Heir APPARENT

What do Leonardo DiCaprio, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Elisabeth Moss have in common? CHASE INFINITI playing their daughter on a screen near you

Vanities /Opening Act

SEARCH THE WORLD OVER and you'll find precisely one 20-something who can emote, do a roundhouse kick, and plausibly portray Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor's kid. Paul Thomas Anderson would know: He "saw every young woman in the United States and beyond" for that role while casting his next film, One Battle After Another.

Enter ex-kickboxing trainer Chase Infiniti. Three years ago she was doing local plays around Chicago. Now she's standing her ground against icons like DiCaprio in One Battle and Ann Dowd in The Testaments, the sequel series to The Handmaid's Tale. Her destiny seems to have been set at birth: Infiniti's parents named her for both Batman Forever's Dr. Chase Meridian and Buzz Lightyear's famous catchphrase. (She has a last name too, though she doesn't use it professionally; it's Payne.) But Infiniti's good fortune really began in 2022, when her senior showcase at drama school caught the eye of a manager. "I thought he was a scam at first," Infiniti says, "it was too easy—there's no way I'd get that lucky day one."

But sure enough, that manager helped her get an agent. Infiniti started auditioning, averaging five tryouts per week. At one point she botched a callback so badly that she wasn't sure she should keep trying. Her agent soothed her: "it wasn't for you. Doesn't mean that you're not talented." A few months later Infiniti booked the Apple TV+ series Presumed Innocent, in which she'd play the daughter of Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga.

There was a steep learning curve for Infiniti on her first major production. "I was so anxious," she says. Off camera, Infiniti was also feeling culture shock after moving to Los Angeles for the shoot. "When I first got here, I felt the city was very lonely," she says. "I don't know why I came to LA thinking I was in the Midwest and that everyone would say hi to you as you walked down the street."

Now she's living in Toronto, playing the daughter who was taken from Elisabeth Moss's character in The Handmaid's Tale. The new series, set several years after its predecessor, shows "a side of Gilead you really don't see in Handmaid's," Infiniti says. "There's a certain lightness The Testamentshas that everybody is trying very hard to maintain. I think that is what makes it so special—it has a very different tone."

Infiniti can draw upon the lessons she learned making One Battle. As she spent months training in both karate and mixed martial arts for Anderson's film—though she can't say that in real life she's quite as good as her character, "I think I got decent"—the director helped expand her horizons via movie nights, when they watched classics like John Ford's The Searchers and Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. "He's a very playful person," Infiniti says. "He gave me permission to play, which felt very liberating." Anderson returns the compliment: "I was more worried for Sean [Penn] and Leo in the combative scenes than I was for Chase. She can hold her own."

Infiniti hasn't yet booked her next project, though she hopes to voice an animated character someday—"My dream has always been to be a Disney princess"—and also sees herself eventually returning to live theater. "Broadway has been the goal since I was a kid," she says. "I know that this is something I will do." With a path that's been written in the stars, why shouldn't Infiniti be optimistic?

REBECCA FORD

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