In the first trailer, released this spring, Infiniti stands in a field firing off an assault rifle while clad in a ballet skirt and combat boots. She’s also shown kicking those boots through the glass partition of a cop car.

She’s been anointed by Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière, too — he dressed Infiniti for the film’s world premieres, adding her to his muses that include Emma Stone.

“She has this long-term vision for herself as an artist,” says Ruth Negga, who played Infiniti’s onscreen mom in Presumed Innocent, her first TV role.

Her parents raised her in Indianapolis, where they own a construction company. They never intended putting her through the Hollywood paces, but they did hope the name would push her toward greatness.

As a child, Infiniti showed an interest in performing. “I always loved going to see musicals, my sister and I would constantly put on little shows, and I went through a phase where I watched Hairspray every day after school for six months straight,” she says.

Noticing this, her mother encouraged her to audition for a local musical theater revue when she was 10. “I went into it being like, ‘Fine, sure, whatever,’ and then afterwards I was like: ‘I want to do this for the rest of my life.’”

At the time, she thought that meant a career as a workaday actor of some kind; she had no sense of a career onscreen, but she felt instinctively that she was a performer. She booked her first role in a local production of Hairspray (fated!) and promptly adopted her stage name. “I dropped my last name when I was 10,” she says.

“My parents were like, ‘We gave you a star name, so now you’ve got to use the star name.’ You can look back to any Playbill. I was Chase Infiniti.”

It all started with Jake Gyllenhaal. In early 2023, she sent a self-tape to play Jaden, the daughter of a prosecutor accused of murdering his mistress in Apple TV+’s remake of the legal thriller. Infiniti was invited to do a callback, which became a virtual chemistry read with Gyllenhaal, who would be leading the limited series alongside Ruth Negga. “He was the first celebrity I ever met in my life,” she says. “And a Zoom is so intimate! It’s such a small veil between the two screens, like, ‘Oh my God, I’m sorry for being in your personal space.’”

She got the role, and moved to Los Angeles for the shoot. At 23, it was her first time living in L.A., her first time living alone and her first time on set. “She brought this excitement about being there that felt amazing,” says Negga. “But she was also really instinctual. And she was there all the time, even when she didn’t need to be.” Infiniti says her high attendance was a suggestion from Anne Sewitsky, who directed the first two episodes: “I had a lot of free time, and I wasn’t comfortable being by myself yet, so Anne told me I should come in and observe on my days off.” The first time she showed up, she watched a scene in which Gyllenhaal, Bill Camp, Peter Sarsgaard and O-T Fagbenle acted together. “I decided to do that every day and absorb everything I could, and at the end of the shoot, I felt so much more confident,” she says. “By the time I came back to L.A. for Paul’s movie, I was thriving on my own in L.A. I was going around town, eating at restaurants by myself. And I liked it.”

Infiniti sent in her first self-tape for One Battle After Another in March of 2023, while in production for Presumed. She wasn’t very familiar with Anderson’s body of work, but she felt like she understood the character of Willa, the daughter of two now-dormant leftist revolutionaries (played by DiCaprio and Taylor) who finds herself hunted by their group’s former adversary. When we meet Willa in the film, she and DiCaprio’s Bob are hiding out in rural Colorado; he is a paranoid hippie, she is a rebellious high schooler. “I’m genuinely scared of teenagers at this point in my life, but I thought a lot about how teenaged me would act in that scenario. Willa really is like, ‘I have the whole world figured out,’ so I tried to hold on to that confidence and the feeling that you think you know everything.”

The next day, Anderson called and asked her to come back for another round. This time, he wanted to observe her during fight training; since the role of Willa is so physical (in addition to what’s seen in the trailer, she has tussles with Sean Penn), he wanted to see her literally in action. “I went to a karate class and he watched the whole thing,” says Infiniti. “It was me and 20 other students, and I was the only white belt. Everyone else was brown and purple. I was trying my best not to make a fool of myself.”

Anderson hired her on the spot after the karate class, and Infiniti began months of intensive prep, flying back and forth to L.A. for everything from mixed martial arts training to costume fittings (she wears the same outfit in every single scene of the film). Even for an industry veteran like Regina Hall, who plays a revolutionary tasked with overseeing Willa’s protection, the concept of shooting Paul Thomas Anderson’s largest, most expensive endeavor yet was daunting. “I couldn’t grasp the scope of it, I didn’t understand how it was going to be shot,” Hall says. “Everything he does feels like something you’ve never seen before, and working on this movie meant learning how to give a director a lot of trust.”

Infiniti followed Hall’s lead, giving over to Anderson’s direction and also coming in on as many of her days off as she was allowed to watch the master at work. “People like to call me a sponge,” she says with a laugh. In the end, she felt amazed at her own ability to learn to film fight scenes, shoot a (prop) automatic rifle and drive a car during a chase scene — while her hands are in handcuffs. “Watching her felt like peeling back the onion of a new generation of talent,” adds Hall. “It was so rich to witness, and to respect who someone is as a person in addition to an artist, that’s when you’ve hit the lottery.”

Infiniti was deep into production on One Battle when Presumed Innocent premiered, so she was shielded from the bulk of the attention and intrigue that came her way. She wasn’t even able to attend the premiere because of her shooting schedule. At the time of her Hollywood Reporter interview, she’d had very little experience engaging with anyone who has seen her work. She taped her first EPK earlier this summer — a junket-like experience in which the studio conducts promotional interviews and featurettes — and says she was terrified for days ahead of time. “I still don’t know a ton of people in this business, so I don’t entirely know what to expect,” she says. “When I heard about what we were going to be doing to promote One Battle, the first person I went to was Ruth Negga. I literally was like, ‘What’s a press tour?’” (Negga says she told her: “Take lots of vitamin C, surround yourself with great people and you’ll have a ball.”)

While the fandom of film bros — and bro-ettes — is sure to come in the wake of One Battle’s release, Infiniti’s profile within the industry is starting to rise, too. When the first trailer dropped online, she started to hear from other directors, and when Tyler, the Creator saw it play in a movie theater, he immediately cast her in the music video for “Darling, I.” Shortly before this interview, she wrapped filming on the first season of The Testaments (it’s expected to premiere in 2026), and is awaiting news on a renewal for season two. Showrunner Bruce Miller spent a long time casting for the role of Agnes, an iteration of the Handmaid’s character Hannah (daughter of Elisabeth Moss and Fagbenle). “I watched her on Presumed Innocent, and then I saw her read for the part, and then I watched videos of her performing K-pop dances, and then I met her,” he says. “And the fact that she can embody all these different sides of herself totally blew me away.”

When Infiniti was auditioning for The Testaments, she still felt lucky to even have the chance to read for a role that felt stimulating and exciting — she couldn’t fathom the fact that in a year’s time, she’d be talking about how to manage a burgeoning movie star career around a long series production. “I know it seems like I’ve gotten everything I wanted, but I really have been rejected a lot, too,”  she says, laughing. “I’d say that 95 percent of the things I’ve auditioned for, I have not gotten — it’s just that I’ve gotten very lucky when it comes to what I have booked.” In the meantime, though, she’s just happy for people to get to know her. “As I get more exposure, I keep finding that nobody believes Chase Infiniti is my real name,” she says with a laugh. “But guys, it’s on my birth certificate. That’s really me.”