96 newyork| november25–december8, 2019
The psychic said she’d be fine. Better than fine, actually.
AlexaDemiewasnervous about starting work on Waves, maybe her most
demandingproject to date, so a few days before she flew to the movie’s
Floridase t, shewenttoseea psychicinherhometownofLosAngeles.
“[She]waslike,‘You’re being too hard on yourself.’ Like, ‘Acting is in your
DNA. You’re meant to do this, just trust it, and it’s gonna be one of your
best, best roles.’ So I was like, ‘Okay!,’ ” she says, laughing as she recounts
the session over tea. We’re in a corner spot at the Crosby Bar in Soho,
which is mostly empty except for a few other famous people—Paul Rudd,
trulyagelessinreallife,is at thenexttable—andtheirmanagers.
waves, she notes with emphasis: “There’s
a moment in my life where I’m out by, like,
ten. But then I go through my insomnia
phase where I cannot sleep, so if I know
I have to be up [early], I have to dose
myself with CBD.”
The Waves opportunity happened
quickly. “Audition. FaceTime. I’m in Flor-
ida,” Demie says. The rest of the cast had
been living with the story for months;
Kelvin Harrison Jr. had worked on the
script with writer-director Trey Edward
Shults, and everyone else hung out inter-
mittently,gettingcomfortablewith one
another. Demie had only a week after
being cast last summer. She dove into
research, watching YouTube videos about
codependent relationships andplaying
rounds of 20 Questions with Harrison to
get to know him. Shults, she says,is “ego-
less.” He let her reshape her character—a
high-school senior entangled in a romance
with Harrison’s character, Tyler—as she
found appropriate, so Demie renamed
her (Courtney became Alexis). Their love
oscillates between tender and toxic. They
whisper secrets on the beach and have
screaming matches in the street. “It
seemed like those classically codepen-
dent high-school relationships, where
you’re so in love with each otherbut it’s
also not good for you, but you feel like it’s
normal,” she says. “You feel like those
fights—or just the way you speakto each
other—to you, that’s a normalpart of
your relationship because you don’t know
any better in high school. A lot of us don’t
know any better.”
The movie is split in two: The first half is
about the way Tyler undoes his family; the
second shows how his younger sister, Emily
(Taylor Russell, extraordinary), rebuilds it.
Sometimes Waves errs into Instagram-
filtered angst, but mostly the film wears its
heart on the sleeve of its Nikehoodie.
Demie’s scenes are among the most affect-
ing. In one (her best and the first she
filmed), Tyler is spiraling downward from
his own stresses when Alexis tells him she’s
pregnant. Their trip to PlannedParent-
hood ends early when she decidesagainst
terminating the pregnancy. It’s a desperate,
claustrophobic scene: Tyler drives them
home screaming through his confusion,
while Alexis sobs out her protests. She
demands he slam the brakes and let her
out, right then and there.
Some have compared the character of
Alexis to Euphoria’s Maddy, but Demie
protests. “That’s really lazy to say that,
because they’re so different,” she says.
“Maddy was staying in that relationship
and wasn’t leaving and wasn’t as strong
and wasn’t standing and saying, ‘Don’tThe CULTURE PAGES
Demie is best known as the smizing
scene-stealer on Euphoria, a teen drama
for adults that’s closer to Harmony Korine
and Larry Clark’s Kids than the CW’s
Riverdale. She plays Maddy, the series’
Casino-obsessed cheerleader whose eye
makeup has launched dozens of Insta-
gram fan accounts. (That Casino detail,
Demie says, came from her own life: “I love
mob movies with every bone in my body.
And so ... I expressed that to Sam [Levin-
son, the show’s creator], and he wrote it
into my character.”) Waves and Euphoria
intersect thematically—Demie portrays
the girlfriend of a troubled boy in both—
but in execution, they are fundamentally
different. Euphoria’s first seasondevotes
eight glitter-soaked episodes to the
sprawling story of over a dozen high-
school characters dealing withvarious
traumas; at 135 minutes, the two-act
Waves is an intense drama that revolves
tightly around a troubled familyof four,
whose lives are further fractured by a
shocking act of violence.
There is an opinion—held by me and,
not coincidentally, circulated by me—that
Demie is poised to become the FirstLady
of A24, a movie studio that is as cool and
hyperhip as any movie studio in 2019 can
be. It’s not that A24 exclusively makes
good films, but it consistently makes
eclectic ones, the kind that might not
sound like big, generation-defining
movies on paper but that turn out to be
Moonlight or Lady Bird. Demie’sfeature-
film debut was as the gamine older crush
in A24’s Mid90s, a coming-of-age story
about skateboarding teens written and
directed by Jonah Hill. She read for A24’s
Never Goin’ Back, the tale of two best
friends who smoke and make outand
arrive late to their diner shifts,but she
wasn’t cast; instead, the audition led to
her starring role on Euphoria. With three
A24 credits to her name in the past two
years, she has come to represent the
indie studio’s beautifully weird brand of
coming-of-age cinema.
“Careful!,” she cautions. I’m trying to
pour a cup of tea and failing spectacularly
at it. Her glamorously manicured fingers
gently take the teapot from my hands.
Today, she’s dressed in a boxy black suit
that lands aesthetically between the par-
ticular glam of Euphoria and the bold,experimental clothes of Demie’s Insta-
gram. “Just let me do it.” High tea was her
idea. It’s a treat she makes time for when-
ever she’s traveling or even when she’s
back in L.A. Growing up, she’d go with
her mom when they felt like doing some-
thing ritzy. “I don’t want you to burn your-
self! If you want honey, I recommend it,
or if you don’t—we shouldn’t have sugar,”
she says.
Demie describes herself as “high anxi-
ety”; she doesn’t touch the ten espressos
her boyfriend makes in a day, and she has
totakeCBDbeforebedorelseshe won’t
go to sleep. Her nocturnal habits flow like“I love mob
movies with
every bone in
my body.”