The Revelation

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 years-long 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. As Willa, she plays a teenaged girl on the run from sinister military forces, unflinching in her trust of her bedraggled, pot-addled revolutionary dad (DiCaprio) while also barely containing her teenage fury toward him. She shoots a machine gun, wrestles with Sean Penn’s villainous military officer, hides in a nunnery, drives a getaway car at breakneck speed while handcuffed—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 Vulture. Joe Friar in the Fort Worth Report said Infiniti as Willa was “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, but Penn, Benicio del Toro and Regina King, among others. 

But in person, none of that seems to have rattled her, nor has the publicity hurricane that has accompanied the film’s critical and box-office success and 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’s now in a sloppy T-shirt on which Perfidia is scrawled—a gift from her co-star Teyana 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 for bringing 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 that people know he has spent the better part of 20 years working on One Battle After Another.

Based on the 1970s novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, Anderson’s screenplay takes many detours and evolutions 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 determined to take down a corrupt capitalist system. In doing so, they draw the enmity and sexual obsession of a Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Penn). Perfidia disappears and the movement is defeated, but she leaves behind an infant, Willa, who is raised in the remote northwest by a perpetually stoned former revolutionary, Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio).

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 obsessive target of Lockjaw, who may or may not be her biological father. 

The plot might be 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 at a post-screening interview at Lincoln Center why it took him so long to get the movie made, 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 was born to suburban parents in Indianapolis. Her father owns a construction company
(but plays jazz on the side) and her mother is an optometrist, but clearly they aimed for Chase and her sister, Dolce Imani, to pursue creative lives. She was named Chase after Nicole Kidman’s Batman Forever character, and Infiniti after Buzz Lightyear’s Toy Story catchphrase “to infinity... and beyond!” 

Infiniti fell in love with musical 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 her academic years occurred 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 by a manager out of college who put her up for film and television. In between studies and acting classes she made K-Pop dance videos with two friends. (She’s still doing it; check her out on TikTok.) 

In early 2023, she auditioned via self-tape for a role in Presumed Innocent, playing the daughter of a prosecutor (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 Skarsgaard. Pretty daunting. 

Meanwhile, Anderson and Kulukundis had been 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 many actresses by the time the casting notice came to Infiniti in an email from her agent. She did what she often did, a self-tape. It was a two-page scene, with characters named “Girl” and “Bob” talking at a breakfast table. No context. She self-taped the scene and sent it off, determined to forget about it. A month later, she got a call Kulukundis, who offered to fly her to L.A. for a chemistry read…with DiCaprio and King. 

“She just clicked all the boxes,” Kulukundis said. “When I [saw her] tape, I just was like, ‘She’s so special. She’s so unique.’ 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 with Anderson looking on. 

Anderson said he was testing her to make sure Infiniti 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 wrote TheWrap in an 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.”  

In about October 2023, at the end of one of the many callbacks, Anderson casually gave her the news: “[He said] ‘In case you didn’t know, you are Willa,’” said Infiniti. “And I was like, ‘Oooooh.’”

In the Flow

During production, what followed were many deep conversations between director and actor about the character and about 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 with actors. 

“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 back 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 already has had to leap to the next project. As One Battle was readying its fall release, Infinti was wrapping the first season of The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale in which she plays Hannah, the daughter of Elisabeth Moss and O-T Fagbenle. 

You can probably tell, this is going to be a white-hot story of a Hollywood rise.