly cleaning her hands with some hand sanitizer she keeps in her Dior tote. She laughs it off. “All good,” she says. That’s Hailee, I realize. It’s usually all good.

Top image credit: Gucci bodysuit, Bvlgari jewelry