One Nightstand With Haley Lu Richardson

Celebrating your 30th birthday while you’re on a work trip? Not ideal, unless Emilia Clark happens to be around. “I actually had a really great day,” says actor Haley Lu Richardson, whose debut poetry collection, I’m Sad and Horny, is out now. “I’ve had some set birthdays that were pretty sad but this time, honestly, it was mainly to do with Emilia Clark who I was working with. She is the most generous, joyful, earnest, loving peanut. She’s so giving, and she really made my birthday special.” Richardson and Clarke were filming Peacock’s new spy thriller Ponies together, and Clarke got the whole crew involved, too. “There were balloons filling my whole trailer, I’ve never had a surprise like that before,” she says. “And I had a party at night and got hammered. It was great.”

Richardson’s breakthrough came via teen TV work (she earned her stripes in ABC Family Pretty Little Liar’s spin-off, Ravenswood) before she became an indie darling (her performance in Columbus, opposite John Cho, netted her a Gotham award Best Actress nomination). She later brought down the house as Portia in Season 2 of The White Lotus, opposite Leo Woodall and Jennifer Coolidge, and since then, she’s entered a new decade, experienced confounding heartbreak, and penned a moving poetry collection to mark it all.

“The second I turned 29, I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s almost over,’” she continues. “The last few years of my life have been really letting go of a lot and I feel like in a big transition, and I was ready to have that mark happen.” She began writing the collection while on location in South Africa. “I was really in my feels and writing three poems a day and I would be in the cast tent outside in the rain on a night shoot, just writing,” she says. “And I’d start crying, and one of the other actors would be like, ‘You OK?’ And I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I had a feeling.’”

The collection features one poem she wrote as a teenager about heartbreak; “I'm 14 now. I'm going for men” she concludes at the poem’s end. “It was amazing to find my old poetry and also hilarious and kind of pitiful,” she says. “Like I’m writing about the exact same stuff now with a slightly wiser perspective and voice, but it’s the exact same sh*t I’m writing about these days. So that was a funny realization.” Also a revelation? Sending it to her parents.

“I had some fear, I guess, about putting [out] something so vulnerable,” she says. “But a lot of that was dissolved when I sent them to my parents.” Her father responded by sending her an email. “My dad was a graphic designer, so I think that all he really could focus on in the book truly was the design and formatting,” she says. “He sent me an email with all of his notes on what the font should be and different things about spacing of ellipses and ligatures and all these formatting technical things. And then at the very end of the email, he was like, ‘P.S., I read the poems. I liked them some more than others. Some were hard for a daddy to read, but I read them.’ It’s such a beautiful thing when someone supports you without understanding fully. That’s a really beautiful concept.”

Keep reading to discover Richardson’s favorite books.

Her first choice is a poetry collection: The Orange by Wendy Cope. “I’m not a poetry connoisseur,” says Richardson. “But I was introduced to Wendy a few years ago by her poem The Orange.” In particular, she was blown away by not just “the simplicity of it, but how freaking meaningful it felt. By the end I was like, ‘Wow, I love you.’ I’m glad I exist. That’s the final line in this poem, and it’s just so simple, but it really hit me deep.

“That’s what her poetry’s like,” she continues. “It’s very sweet but it’s so much more than that. Sometimes they can be really feisty, sometimes they can be super powerful. Sometimes they can be a little sassy. A lot of her poems are like mic-drop moments.”

Her second book is Notes on Shapeshifting by Gabi Abrão. “I had a friend give it to me a few years ago when it came out,” she says. “It’s a very specific type of book poetry, but it’s also thoughts and posts and essays — late night trying to fall asleep [type of] thoughts. It really felt like it was my own brain articulating things for the first time. I’ve never had an experience with a book like that before or after then.”

Abrão makes an interesting observation about the vessel holding the observer and the performer, which prompted reflection for Richardson. “I’ve been thinking so much lately about the metaphor of a sad clown, which I think is really in line with that,” she says. “It’s like we all have these masks that we use to function in life and get through awkward situations or situations where we don’t feel safe. And as an actor, I’m constantly showing up to things where I don’t know anyone. I’m in a new country but I have to cry the first day about my husband dying in front of 150 men I’ve never met. And that’s weird. So it’s like, I guess it’s like a relationship you make, I think with the performer or the mask that we wear or the things we do to get through or to protect ourselves. It’s important that they’re there — sometimes we need to be protected. But it’s also: relying on it and having that exist completely and not being conscious of it and not having a relationship with it is, I think, where we get lost.”

Her third selection is a modern classic: Three Women by Lisa Taddeo. “This book was a life-changing experience for me in a similar way Notes on Shapeshifting was,” she says. “I’d never read something that was so just fully raw and honest about women’s sexual yearning and shame. I felt really seen and I felt like it lifted a lot of my shame. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m not the only one who has these [thoughts].’ I mean, at least for me, they kind of play off each other in a way that I’ve always thought, ’Am I f*cked up?’ And I guess we all are. I just thought how blatantly open it was about that was world-changing.”

She continues: “It made me be honest with myself for maybe the first time as deeply as these women were honest with Lisa. And that’s another thing — I’ve actually never met Lisa in person but I met her over Zoom, I don’t know, probably seven or eight years ago now, which is why I wanted to read this book. I had a four-hour Zoom with her, and it was about another project that she was maybe going to make, and I was like, ‘This woman is my person.’”

A former boyfriend recommended her final collection of books: The Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. “I love smut,” she says. “I really love it. But Brandon’s books are — I’ve read maybe 10 or 15 of his books, I’ve read a lot; I’ve read tens of thousands of pages of Brandon Sanderson books, because all of [them] are over 1,000 pages — but they’re like PG 13. There’s some romance, but I sometimes feel with smut, the sex is the shining light of the story. So it can almost be used as a crutch. And then if you really read the book without any of the sex, you’re like, ‘How deep are these emotions? How big is this world building? How meaningful is this writing?’ And with him, because he doesn’t do any of that, it’s just so focused on the world, building the character, building the emotional connections, the symbolism.”

She continues: “Brandon is, I think, a poet. I think this type of fantasy writing, because it’s so symbolic and metaphorical and deep, I think there’s elements of poetry in there.

“But yeah, it’s really f*cking good.”

Watch the full interview below.