Pauline Hope Chalamet arrived in New York City like a daughter of two different worlds—French newspapers and Broadway studios, art-house sensibilities and subsidized high-rise living. Manhattan Plaza may have been government housing on paper, but to a child it was a hive: dancers reheating their ambition in the hallways, actors smoking between auditions, musicians playing at odd hours while elevators rattled like metronomes. Pauline grew up with all that vibration, the kind of background noise that teaches a kid early on what striving sounds like.
Her mother, Nicole—half Russian Jewish, half Austrian Jewish, brilliant, exacting—had danced on Broadway and could still command a room with a posture correction. Her father, Marc, was a French journalist who split his life between UNICEF reports and the quiet gravity of Nîmes. The household spoke French and English in equal measure, and the rule—Pauline’s own invention—was that her father must ignore her entirely if she slipped into English. As attempts at rebellion go, it was charmingly academic.
By ten she was dancing in a Broadway Midsummer Night’s Dream, her body still limber enough to believe that ballet was destiny. But destiny is fragile. A bike accident at seventeen snapped that vision in half, leaving her staring at a future without the barre. For a while she drifted—LaGuardia High School, then Bard College, double-majoring in theater and political science, checking out books in the library by day and debating whether she wanted to become a human-rights lawyer at night. She worked the jobs that soften you: bartending, babysitting, copyediting. The kind of work that makes you watch people, which is just another form of training.
Then came the final whispered conspiracy: she wanted Paris. So she went—secretly. Signed a lease, informed her family afterward. The apprenticeship at Studio Théâtre d’Asnières rekindled the acting flame, and she waited out the lean years by writing, making shorts, and taking every small role that taught her more than it paid.
The slow burn into the frame
Before the world knew her last name as a marquee, Pauline was building her own résumé: small parts in One Life to Liveand Royal Pains, short films made with friends and strangers, French projects filmed in borrowed apartments or cramped streets. By 2019, she had founded Gummy Films with two collaborators—an act of defiance, really, against waiting for anyone else’s permission.
The breakthrough came wrapped in Judd Apatow’s loose, bruised comedy The King of Staten Island in 2020. Joanne, her character, wasn’t the most chaotic person in the room, but she grounded the film like someone who knew how to keep her own secrets. Pauline slipped into major cinema the way people slip into a swimming pool at night: quiet, careful, fully prepared for the shock.
Then came HBO Max’s The Sex Lives of College Girls, where she played Kimberly—earnest, anxious, socially outmatched, a girl with a brain and a budget from two different universes. Pauline carried the role like someone who understood the politics of class from the inside. It wasn’t a performance built from exaggeration but from recognition: she’d known the middle-class weight her entire life.
The producer emerges
Gummy Films didn’t stay theoretical for long. Under its banner, Pauline co-produced Lemon Tree, which premiered during Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, the cinematic equivalent of an indie kid getting invited to sit with the cool table. Then came What Doesn’t Float, a dark-comic New York mosaic in which she starred and co-produced—a love letter to the city’s oddities, soaked in brine and broken dreams. Critics responded to its swagger, its refusal to sand down its rough patches, its willingness to let Manhattan be beautiful and ugly in the same frame.
The company kept expanding, feeding off the part of Pauline that never wanted to wait for the phone to ring.
France, film sets, and the strange reward of reinvention
She kept working in France as well—bilingual careers require double stamina. She played Paola in Split, a series that peeled back the layers of desire and duplicity, and appeared in Sex Is Comedy, a documentary about the often invisible labor of intimacy coordinators. She built characters in English and French with the same ease she once switched languages over breakfast.
Her cameo in Between the Temples in 2024 was brief and wicked, enough for critics to call it “laugh-out-loud” and “gloriously twisted.” The kind of small role that marks a performer who knows exactly how to steal a moment and walk away before the audience realizes what happened.
She kept producing. Kept writing. Kept making her own opportunities, like the New Wave-inspired Tell Me More, directed by her partner, Rhys Raiskin—an aesthetic love letter to the streets of Paris where she now lives part-time, raising her daughter and learning the rhythms of motherhood with the same curiosity she brings to a script.
The activist spine
Behind the work lies a political clarity. Pauline openly describes herself as “pro-socialism,” and her actions match it: she traveled to Capitol Hill with the Creative Coalition to defend funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, then sharpened her stance in print. If you’re raised in a building full of actors, dancers, musicians, and designers living one paycheck from freefall, you do not take the arts for granted. You understand the stakes.
The present and the yet-to-come
Upcoming projects slide across genres: she’s producing and starring in the thriller Terrestrial, joining The Devil Wears Prada 2, filming an untitled Antonin Peretjatko feature, and headlining the independent series Switch. When people ask her about what’s next, she gives the sort of answer that implies she’d rather make the thing than talk about it.
She divides her life between Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. Reads a book a week. Worships The Count of Monte Cristo. Names her company after a sweet. Co-parents a daughter born in a September Paris full of rain. Builds a career not by chasing someone else’s blueprint, but by drafting her own in two languages.
Pauline Chalamet is proof that sometimes the most interesting thing a performer can do is refuse to be defined by the family name people notice first.
