Ava Phillippe calls herself a “care-too-much bear.” She says this while holding a mason jar of water with a metal straw, in a studio with a guitar propped next to the washer-dryer and a self-tape backdrop leaning against the wall behind her couch. Her Border collie mix Benji—Benjamin, when he’s misbehaving—has just been let outside, mid-interview, because his paws wouldn’t stop skittering between the furniture.

We’re here to talk about her feature film debut as the titular character in Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, adapted from Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell’s graphic novel of the same name. On the page, Laura Dean is a swoopy-haired, charismatic disaster: a prom queen, a serial cheater, and a queer James Dean who is never once sorry about it.

“The thing I stayed faithful to was her unbotheredness,” Phillippe says. “It’s what makes her so alluring, and also the red flag of all red flags. That is so not who Ava is as a person.”

Phillippe as a person, by her own account and her mother’s, is stubborn—which is part of the reason it took her this long to act professionally, not some overdue destiny finally catching up with her. “Even when I was a kid, my mom’s like, ‘I couldn’t tell you what to wear, I couldn’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t be doing. You were just gonna do it anyway, whatever it is you wanted to do. You had to learn your own lesson.’”

She grew up watching the industry from close enough to see past the glitz, which—combined with the constant question of whether she’d follow her parents into acting—made her want to do anything else.

“My stubbornness kicked in. I chafed against it so hard because I was like, ‘No, I’m me. I have my own creative ideas. I have my own things I want to do with my life. I don’t know what they are yet, but I have my own things,’” Phillippe says. “I tried a little bit of everything creative, and that definitely is where my soul leans. But because I was trying to individuate so hard, I just went the total opposite direction.”

She settled on being an academic and pursued a degree in Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley—initially content to unleash her creativity through other mediums: drawing, painting, playing the guitar. Phillippe has also modeled for years, starring in campaigns for brands like Rodarte, Pat McGrath, Beyoncé’s Ivy Park, and Vince Camuto, while recently becoming a friend of FENDI, sporting Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Debut collection for FENDI in her debut solo magazine cover.

“I have a bunch of seasons of creative pursuits. I’ve tried just about everything and this is actually my art studio,” Phillippe says, gesturing to the background behind her.
The studio, chock full of creative ephemera behind her, fills in the rest of the picture.

After leaving college early, for a variety of reasons, she ran straight into the question she’d been dodging for years. Was she finally going to do what most people viewed as a sort of birthright or figment of destiny?

“I said to my manager at the time, ‘If this is terrible, do not send it anywhere. I’m going to do this tape, and I’m just gonna wing it,’” she says. It wasn’t terrible. “I ended up really enjoying the kind of blend of psychology and artistry that is acting. All the things that I was studying in school fed into it, and I started to really learn about the craft in my own way. It started to feel like mine.”

Since this epiphany, Phillippe hasn’t wasted any time immersing herself in the profession she shirked for so long. When we speak, she is one day removed from shooting the indie short film The Call, a collaboration with non-profit Cure Addiction Now. Phillippe made her official debut as a guest star in the medical drama series Doctor Odyssey, where she plays Veronica, one of a trio of spring breakers who call themselves the Vixens.

Her other credits include a guest role in the Netflix series Ransom Canyon and a supporting role in the short film The Sisters of Scott County as Roxy Reed, one part of an orange-haired Southern family whose criminal enterprise threatens to uproot their sister Cherry Mary’s dream of becoming a commercial truck driver. 

And of course, there’s Laura Dean, the latest project from Tommy Dorfman’s Good Girl Productions. Phillippe stars opposite Sam Morelos who plays Freddie, the loving, innocent foil to Laura’s aloof swagger, alongside friends: Doodle (Milly Shapiro), Eric (Jordan Gonzalez), and Buddy (Charlie Clark).

“There’s a tenderness in the coming-of-age aspect,” Phillippe says. “There’s an ache to it, a heartache that eventually gets resolved but is very familiar. There were parts of this story that I recognized in my own journey as a queer person, where I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is a canon event, and you can’t stop it.’”

“We all have an ego,” Phillippe says of the character’s psychology, “and we all have a different level of control over that ego. Some of us more than others, unfortunately. I don’t think Laura Dean has a lot of control over hers,” Phillippe says, laughing a little at the diagnosis. “So kind of turning up the volume on, ‘No, it’s about me. I want what I want, and I will take what I want, and who cares? And I don’t give a fuck how you feel about it,’ which is, again, so far from how I operate in the real world, but really fun to play around with in a safe way where I’m not actually hurting people.”

It’s the same care-too-much-bear instinct showing up in reverse; she can access the ego because she knows exactly how far it is from her own. That same sentiment is most palpable when she speaks about inspiration and her innate curiosity.

“I’m focused on feeling a sense of empowerment with everything I do and an alignment with my values,” she says. “I was born with a very strong sense of justice, and I do care a lot about a lot of different things. But I had to really mold that into something that made sense in the context of being a mature, responsible adult who has empathy for more people than not.”

She references her work on The Call, which follows a mother and two sisters, one of them struggling with drug addiction.

“I don’t know one person in my life who hasn’t been touched by the specter of addiction or overdose in their own lives, so being able to do that as an actor, to be of service to that story and that message is really important to me,” Phillippe reflects. “I’m inspired in the way I want it to mean something to somebody else.”

She doesn’t know if she would describe this pull as creative inspiration. “It’s more of a soul thing,” she says.

Phillippe has been open before about her history with anxiety and her staunch advocacy of mental health resources, “I’m obsessed with therapy,” she says, and she doesn’t flinch from the subject now.

“So many of our kindest, most empathetic, most intelligent, creative people are also the ones suffering the most,” she says. “I count myself within some of that. I definitely had quite the journey with it as a teenager, and I’m so glad I did.” A combination of therapy, medication, exercise, and volunteer work ultimately helped her pull herself out of her own head.

“I mostly worked with all sorts of populations of children, just to… [not] focus on me. Let’s just give them everything I have, and it turns out it’ll feed you right back.”

We only have 30 minutes, and I have an inane, burning question for Phillippe. There are those who say you can learn a lot about someone from their Instagram bio, and Phillippe has an Alice in Wonderland quote in hers, “Curiouser and curiouser.”

“Curiosity is such an untapped well, in a sense. I think the most interesting people are interested. I think curiosity is a great gateway for empathy,” she explains. She credits some of her inquisitiveness to her ADD. “There’s Google searches for later up in here,” she says, tapping a French-tipped nail against her temple. “And the Notes apps are crazy.”

“I’m just kind of meditating on the value of curiosity and what that can be on a grander scale, not just for me as a creative, but also for us as a people. Instead of just accepting or condemning others, why not just start with a question, instead of ‘I’m angry at you,’ or ‘I don’t understand you, so I’m writing you off.’ I think it can open us up to a lot of good.”

Photographed by Dennis Leupold

Styled by Siena Montesano at The Wall Group

Written by Isa Luzarraga

Hair: Christopher Farmer at The Wall Group

Makeup: Alexandra French at Forward Artists

Flaunt Film: Parker Davis

Photo Assistants: Anatalia Zavaleta and Winston Kingstro

Production Assistant: Ava Lachini

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