It took Paul Thomas Anderson eight years to cast Willa, the teenage girl at the center of his epic tale of modern political rebellion, “One Battle After Another.”
And once he found her, the writer-director made the young actress, Chase Infiniti, go through six months of testing: karate lessons, mixed martial arts training, chemistry reads with Leonardo DiCaprio, weapons practice.
One time he pulled out a razor and asked her to shave her celebrated co-star.
“Paul, in that screen test, literally handed her a razor and was like, ‘Shave Leo’s face,’” said Cassandra Kulukundis, the casting director who joined Anderson on the search. “I’m sure she was shaking, but she held it all in and didn’t look like she missed a beat. So I was like, ‘This girl is gonna be absolutely fine.’”
She was more than fine, actually. Twenty-five-year-old Infiniti, born and raised in Indianapolis and with zero movie credits to her name, holds steady as the beating heart of Anderson’s masterpiece. Willa is a young woman on the run from sinister forces, unflinching in her trust of her bedraggled, pot-addled revolutionary dad (DiCaprio) while also barely containing her adolescent fury toward him. She shoots a machine gun, wrestles with a villainous military officer played by Sean Penn, hides in a nunnery, drives a getaway car at breakneck speed in handcuffs — and tries to make sense of the chaotic, violent world into which she’s thrust. All while wearing the same outfit: a black leather jacket over a white T-shirt and a puffy party skirt with boots.
If the audience didn’t believe her, the movie simply wouldn’t work.
Many critics used the word breakthrough to describe her performance. “Infiniti shoulders the brunt of the film’s emotional arc (with a) clear-eyed, stirring gravitas that belies her age,” wrote Jason P. Frank in Vulture (citing Alison Willmore). Joe Friar of the Fort Worth Report called Infiniti “powerful, innocent and ferocious, establishing her mark on the industry with a commanding presence that stands out next to her veteran co-stars.”
Oh yes, there’s that. Infiniti plays Willa inside a complex, action-filled story surrounded by a cast of heavy hitters that includes not just DiCaprio and Penn, but Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor and Regina Hall, among others. But in person, none of that seems to have rattled her, nor has the publicity hurricane that’s accompanied the film’s critical and box-office success or her own campaign for Best Actress at the Academy Awards.
“I’m filled with so much gratitude,” she said in a quiet conversation after two hours of a fast-moving fashion shoot on a recent Saturday in Los Angeles.
After modeling several high-end designer outfits, she was dressed in a chic Louis Vuitton suit. But as soon as glam was over, Infiniti slipped into a sloppy T-shirt on which “Perfidia” was scrawled — a gift from her co-star Taylor, who plays Willa’s mother.
In person as on screen, Infiniti has a brown-eyed youthful gaze mixed with an unexpected maturity beyond her years. “Even while we were shooting the film, I was just so grateful to be there every single day,” she said. “But getting to see the response from people, the love that people are pouring into the film, and how passionate they are about it …”
She trailed off but admitted that she wasn’t surprised by the rapturous reactions. “I mean, it’s Paul Thomas Anderson. People were gonna love anything that he does.”
She flipped the focus to her director. “You can always count on Paul (to) bring the humanity with every single character that he writes and puts on the screen. But also, at least in my experience, creating such a wonderful environment for creativity on set. You know that anytime that he creates something, it’s going to be unique, and it’s going to touch people in different ways. And I’m so happy that people are responding so positively to it.”
The waiting game
Anderson seems almost embarrassed to admit that he has spent the better part of 20 years working on “One Battle After Another.”
Based on the 1990 novel “Vineland” by Thomas Pynchon, Anderson’s screenplay takes many detours from the original. But the core of the story is the same: A group of left-wing revolutionaries, led by a fierce Black woman named Perfidia (Taylor), leads a series of terrorist attacks intended to take down a corrupt capitalist system. In doing so, they draw the enmity and sexual obsession of Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Penn). Perfidia disappears and the revolution is defeated, but she leaves behind an infant, Willa, who is raised in the remote northwest by a perpetually stoned former activist leader, Bob Ferguson.
The story reignites 16 years later as the revolutionary movement kicks back to life in a new era of government repression. And Willa now becomes the target of Lockjaw, who may or may not be her biological father. The plot is elaborate — but on the other hand, fans of Anderson’s 1999 gem, “Magnolia,” may note that there are no frogs falling from the sky.
Asked why it took him so long to get the movie made at a post-screening interview at Lincoln Center, Anderson repeated the question. “What were you doing for 20 years?” he said. “I was waiting for all of these people… Not least of which was Chase. She wasn’t even born when I started this.”
That’s an exaggeration, but not by much.
Origin story
Chase Infiniti Payne grew up in the suburbs of Indianapolis. Her father owned a construction company but played jazz on the side and her mother was an optometrist, yet they aimed for Chase and her sister, Dolce Imani, to pursue creative lives. She was named Chase after Nicole Kidman’s “Batman Forever” character, Chase Meridian, and Infiniti after Buzz Lightyear’s “Toy Story” catchphrase, “To infinity…and beyond!”.
Infiniti fell in love with theater at a young age and watched musicals obsessively, booking her first role at 10 in a local production of “Hairspray.” She majored in musical theater at Columbia College Chicago, but it was during the COVID pandemic, so she had to take classes on Zoom and audition remotely. She graduated in 2022 with a plan to move to New York and take Broadway by storm, but by chance she was signed out of college by a manager who put her up for film and television. In between acting classes, she made K-pop social-media dance videos with two friends. (She’s still doing it; check her out on TikTok.)
I treated every single callback and chemistry read like a master class. I would try to pick up everything that I could and be a sponge.
Chase Infiniti
In early 2023, she auditioned via self-tape for a role in “Presumed Innocent”: the daughter of a prosecutor (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) who is accused of murdering his mistress. She got the part. Which meant that on her very first production, she was working with actors like Gyllenhaal, Ruth Negga and Peter Sarsgaard. Pretty daunting.
Meanwhile, Anderson and Kulukundis were on their seemingly endless hunt for Willa. “I definitely needed somebody who could kick some butt, who could do all the things that she needed to do: be a real teen, be rebellious but also find out that her father wasn’t her father,” Kulukundis said. “You know, heartbreak. She had to run the gamut of emotions, and you needed somebody who could go toe-to-toe with people like Leo and Sean Penn and not get thrown. That’s a lot of boxes to check for that role.”
They had tried out many actresses by the time the casting notice came to Infiniti in an email from her agent. She did what she often did: made a selftape.
It was a two-page scene as characters named “Girl” and “Bob” talked at a breakfast table. No context. She sent it off, determined to forget about it. A month later, she got a call from Kulukundis, who offered to fly her to L.A. for a chemistry read with DiCaprio and Hall.
“When I had her make a tape, I was just like, ‘She’s so special. She’s so unique,’” the casting director said. “I mean, she hadn’t done anything. So you would look at her wondering who she was. She just felt like such a real person. And that’s so key, I thought, for Willa — for us to believe her and fight for her.”
The L.A. trip was the first of many chemistry reads over months. “I treated every single callback and chemistry read like a master class,” Infiniti said. “I would observe them, and I would try to pick up everything that I could and be a sponge. I love to observe, and I love to just sit back and watch anytime that I can,” In addition to challenges like shaving DiCaprio, the actress had to take karate classes while Anderson watched.
The director said he was testing her to make sure she had the grit to make it through a grueling story. “Gotta make sure the talent, intelligence, humor and work ethic is real and not imagined,” he told TheWrap via email. “Six months is not long in trying to get to know someone and have them get to know you… It’s a long runway so that by the time you start shooting you have a common goal and an ease with each other.”
Around October 2023, at the end of one of the many callbacks, Anderson casually gave her the news: “In case you didn’t know, you are Willa,” said Infiniti, recalling the director’s aside. “And I was like, ‘Oooooh.’”
In the flow
The production of “One Battle” involved many deep conversations between director and actor about both the character and specific scenes.
Anderson, famously considered to be among the most actor-focused directors of his generation, said that’s a big part of his process.
“It is never a good idea to come with too much fully formed,” he said. “It is better to have a strong understanding of the material and be open to discovery as situations present themselves. She came with tons of preparation and a willingness to drop it and engage in the scene as it was happening. Chase is extremely agile and quick on her feet. She is also able to fight the corner for her character and what she believes.”
From Infiniti’s perspective, the film was “constantly changing, constantly flowing. What’s on the screen was definitely more colorful in every single way (than the screenplay), but different. There’s a lot of stuff that wasn’t written on the page until we did it on the screen, and then he added it into the script.”
Her character, though, remained the same. “I fell in love with her immediately — her strength and her resilience and her stubbornness,” she said. “But I love that she is who she is. And getting to see her through Paul’s eyes was such a wonderful thing, because he has the entire vision already planned out, and just to be able to see a snippet into the scope of his mind was so incredible.”
This epic experience has barely settled and Infiniti has already had to leap to her next project. As “One Battle” was readying its fall release, Infinti was wrapping the first season of Hulu’s “The Testaments,” a sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale” in which she plays Hannah, the daughter of Elisabeth Moss and O-T Fagbenle’s characters.
You can probably tell, this is going to be a whitehot story of a Hollywood rise.
This story first ran in The Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
