Hunter Schafer is vibrating on a higher frequency. Booked and busy ever since Euphoria wrapped its sophomore season, her latest project is Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, a horror film. Also featuring Dan Stevens, Jessica Henwick, and Martin Csokas, it follows a teenager named Gretchen (Schafer) who relocates with her dad to a remote resort town in Germany. Working as a store clerk there, she slowly untangles a legacy of family secrets and terrifying visions.
It’s Singer’s second feature, and one that’s come with a bigger platform, thanks to both Neon—its canny production company—and the film’s 25-year-old star.
So, is Schafer a horror fan? “I’ve definitely gone through big phases. I feel like [horror] fed my angst in everything that I was stewing in as a teenager,” she tells me over Zoom. (Pressed for a favorite example, she identifies Andrés Muschietti’s supernatural Mama, from 2013.) Of Cuckoo, she adds: “I wasn’t really looking for a horror movie in particular. I was just looking for a movie. It came into my life after Euphoria season one, and I was starting to think about doing a project other than Euphoria. I really liked the world that Tilman had written, and then I saw his movie Luz, which is just brilliant.”
The two got to know each other over the phone for almost two years before they started filming. “He has this child-like excitement still. Maybe it’s because he’s still a younger, newer filmmaker and isn’t quite jaded yet,” Schafer says. “I was also coming at it with the same wonder because it was my first movie, so we had this really special, big moment together.”
There’s something buoyant in Schafer’s voice as she speaks. The North Carolina native is sweet and curious, thoughtful and measured. The same qualities come through in her work: Stills from a Euphoria montage featuring Schafer and Zendaya as partners across space and time went viral back in 2022. “I love that montage so much,” she says now, laughing. “[Parodying] Brokeback Mountain in particular was so fun because we’re both in drag as cowboys doing stupid Southern accents and being aggressively horny for one another. It felt really playful.”
In some ways, Schafer is still finding her footing as an actress. “I have to keep checking in with myself and making sure I’m doing it for the right reasons and for the love of making stuff,” she says. (Long before booking Euphoria, she’d hoped to pursue a career in the visual arts.) She’s split her last few years across a coterie of projects: voicing an anime character in 2021’s Belle and shooting a string of feature films: Cuckoo, last year’s massively successful Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and Kinds of Kindness, in which she makes a brief appearance as a medium.
If there is any through line in the characters she’s gravitated toward so far, it’s that they have “human-animal stuff happening,” as she puts it: Cuckoo is her bird movie, and Songbirds and Snakes was her tiger movie (she played Tigris Snow, the gentle, housebound cousin of Tom Blyth’s Coriolanus). Now, however, she’s reading Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for her upcoming role in a new Blade Runner TV show helmed by Ridley Scott, and she recently finished shooting Mother Mary, about a musician and a fashion designer played by Anne Hathaway and Micaela Coel, respectively.
There are still plenty of directors she dreams of working with. Panos Cosmatos is one, and she loves Ponyo, by the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. Would she ever want to voice one of his movies? “Are you kidding?” she gushes. “I would die. I feel like he said the past two movies [would be] the last movie [he made], but then he can’t stop. So I’m hoping that keeps happening.” But Luca Guadagnino is at the top of her wishlist. “I love the way he does queer storytelling,” she says. “I have lots of dreams of movies about trans women, and I feel like he could do that really beautifully.”
I ask how she balances not wanting to be known only as a trans starlet—something she discussed in a GQ profile published in April—with the responsibilities of representation that have been thrust upon her. “All the time I’m kind of doing the math of when to reel it in and when to lean into it. It’s really tricky,” she says. “I know the position I’m in. There’s not a lot of us that have infiltrated [Hollywood] yet. There’s a sense of responsibility there, but at the same time, I feel like I need to keep infiltrating to the point where I feel safe enough in this world to do whatever I want, and then kind of lean into it whenever I want.” It’s challenging, she adds, “when you feel like you’re not there yet.”
Schafer as Jules in Euphoria
Photo: Eddy Chen/HBO
Schafer has also been working on channeling her own creative vision. “I feel this constant desire to put more energy into stuff behind the camera,” she tells me. “Fuck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob,” the 2021 Euphoria episode that she cowrote with creator, Sam Levinson, is a strange lullaby about trans-ness, hormones, and male validation. During a therapy session, her character Jules delivers stunning monologues on dating, going on blockers, and her ambivalence about passing, and runs around in the ocean full of complicated feelings. She’s gifted a vivid interiority rarely allowed to trans women, and certainly trans children, in our current political climate.
The following year, Schafer would direct a music video for the Norwegian singer-songwriter Girl in Red, and she has recently taken an interest in the canonical trans girl activity: DJing. “A lot of my friends are in the DJ world,” Schafer says. “It’s something I play with on my own time. I do have a dream of DJing one of my wrap parties. I have to get good enough first.” Her favorite DJ at the moment is the New York–based hard techno musician Kilbourne. “I saw her live for the first time at this festival in Greece last year, and her set rocked my fucking world,” Schafer says. Lately, she’s been messaging with Kilbourne about learning to use the popular music software Ableton.
Trans women are well-represented in techno, from Juliana Huxtable, SOPHIE, and Goth Jafar to Sage Introspekt, Bored Lord, and Gag Reflex. Open SoundCloud or tune in to NTS radio, and you can hear them toying with house, industrial, and hardcore. Schafer’s own interest in the genre, however, took her by surprise.
“After experiencing techno in Germany—because I’ve filmed, like, three movies there now—I fell in love with it on this much deeper level than I had anticipated,” she says. “At some point it stops becoming about the music, and it’s about the way you’re participating. It’s less social. I’ll have moments dancing to techno where I’m working through shit in my head on the dance floor, and there’s something magical about that.” She adds, “I’m also constantly fascinated by intersections of softness and femininity, hardness and sharpness, and the way they mesh. Techno is an exciting space for that.” Wherever she goes, fans are certainly along for the ride. Schafer’s horizon is undoubtedly bright, full of oceanic feelings and new frequencies just waiting to be tapped.
Cuckoo is in theaters from August 9.
