Hunter Schafer was recently in London for the wedding of her Euphoria co-star Zendaya, who married actor Tom Holland. She found time for a night out with close friends at a nightclub.
“We were dancing incredibly hard. There were no cameras out, which was great, so everybody was really letting loose,” she said. “I have little flashes in my head of looking my friends in the eyes and singing the lyrics and feeling completely free.”
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It summed up her state of mind, she said.
“I feel like that’s the magical thing about queerness,” she told Elle magazine. “On an ideological level, it’s about possibility and expansion and growth, and being on that journey and finding yourself.”
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While she’s had that expansive view of her gender identity for years now, she calls where she’s landed “flatter.”
“I’m a woman. I’m a girl,” she explains.
To get there, Schafer said she’s wrestled with queerness as an idea and philosophy “versus how it applies and works in real life, in the context of the world that we’re living in.”
“I feel like there’s always a tension there,” she said.
In December, she addressed it.
Schafer is on a publicity blitz, promoting her biggest role yet: the lead opposite Michelle Yeoh in the highly anticipated Amazon series, Blade Runner 2099. Schafer stars as a human impersonating a replicant Blade Runner, with humanity under threat of extinction.
It’s some ingenious casting, given Schafer’s own history of evolving identity.
Her time in London was mostly a break from supporting the project, with at least one exception to address a reckoning.
“Maybe it’s a good thing to share, for the tension I was talking about between those two worlds,” she said, referring to “reality” and “ideology.”
“I just had bottom surgery in December, which was amazing, and I love it so much.”
While every trans person is different, Schafer said, medically transitioning was the right decision for her.
“Like I said, for a long time I’ve embraced the gender-expansive part of myself, and I really wanted to try to make that previous body work, because I thought there was something really cool and badass about it.”
But she said her queer utopia didn’t match up with her everyday world.
The fashion model and actress — with roles in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, 2024’s Cuckoo, and the upcoming Tom Ford movie Cry to Heaven — has been romantically linked to Spanish pop star Rosalía and her Euphoria co-star Dominic Fike.
“I haven’t had a relationship that’s been longer than two years,” she shared, “and I’ve heard the two-year mark is when it gets more like a partnership rather than some passionate whatever-it-is. Something that feels more sacred and intentional.”
Following surgery, Schafer holed up in an apartment where she was limited to just 150 steps a day. Friends and family were around to distract her from the imposition.
But, she added, she’s always happy to be on her own, too.
“There are so many thoughts to think.”
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