Like A Dream
With
Hari Nef
HARI NEF is the multi-hyphenate talent stealing scenes in this year’s most hotly anticipated movie, Barbie – and her real life is even more intriguing than that on screen. TOM RASMUSSEN meets the modern-day maverick to talk about the art of reinvention and doing the unprecedented
What do the words ‘writer’, ‘muse’, ‘movie star’, ‘intellectual’, ‘It-girl’ and ‘model’ have in common? That’s right: Hari Nef. But the reality is Nef is bigger than the sum of her titles. She is, in the most unpretentious way, chameleonic and undefinable. That’s why one day she can walk for Gucci; the next, she can star in Sam Levinson’s latest TV creation, or hit Broadway, or feature in the summer’s biggest movie, or write an essay for Artforum. As a career, it’s “exhilaratingly open-ended,” Nef tells me. “But I think on the level of functioning in an industry? It frequently feels like an uphill battle because, you know, people don't have a proof of concept.”
Nef moved to New York, which is where she is today, in 2011. Before that, she’d grown up far away enough from Manhattan – and who she knew she was – that she would spend every day studying the art of New York or, perhaps better, the art of reinvention. “I was on Myspace; I was paying attention to what was going on in New York; I was looking at party pictures. I was the first generation that had that live feed to what was going on in the places where people were doing things that I was interested in. So, I was just like, ‘I’m gonna become one of those people’.” And she did. When Nef arrived in the city, she dressed up and she showed up, marveling at finally being there. She tapped people on the shoulder, she respected their work – “I was a fan”– and went to places where everyone who believed in reinvention would go, too. “Sure, it’s not like I could go out and meet Donatella Versace,” Nef says, “but, for me, at that point in my life, Amanda Lepore [the model, singer, and performance artist] was Donatella Versace. You know what I mean?”
“I was NEVER an ingenue who, like, didn’t know where she was or WHAT she was doing; I was always AWARE”
Now, New York rolls off Nef’s tongue. “If I’m out in New York, and I have the day free, I’ll probably just see what’s playing and go to a movie. I go to the movies alone a lot.” She had a brief stint in LA, “between an earlier New York era, and the New York era that I had not yet given birth to”. She wonders if the former still exists – the one with more socials and less social media.
“The break into Hollywood really FED the fashion stuff. Because, you know, I wasn’t exactly a MODEL’S model. I didn’t look like one. I didn’t FEEL like one”
First time around, it was fashion and acting. Acting and fashion. Plus, the queer party scene. As profiles about her rolled out across the internet, Nef frequented queer clubs downtown, walked runways many could only dream of, and appeared on the then ground-breaking Amazon series Transparent. A shapeshifter, maybe, but for those of us who grew up with the internet, from the moment she arrived in New York and signed as the first openly trans model to IMG, there has always been Hari Nef – a constant in the millennial and gen-Z internet landscape. She went to the city, then became the reason so many of us went to the city. And she worked for it. “I was never an ingenue who, like, didn’t know where she was or what she was doing,” she says. “I was never plucked out of obscurity by the sheer magnetism of my beauty and talent; I was always aware: I have this much beauty and I have this much talent. I need to increase this one, and increase that one and, like, really push it and then create a context around it.”
“[Barbie] is so gorgeous, and so silly, and so SMART and joyful without being heedless. It’s EXACTLY the kind of movie that I was trying to MANIFEST being in”
And she did that, somehow creating this magical blur between Hollywood, television, and fashion – she had a voice in all of them. She’s perhaps the first ‘slash’ of the millennial multi-hyphenate generation, and certainly the chicest. “The break into Hollywood really fed the fashion stuff. It was an excuse for me to be there. It kind of ratified my entrance into fashion spaces. Because, you know, I wasn’t exactly a model’s model. I didn’t look like one. I didn’t feel like one. But because I did other things, I was able to move in and out of fashion spaces as a personality and as kind of an interesting new proposition for someone to wear the clothes.”
Now is the time for another pivotal moment in Nef’s career. “It’s not my first time catching a wave and riding it. My first time was sort of my introduction into showbusiness, and I think that was a rush and super-overwhelming. This time around? I have a better sense of how things work.”
It’s lucky she does, because she’s everywhere. Let’s start with Greta Gerwig’s new take on the world of Barbie, in which Nef plays, well, a Barbie and steals the trailer with her horror at Margot Robbie’s “flat feet!” The real horror for her, however, was happening behind the scenes. “I sliced my leg open on the fourth day… and they had to keep, like, plastering my Barbie leg and painting over it,” she says, laughing. “[The movie] is so gorgeous, and so silly, and so smart and joyful without being heedless. Of course, I’m excited to be a part of it. It’s exactly the kind of movie that I was trying to manifest being in. It’s glamorous, but it’s also intelligent. It’s directed by a filmmaker, and co-written by that filmmaker and another filmmaker [Gerwig’s partner, Noah Baumbach], both of whom I had dreamed about working with.”
While Nef’s casting in this vision of Barbie has been hailed in places as a brilliant step for the franchise, really her work here is more about an ethos that connects her career: giving back; a sort of artistic largesse. We talk about mentors, and while she appreciates so many people for helping her be who, and where, she is now – including Mel Ottenberg, editor-in-chief at Interview, director Sam Levinson, artist Zackary Drucker (with whom she’s about to retell the story of Candy Darling’s life on screen), performer Alexis Blair Penney, and actor Rachel Harlow – it’s always been about mutual collaboration; giving and receiving; making work which, in some ways, delivers something deeper than the image in a world that’s obsessed with them. She speaks in the same way about Barbie. “I saw the movie a couple of weeks ago and that made me really excited. It made me feel like a kid again – and about the life-long, obsessive attachment that I would be forming with that movie if I were a kid. It would become an all-time [favorite]. It’s a world you can spend hours in; wrap yourself in.”
Nef pulls off her accomplishments with the kind of modesty that allows celebrities to remain chic. “I have a bunch of costumes and I’ve got a couple of lines [in the movie] for every costume. But it’s really an ensemble piece,” she says. “You know, whether you’re a super-A-list star or you’re an up-and-coming actress – it’s obviously driven by Margot [Robbie] and Ryan [Gosling]’s performances – but it’s an ensemble effort.”
“I’ve never met ANYBODY who I look at and I go, ‘Oh, THAT’S what I want to do.’ So much of what I want to do doesn’t have a PRECEDENT”
Before embarking on Barbie mania, Nef starred alongside Parker Posey on Broadway in The Seagull/Woodstock, NY. She’s also in Levinson’s complicated HBO offering, The Idol, in which she plays Talia, a Vanity Fair journalist profiling Lily Rose-Depp’s character. The role was a sort of ‘fan fiction’ of a glamorous journalist, written for her by Levinson. “I think Sam can see more clearly than I can see what I’m good at as an actor, and what I bring to a screen. If I think too much about that stuff, I just go into a spiral. That being said, I hang out with a lot of really gorgeous, glamorous writers, ladies in New York and, like, they’re smart. They’re critics. They read. And, you know, I was kind of just trying to channel the girls back home. That’s why it’s so important to live your life when you’re not working.”
And that’s where Nef is keen to spend most of our conversation together: in her real life. She wants to get back to it. Sure, she’s proud of, excited by, and stimulated by the work she does. But Nef is keen on the real world now, after so much reinvention. “It’s just work. It’s not my life. It’s not my love. It’s not my family or my friends. And especially this part of the job, which is flying around promoting things, appearing on carpets, going to parties, doing shoots. I love clothes and I love dressing up but, other than that, this is not the reason why I do what I do, which takes the pressure off and lowers the stakes, and I can just kind of have fun and enjoy the hotel rooms; enjoy the compliments, which I’m working really hard to believe. But you don’t want to stay too long in the surreal.”
Nef’s initial pursuit – New York 1.0 – saw her rise through the world of the surreal in many ways. On this moment in her life, she cites the legendary movie Party Monster, and how it “reveled in the joy and the glamour and the ridiculousness of moving to New York and creating yourself”. Yet Nef was arguably the leader of a generation of self-creators; people who are beyond description, who see a future and a new way to do things.
So, what comes next for her? A different kind of real life, it seems – one in which films and stages and shoots and red carpets are where she can, over and over again, reinvent. Then there’s a life away from that where she can sit on her friends’ sofas and gossip, where she can call her mom, or order a deep-dish pizza and spend a Sunday in bed watching movies. The former perhaps sounds more exciting, but how does it look when people like Nef, who aren’t usually afforded such fame and artistic agency at the same time, get to have a real life? That is a deeply exciting prospect. “I guess, to be perfectly honest with you, I’ve never met anybody who I look at and I go, ‘Oh, that’s what I want to do in exactly the way I want to do it.’ There are so many women who have, and people who have, paved the way for me. But so much of what I want to do doesn’t have a precedent.”
Barbie is in theaters from July 21
The Fashion Challenge with Hari Nef
From what she would wear to her best friend’s wedding to the perfect daytime-to-dance-floor look, watch as Hari Nef puts her styling skills to the test…
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