Hunter Schafer Has Never Felt More Like Herself

Hunter Schafer is good at having a bad time. As Jules in Euphoria, she was thrust into the darkest places as addict Rue’s lifeline; as teenager Gretchen in the movie Cuckoo, she was embroiled in a full-on body-horror conspiracy nightmare; and as assistant Hilda in Mother Mary, she was caught between the drama of two complicated mega-divas. Now, in her first TV role as a lead, she’s a fugitive fighting for the survival of mankind in Blade Runner 2099 (a limited series coming to Prime Video in November). As her character Cora, a human masquerading as a replicant Blade Runner, Schafer tells me, “I smile maybe twice.” It’s an impressive performance in a tough role. “I think a lot of things that portray the future can feel sterile or clean, where everything’s perfect and fascist and robotic,” she says. “The androids in Blade Runner are kind of nuts and artistic and messy, which I think is more accurate.” I’ve previewed the first few episodes when we meet in London, and wonder whether there’s ever any respite for Cora later in the series—a nice bubble bath, perhaps? “Not a chance,” she says with a laugh.

The softness of Schafer’s preternatural beauty as an actress belies the hard-won strength of someone who began transitioning at age 14, and then three years later became the youngest plaintiff in the legal challenge to North Carolina’s anti-trans “bathroom bill.” The contrast makes her Hollywood’s perfect manic pixie trauma girl. She can carry it without it crushing her. Because whatever darkness a script demands, the sweet, funny 27-year-old I meet in London has a way of bringing a special kind of light to the part.

Over our time together, as we’re chatting on a bench in Grosvenor Square in the late summer sun, our conversation spans spirituality, art, freedom, and humanity. I feel relaxed in her easy company. She’s someone you’d bump into at a club and find you’ve lost half the night talking to. I thought she’d be intimidatingly cool, but after I clock the cute little woodland creatures on the socks she wears with her ballet pumps, I readjust the narrative in my head. And when she decides to reveal something pretty major that no one outside her immediate circle of family and friends knows yet, I feel honored to be trusted with helping tell this part of her story.

Schafer grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her parents are pastors, and she says Christianity gave her childhood a structure and purpose. She moved away from the church as a teenager and now isn’t religious, but that sense of “being in service,” as she puts it, or “making things for something bigger than yourself” has continued to be a driving force in her life. Creating art, whether through acting, modeling, or painting (she carries her watercolors with her everywhere), is less about ego and more about a higher purpose? “Exactly,” she says. “I think it’s important to do it for the—oh my God, I’m going to sound like such a pretentious asshole—for the poetry, or whatever. It sounds so annoying, but I do believe that.”

After some difficult teenage years “where I was really angry at the world and at the restrictions I felt growing up in the church and with pastor parents,” Schafer is in a good place with her family, and her younger sisters are following in her footsteps in the entertainment industry. “I can have really beautiful conversations with my parents about spirituality now,” she says. “They might be talking about it through the lens of Presbyterian Christianity, or the house they operate within spiritually, but I feel like we’re talking about the same things.”

Reflecting on her teen years now, she thinks the anger was a result of the “normal teenage thing of waking up to what the world really is versus what you thought it was.” I ask if adulthood turned out how she imagined. “In a lot of ways, I still feel like a teenager,” Schafer says. “I think there’s something about acting where people baby us all the time. On set, we’re being looked after by PAs, coddled, and given all our meals. Sometimes it can make us not great people to be around in real life. So I don’t even know if I feel like an adult.”

She says her early twenties were “kind of a shit show” for so many reasons. “I was just a disaster,” she reflects. “But I don’t feel like a disaster anymore. I think that’s come with entering my late twenties and getting all of that bullshit out.” I wonder if she’s being harsh on herself—after all, she was holding down a major role in one of the most popular TV shows of the decade from the age of 19, and, as a high-fashion model, walked for Dior, Miu Miu, Marc Jacobs, Coach, Rick Owens, Maison Margiela, Helmut Lang, Vera Wang, and others. All while navigating the world of celebrity as a young woman who is trans. It looked, from the outside at least, as if she was thriving?

She thinks for a second, then says, “I do think it’s truthful to say I was a fucking mess for the first chunk of my twenties, up until a few years ago.”

What changed? “I’m getting used to my new life now,” she explains. “It was overwhelming, and it happened really fast. There was a part of me that felt like I needed to resist it, and that was really disorienting.” Now, she says, she’s “okay with riding this very strange, sometimes terrifying, and a lot of the time really delicious wave. Being down for the ride and not trying to push back against it, or self-sabotage.”

As we talk, office workers walk past us on their lunch break, oblivious to the star sitting cross-legged beside me wearing harem pants and a strappy black Prada top. She tells me she’s in town for a friend’s wedding. I later realize the friend she refers to was likely Zendaya, who married Tom Holland at an exclusive hotel in the British countryside in August. Schafer says her Euphoria co-star is “like a sister” to her now. “She showed me the ropes,” she says, adding that she also learned a lot from Zendaya about managing celebrity and reality and “keeping those worlds separate.”

Working with powerful women has been a theme of Schafer’s acting career so far, and she’s grateful for the grace and wisdom they’ve offered her. While filming Blade Runner 2099, her co-star Michelle Yeoh became a mother figure who she says helped “usher me into the world of action.” Schafer did many of her own stunts on the show alongside Yeoh, whom she describes as “one of the best—a master.”

“The reason I like action so much is you don’t have to think that much,” Schafer says. “It’s just being in your body.” She quite literally threw herself into the role. Schafer says that actors who have done action before know how to fall, but as she’d done very little training before being offered the role without auditioning, she’d just flop her body onto the ground as best she could, until Yeoh, tired of watching her hurt herself, explained the art of “layering a fall with your body so the weight gets dispersed.”

We talk more about the freedom that comes from being fully embodied, especially as a trans person who has experienced the knotty discomfort of body dysmorphia—the feeling when your outer shell doesn’t match who you know yourself to be. It’s a theme explored symbolically through the concept of androids and replicants in Blade Runner, and was one of the reasons Schafer signed on to the show, even though she’d vowed to have some downtime to paint and make art. She plays a human pretending to be a robot to survive. But can anyone really hide their truth for long?

I ask Schafer what’s the most human thing she’s done recently, and she tells me about a night she’d had a few days prior with close friends in a nightclub. “We were dancing incredibly hard. There were no cameras out, which was great, so everybody was really letting loose,” she says. “I have little flashes in my head of looking my friends in the eyes and singing the lyrics and feeling completely free.”

Our conversation about feeling free naturally veers into our perspectives on queerness: me as a nonbinary parent in my forties, who came out as a lesbian two and a half decades ago, and Schafer as a woman in her late twenties, who was assigned male at birth. Through the very act of her existence, let alone a growing profile as an actress and model, she became a role model for the queer and trans community, which cast an identity on her from an early age, before she’d really had the chance to explore it for herself.

“I feel like that’s the magical thing about queerness,” she says, taking off her Prada sunglasses so she can look me in the eye. “On an ideological level, it’s about possibility and expansion and growth, and being on that journey and finding yourself.” While she’s had an expansive view of her gender identity for years, where she’s landed now is somewhere she describes as “flatter” in a sense: “I’m a woman. I’m a girl,” she says. To get here, she’s wrestled with queerness as an idea and philosophy “versus how it applies and works in real life, in the context of the world that we’re living in,” she adds. “I feel like there’s always a tension there.”

As we get deep, she suggests we go into a nearby hotel for a drink (and so that she can use the bathroom). It’s probably a good time to tell her about the U.K. law that went into effect earlier this week, which means people should now use the bathroom that corresponds with their birth sex. It’s a ridiculous and unenforceable attack on trans and nonbinary people and their dignity, which everyone sensible is ignoring. She’s shocked, but not surprised by the pendulum swinging backward. “That’s why these laws are so fucking stupid,” she says. “It was the same thing with HB2 in North Carolina. You can make it the law, but are you deploying a little gender policeman to stand outside the bathrooms?”

As we sit down in the glamorous tea room of the hotel, two little girls in face paint dance around as their mother and aunts eat scones with cream. When Schafer settles into the armchair beside me and takes a sip of her Diet Coke, I can feel something has shifted. A steely resolve tugs at the corners of her mouth. She nods, as though silently weighing the pros and cons of a disclosure. “Maybe it’s a good thing to share, for the tension I was talking about between those two worlds [reality and ideology],” she says. “I just had bottom surgery in December, which was amazing, and I love it so much.”

For those who don’t know, what Schafer is describing is a gender-affirming operation that changes a person’s genitals to better align with their gender identity. “Like I said, for a long time I’ve embraced the gender-expansive part of myself, and I really wanted to try to make that previous body work, because I thought there was something really cool and badass about it.” But Schafer describes hitting a wall again and again where this theoretical queer utopia didn’t match up with the world she encountered every day, and the way she personally wanted to show up in it. Medically transitioning was right for Schafer, but every trans person is different. And as a celebrity, she may be judged by both queer and cis people for her decision.

During her recovery at the start of this year, she rented a big apartment and had friends and family visit, while she was forced to lie down. “I think my limit was 150 steps per day, which is nothing,” she explains. Normally Schafer is an all-or-nothing kind of friend—she’s either planning a big adventure, like the one she’s about to go on to watch the solar eclipse in Iceland at a rave hosted by Björk, or chilling out at home. She’s happy being on her own because “there are so many thoughts to think.” She’s different in a romantic relationship: “They defy the introvert because I want to be around them, touching them, all the time. When I’m in love, that’s how I feel. I want to be with you all the time.” She’s previously dated Spanish pop star Rosalía and her Euphoria co-star Dominic Fike, but she notes, “I haven’t had a relationship that’s been longer than two years, and I’ve heard the two-year mark is when it gets more like a partnership rather than some passionate whatever-it-is. Something that feels more sacred and intentional.”

I tell Schafer that I think she would make the perfect goofy, yet adorable, lead in a rom-com, and that, frankly, I want that for her as an actress. Enough scrambling around in the dirt or digging deep into her soul—someone cast her as a big-city girl boss who inherits a chocolate shop in a small town and meets the man of her dreams at Christmas already! “I would just love to see a trans girl rom-com, too,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about that for a while. I would like to make that happen.”

Does she think of herself as cool? Of course not. What genuinely cool person does? “Celebrity is not cool,” she explains. So who is? “Fran Lebowitz, Björk, Patti Smith,” she says. “People who are not thinking about perception at all. And I think about perception all the time. It’s a big part of my job. It’s not cool at all.”

As our conversation winds to a close, Schafer remembers being a young kid at a friend’s birthday party. She was invited to join in with a choreographed dance, but was so cripplingly aware of how she was being viewed, it wasn’t fun. “I was so shy and so scared to dance in front of other kids, I was crying. I was so nervous and scared,” she says. “I still did it, trying to smile, but I kept being like, ‘No.’ I think that’s what I was at my core before this job broke me open.”

She says she was “just a baby” when she first got the role in Euphoria that changed her life. “I was a different person in a lot of ways. I was really introverted and not set on performing in front of people at all. There was this shell that was there that’s not with me anymore.” I like this image of Schafer, like Botticelli’s Venus emerging from her shell, newly born but fully grown, finally in a body that feels like hers and ready to slay.

Lead image: Sweater, skirt, Marc Jacobs. Shoes, Jeremyn Lee Archive.

Hair by Pablo Kümin; makeup by Raoul Alejandre at MMXX Artists; manicure by Honey for Dior Vernis; set design by Edith Di Monda; executive produced by Siyan Chen; produced by Felix Cadieu at Neighbors.

This story appears in the November 2026 issue of ELLE.

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