A bluey twilight illuminates the shaded face of a newly-minted Hollywood starlet who is quietly being shepherded from the Montreal airport to a late-evening dentist appointment. She sits alone in the back of a black SUV, having managed to chip a tooth en route to the city from Los Angeles. She must get her smile fixed before appearing on set tomorrow. Then, back to LA to spend the next weekend at home; then back to Montreal. It is safe to assume that much of Odessa A’zion’s life in the past couple of months has unfolded this way, vivified in the logistical incurves between high-visibility engagements and on-set work; from the backseat of private cars and through airport terminals and in fitting rooms and plopped atop makeup chairs.

Such can be the purported, lonesome reality of a star on the eve of her breakthrough—particularly one who made concurrent appearances in this season’s most-talked-about pieces of media. In the months since her dual turns as Tallulah Stiel in HBO’s zeitgeisty Gen Z satire I Love LA and Rachel Mizler in Josh Safdie’s Oscar-nominated Marty Supreme, A’zion has become a prime subject of the world’s attention, her kinetic onscreen presence bringing millions of eyes to the craft at which she’s been working tirelessly for a decade, and with these eyes, a ravenous demand for her presence at awards shows and junkets and celebratory events and undisclosed projects. None of her laundry list of roles in the past couple of years have cast A’zion under the same sort of dual-edged praise and scrutiny.

Despite our conversation occurring in one of these stretches of logistical nothingness in between obligations, the actor-as-deliverable is not the picture that is painted to me this evening. As Odessa A’zion speaks to me, chipped white grin flashing through an ever-encroaching darkness, it becomes abundantly clear that the actor’s success comes because she is hyperattendant to the mundanities of the everyday, not in spite of them. A’zion is not the type to let herself ignore the importance of the liminal. And she’s not sitting stagnant in a makeup chair (at least, not for our shoot, for which she walks in and promptly dumps the contents of her makeup bag on the floor, filing her nails from her seat on the ground while chatting to the team).

“I feel like sometimes I maybe have too many goals,” A’zion tells me. “I need to focus on one thing at a time. Instead, I’m all divided everywhere.”

We are talking success stories—in the warped vein of the titular character of Marty Supreme and in the case of her HBO influencer persona Tallulah Stiel—and considering how ambition can, at times, be distorted into a sort of all-consuming maelstrom of anxiety, a mix of emotions with which A’zion has become familiar in the throes of years of hard work.

“So many people inspire me all the time, which is kind of my problem, because then I think about them all the time, and then have a new goal.” She says, going on to list her inspirations in one breath: Janis Joplin, Octavia Spencer, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and the vendor she keeps coming across on one of her twice-weekly LAX excursions who wakes up at 3 AM every morning to get to the job.

“People that are just grinding and getting things done, working for themselves and their families, making a life for themselves—they’re all really beautiful and inspiring,” she considers.

If there is an underlying thread here, it is that she admires those who display a singularity of purpose. A’zion has had to zero in on that for herself. A’zion began her career in the realms of both acting and music while going to CHAMPS Charter High School of the Arts in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley (“Filled with freaks,” she giggles. “Everyone was so creative, and had such a vision for their lives already at such a young age”).

In the years since, A’zion released music under the alias bugzbee while attending a myriad of auditions, with a major casting in Netflix’s teen ensemble drama Grand Army that got cancelled after one season, and appearances in Am I OK?, Pools, Good Girl Jane, Hellraiser, Until Dawn, as well as a COVID-era audition for Euphoria, which would eventually land A’zion an invitation by the same casting director to audition for Rachel Mizler.

She admits, “I’m definitely living the life that I wanted when I was in high school, but there’s one part of it that’s still missing. All I wanted to do was to be an actor and to do music. But every single time I’ve had a chance to do music, my acting stuff would take off, which is amazing. I put music on pause, and so I still want to be doing music and have that be a major part of my life as well. Obviously it’s really hard to balance. I’m just really grateful that I’m finally seeing some payoff for all the work that I’ve done with acting,” she says.

And she certainly has been seeing the payoff—in the past month, A’zion has been nominated for a litany of awards for her stellar performance as Mizler, the childhood best friend and partner-in-crime to Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser who helps him extort old evil men for money to get to the Japanese table tennis showcase while pregnant with his baby.

A’zion admits: “Sometimes, I get shy or embarrassed or anxious that someone’s going to be judging me [on set].”

Casting her eyes into the hazy Canadian exterior of the car, she continues: “It’s so stupid, because it’s like, why? This is the only time that I’m going to be able to do this. I’m never going to have a redo, and it’s going to live on forever. Marty Supreme helped me be like, ‘Okay, you know what? Fuck it. I just have to try, even if it’s weird or embarrassing, especially in really intense scenes when that’s really hard to do. But I definitely put my whole pussy in that shit, right?’”

There is, it seems, a certain level of cognitive dissonance requisite of the actorial occupation, where performance is permanent: there is lots of room for error, and so too lots for potential, perpetual judgment.

“Luckily on set, you know, people aren’t recording you like that. It’s not like in the real world, where everyone is their own journalist and you can’t dance in bars anymore because someone will make fun of you on the internet. Set feels like a more safe space, but it’s still just even before the internet, it’s still just embarrassing being emotional in front of people that you may not know, and also just doing stuff that feels so absurd. It’s really awkward and hard,” A’zion posits.

There’s this great moment in I Love LA, where A’zion’s Tallulah, a relatively green influencer still trying to establish a stronghold in the internet’s ephemeral theater, is alone in a room with Quen Blackwell’s heightened enactment of the Queen Bee influencer. She’s just begrudgingly agreed to make content with Blackwell, who, sensing Tallulah’s trepidation, looks her squarely in the eyes and says, “If you stop for a second, you will fucking disappear.”

It’s a sentiment that many feel speaks to the amnesiac state of the entertainment industry at present, where talent bubbles to the surface rapidly and pops just as quickly, but it’s not a fear I sense within A’zion.

What does it mean, really, to “disappear,” as it were? To be able to engage with the everyday world as it presents itself? To chat with airport vendors in the early mornings, to have time to go to abandoned trash sites and paint life-sized nudes of your friends on wooden boards, as A’zion used to do when she had more time on her hands?

There is a sense, here, that A’zion knows more important things in life than the desperate pursuit of greatness; that ambition should not automatically come coupled with ruthlessness.

“Someone recently asked me how I was doing with all this, and I said, ‘I’m just really anxious and I’m nervous and I’m scared and I’m overwhelmed,’” A’zion tells me. “They told me: ‘Don’t mistake your excitement for anxiety.’”

It is hard to not feel a dual tenderness towards and giddiness for A’zion, huddled alone on a cold night waiting for a tooth filling, at the cusp of what are likely some of the greatest years of her life and her career. There is a humanity here, bearing witness to someone watching the life she worked for blossom before her eyes and listening to her remind herself to get excited about it.

Soon, there will be no mistaking.

Photographed by Su Mustecaplioglu

Styled by Christopher Campbell

Written by Annie Bush

Hair and makeup: Alana & Maddie Alper

Flaunt Film Editor and Colorist: Sirin Tunali

Flaunt Film Music: Ailbhe Reddy

Photo Assistant: Xavier Hudon Macdonald 

Location: Maison Singulier