Say what you will about Euphoria and the controversial way Sam Levinson runs that series – but you cannot deny that his show gave rise to a cohort of actors who are and will continue to be the class of their generation, and I’m not even including Zendaya in this because she was already on the rise before it aired.
Sydney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi, Hunter Schafer, and of course Angus Cloud who had a very promising career ahead of him before his death last summer all of them are coming off huge years with Anyone But You and Priscilla and Saltburn and that Hunger Games prequel I can never remember the name of. That, however, is just me, because the movie did well, surpassing $300 million at the worldwide box office, three times its production budget and of course resonating with a younger audience.
Euphoria season three has been delayed but all of the aforementioned talent has been working on their post-Euphoria plans. And that’s where we find Hunter Schafer as she’s one of the cover stars of GQ’s Global Creativity issue:
Remember, before Euphoria, Hunter had never acted. And now she has two films coming out, including a role in the new Yorgos Lanthimos film, Kinds of Kindness, so this is probably her most extensive celebrity profile to date, setting up the next phase of her career. She’s a multihyphenate, a visual artist (she was originally planning on fashion design) and a performer, and also an activist. Activism, in support of trans rights, is how she got noticed, which led her to modelling, and then more.
So while this profile is making headlines for other reasons – mostly her romantic revelations – what’s missing in the coverage is that, like a couple of her female peers from the Euphoria cast who are already flexing their cultural capital and shaping their careers differently from the young women who might have been in similar positions even a decade ago, Hunter has that potential too. It’s worth your time to read the entire article instead of just fixing on the dating bits, which I’ll get to in a minute.
Because for me, the biggest takeaway from the piece is what she shared about her family, her parents who were nothing but supportive of her coming out and speaking up. And what it meant to her when she was offered the opportunity to model.
“Schafer came out as gay to her parents in middle school, and then as transgender in the ninth grade. In 2016, Schafer joined the ACLU and Lambda Legal’s fight against HB2. She joined the suit not just in the hope of challenging the law, she said at the time, but raising trans awareness and acceptance more generally. She was thrust into the national spotlight and culture wars almost overnight, writing affecting op-eds and visual essays for the likes of Teen Vogue and Rookie and appearing on local news segments. Her parents were right by her side. She was terrified of public speaking, so her dad, comfortable behind a pulpit, sometimes made public statements on her behalf, and he and Katy often gave interviews about supporting Schafer and her legal fight.
“It was a lot of responsibility, and life-changing in a way that I don’t think I even understood until it had already happened,” Schafer says now. “I think they felt a duty to protect me.”
Most parents would say this: that they feel a duty to protect their children. HOW they do the protecting is an entirely different story. In Hunter’s case, protecting their child wasn’t fear-based. I’m sure they were afraid, no doubt, about the backlash and the resistance, but there was no fear in the intention because this was about love, loving who your child really is, and helping them to come into their true identity, and then being at their side while they fight for other children and youth who are simply asking for the same dignity.
Still, parental protection can only do so much in a world with too many corners that are still closed to empathy and understanding. Which is why this following paragraph, where Hunter recalls her first modelling job, is so powerful:
“When HB2 was repealed in March 2017, Schafer was in her senior year at an arts-based high school in Winston-Salem, and had been accepted to study fashion design at the ultra-prestigious Central Saint Martins in London. But she put those plans on hold when she got her first modeling job in New York. She remembers having a cathartic cry on the flight there. “It was deeply painful to be in, quote, unquote, the wrong body growing up,” she says. Even with the support she had at home as an adolescent, that feeling had narrowed her vision of the future. And then she was on a commercial set, getting paid to be on camera. It was validation: “I couldn’t believe my f-cking life,” she says.”
She’s been modelling and on camera for years now – but I imagine covering GQ like this, for that girl she used to be, is still monumentally special.
As for the gossip that’s making the headlines, it’s about all that speculation about her and Rosalía from a few years ago. And Hunter confirms here that, after checking with Rosalía, they were indeed a thing for five months or so in 2019, fall and winter. Rosalía would go on to be in a relationship with Rauw Alejandro shortly after – she and Rauw met at the Latin Grammys in November 2019 and were together, and engaged, until last year. She is now dating Jeremy Allen White. And Hunter moved on to Euphoria co-star Dominic Fike. They broke up last year too and it sounds like she’s still getting over it, although it doesn’t seem like there’s acrimony between them as she shares that:
“I had had so many shitty experiences with men before—not from dating them, but just in life,” Schafer says. “I think I had built up a wall that was way too thick around them.”
“And then I fell in love,” she says, smiling.
Being with Fike allowed Schafer to “work through a lot of the feelings of disdain that I had towards men as a whole,” she says. “I think it had inhibited a lot of my friendships with men, and a lot of that came down as well. I had a really beautiful relationship with [Fike], and it really opened me up in that way.”
My thought as I was reading all this was that it’s a true celebrity profile – with confessions and confirmations and very little hedging and reluctance, and we don’t get a lot of these anymore. At 25 years old, with so much ahead of her, we might not get a lot of these from Hunter Schafer going forward. So let’s appreciate it while we can.
One more thing… what pops in your mind when you see this shot of her:
For me, it was instantly Claire Danes, My So Called Life. RIGHT?!?
Before today I never would have imagined saying this… but if they do a remake in the near future, and they need to find an Angela Chase… it would be Hunter Schafer!
For more on Hunter in GQ, click here.
