It’s Friday lunchtime in the busy restaurant of
a stylish hotel in New York’s Tribeca and Laura
Harrier isn’t mincing her words. ‘Dick pics are
unsolicited sexual advances, and nobody wants to see
them,’ she sighs. ‘Keep your clothes on until you’re with
somebody in a consenting situation, and then you can take
them off.’ Recently, the 29-year-old actress went viral on
Instagram calling out men who send her unwelcome shots
of their genitalia. ‘When I posted that, I was really pissed
off, but I also just thought it would be funny,’ she recalls.
‘Then, all these young girls were writing to me, being like,
“Thank you so much for saying that. I hate it when that
happens.” Teenage girls have to put up with so much.’
Sipping a cappuccino in our leather banquette, Harrier
goes seemingly unrecognised by the fashionable hordes.
I can only assume that the extravagant Afro wig she sported
in Spike Lee’s Oscar-winningBlacKkKlansman, has thrown
them off the scent of there being a rising star in their midst.
I’m not sure she’ll be able to enjoy a coffee in such
uninterrupted anonymity for much longer. Harrier’s short
but impressive career to date is a testament to savvy
selectivity; she followed up her 2017 film debut (as former
love interest Liz Allan) in the blockbuster Spider-Man:
Homecoming withBlacKkKlansman, and has just finished
filmingBios, a science-fiction drama with Tom Hanks, set for
release next year. Her first independent film,Balance, Not
Symmetry,was released in July.
A former model (she hated it; more on that later),
she’s one of the faces of Louis Vuitton, alongside Michelle
Williams, Thandie Newton and her friend, Sophie Turner.
The day we meet, she’s still sporting a set of glittering, LV-embellished acrylic nails
from the Met Gala she attended four days earlier, in a leather and leopard-print
minidress, custom-made for her by Nicolas Ghesquière, and a cropped blonde wig.
But the nails, she laments, are going to have to go when she heads home to LA later
that night; they don’t work well with her favourite hobby, pottery. It’s safe to say thatFollowingher big break in Spike Lee’sBlacKkKlansmanwith a starringrole in Tom Hanks’ new film,Laura Harrier’s career is soaring.Here, the American actress talkstoJane Mulkerrinsabout red-carpetfashion, reshaping romcoms a n dthe power of speaking outStyledby APRIL HUGHES Photographs by OLIVIA MALONEHARRIERLANDING