Odessa A’zion is dreaming big

“I walk onto set, not sure if we’re rolling. It’s hectic. There are animals everywhere, a tonne of people on the street, bystanders, extras, crew.” Odessa A’zion, Zooming in from a hotel room in Madrid, is telling me about her first day on the set of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, a ping pong odyssey starring Timothée Chalamet as the film’s antihero Marty Mauser, a table tennis amateur-league demon with a pock-marked flush and a God complex.

Orchard Street on New York’s Lower East Side had been transformed to look like the Manhattan of the ​’50s, and a salvo of camera flashes from looky-loos captured Odessa as she arrived. The 25-year-old actress and musician thought she would simply be blocking a scene (i.e. working out her movements). She was dead wrong. ​“I asked Josh: ​‘Are we gonna block it? Rehearse or something?’ Josh stops, turns to me in the chaos, and says, ​‘What? No. We don’t block here.’”

Not only was this Odessa’s first scene playing Rachel – a grifter in the vein of bug-eyed ​’80s comic Rodney Dangerfield, trapped inside the body of a neurotic Jewish housewife – but it was also the first scene of the movie. So with all eyes, iPhones and cameras trained on her (“I was so anxious, it was a lot”), she had minutes to get into character and pull out a showstopping performance as the relentlessly scheming childhood friend and flame of Mauser, who volleys in and out of his life as his star rises. No rehearsal, no warm-up – straight in. You’d expect nothing less on the set of a director who has wound up audiences with nerve-shattering films such as 2017’s Good Time and 2019’s Uncut Gems, both co-directed with his brother Benny.

“[The opening scene] called for role-play on behalf of both Odessa and Timmy’s characters, and I thought that if she had to search or stumble it could work really well,” Safdie says about his decision to let his lead actress figure things out as the cameras rolled. Did it work? Kind of. ​“There is one brief moment that made its way into the scene.”

It was an immersion by combustion: Odessa’s straight shot into the Safdie sublime. In the finished film, what detonates on screen is a performance that could fray the horsehair of a violin bow: highly strung, manic and as twitchy as Oneohtrix Point Never’s score. Trapped in a failing marriage with an overweight schmuck (played by Emory Cohen), Odessa’s Rachel steals scenes with comedic desperation as she attempts to hide a big secret. She brings a specific brand of cunning to the film, one that made Safdie feel like she ​“could have scammed me and made me feel bad about it”. She’s a deceptive Bonnie to Marty’s Clyde, attached to him like a barnacle as he attempts to raise money for a trip to Tokyo so he can play against the ping pong elite.

Rachel is the polar opposite of Tallulah Steele, Odessa’s other big role this year: a megawatt influencer in Rachel Sennott’s new HBO series, I Love LA. With black flowing hair and a wild, laissez-faire attitude, Talullah is the frenemy of talent agent Maia (Sennott) who returns to Los Angeles after time spent erecting the scafolding of a perfect life in New York, replete with celebrity boyfriends (“Shaboozey is FaceTiming me, he’s obsessed,” she quips) and supposed six-figure brand deals.

A viral video posted by Sennott in 2019 – in which she twirls to the thudding beat of Azealia Banks’ 212, pulls down her wine-coloured cat-eye sunglasses and declares, ​“It’s LA! I’m addicted to drugs. We all are. If you don’t have an eating disorder, get one, bitch!” – is fleshed out through I Love LA​’s eight boisterous episodes. It’s like Girls for the Erewhon age (complimentary), where everyone seems to have a side hustle, a hangover IV drip nurse on speed dial and a friend named Sage. ​“I was dying to do a comedy,” Odessa says of joining the cast.

Her performances in Marty Supreme and I Love LA will guarantee Odessa’s name will dominate conversations in Hollywood backrooms and brand boardrooms, greasing the wheels of a career that has been years in the making – one that, much like her most recent characters, is on the edge of a cannon barrel with a fuse about to blow. ​“If [I Love LA] is really successful, and if [Marty Supreme] is really successful, and if my career is helped a lot from that, it’s not like I came out of nowhere and am an overnight… whatever,” she trails off, seemingly unfazed by the possibility that she’s about to be massive.

Odessa’s striking look – a Joan Jett mop, glacial eyes and a septum piercing – coupled with an unassailable capacity to enthrall whoever crosses her path makes her infinitely watchable, whether she’s playing Marty’s chaos agent comrade or I Love LA​’s dumb, bikini-strapped hedonist. As we speak, she struggles to get comfortable, cross-legged and then sprawling out onto her bed. Still, she’s archly chatting as if we’re waiting outside a club and she’s one good story away from bumming a free cigarette. She’s disarming, funny and self-possessed.

Starring in two projects of such attention-drawing calibre is impossible to plan for any actor, but Odessa is used to being told she’s the Next Big Thing. She tells me as much, her phone constantly pinging off screen. ​“The only thing in my head is other people saying: ​‘Oh my God, this is gonna be crazy.’ And I’m like, yeah, OK, we’ll see. I’ve heard that so many times throughout my career.”

The LA native came out swinging, landing the kind of gigs that make agents exhale: Netflix’s gritty 2020 show Grand Army, in which she played an empowered victim of sexual assault (cancelled after one season); a main part on CBS’ 2019 sitcom Fam (same); major roles in Hulu’s popular 2022 reboot of Hellraiser and in crime drama Good Girl Jane, released that same year. But while she’s always been on the edge of something, ​“something” never quite arrived. Until now.

The reason she got the role in Marty Supreme was because casting director Jennifer Venditti remembered her audition for Euphoria​’s first season. Odessa describes her self-tape for the teen series as ​“weird”, but she was invited to join table reads with the cast for season two. Then came Covid, so her Euphoria moment ​“never happened”.

“Every time something came up I’d be like, ​‘Oh, is she right [for the part]?’ And she wasn’t right, or I was thinking about her for things [but] wondering, ​‘Why is this girl not blowing up?’” says Venditti, who has plucked a fair few actors out of obscurity, one of them being Caleb Landry Jones for his breakout role in Heaven Knows What. ​“I mean, she did things, but it was under-the-radar things. Nothing that would be a breakout in popular culture.”

In between early TV roles, Odessa also made music, learning to play the piano and guitar. In her teens, she gigged around LA as part of a band called Dessa. Three tracks have been uploaded to SoundCloud under the moniker ​“bugzbee”, and she says they have plans to release more music early next year. The raspy, ambient Alone is a haunting lullaby for driving as far away from an ex as the gas tank will take you. ​“I don’t feel stronger [about acting or music]. They feel very equal in my heart.”

She might be acting alongside Tyler, the Creator in Marty, but Odessa cites another musical zenith: at last year’s Vanity Fair Oscars party she held hands with her idol Mick Jagger, as she recounted that Tattoo You was the first album she played on her record player and could recite front-to-back. ​“He was like: ​‘Fank yew, dahling, fank yew,’” she says, doing her best impression of the octogenarian rock legend. ​“Every free chance I get, I’m working on music stuff. I’m just like, ugh, I’m tryna work with Mick Jagger, pleeeease.”

That said, her musical plans have been somewhat drowned out by the noise of sudden momentum. While filming horror-video-game adaptation Until Dawn in Budapest, she’d scrub off the fake blood caked to her clothing and spend her nights recording self-tapes for Marty Supreme. In one, her character Rachel releases a warped, guttural yelp in the middle of a public park to ward off Ezra, a man who wants his stolen dog back, played by ​“fucking scary” Bad Lieutenant director Abel Ferrara. As she regales me with the story, her eyes widen.

“I was with my friend Belmont [Cameli, a co-star in Until Dawn], who was helping me with the tape, which we’d been going at for so long. This girl came out on her balcony and, in the sweetest way, she said, ​‘Um, excuse me, I’m so sorry, I appreciate the artistic creativity, but it’s two o’clock in the morning, can you maybe…’ And I was like, ​‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry, thank you so much.’ She waited for us to finish the tape before saying it. It was really sweet. She was like, ​‘Kindly, shut the fuck up.’”

Whatever disturbance she may have caused to her neighbours, landing the role of Rachel was worth it. ​“She has such a depth, an edge and a rawness to her that it can lend to these [characters] on the fringes,” explains Venditti, calling Odessa a ​“unicorn” of a human.

“She is the kind of bonding asset a film shoot needs to make it come alive,” agrees Ferrara, who has worked with more than his fair share of totemic actors, including Harvey Keitel, Willem Dafoe and Madonna. ​“Whether in costume or not, in front of the camera or not, I felt like being next to her, I was already in the movie we were making.”

At the mention of any awards conversation, however, Odessa starts hyperventilating. ​“Once you start talking about it then you feel bad about yourself for no reason, and it’s like, wait, why am I feeling insecure and self-conscious?” she reflects. ​“It just makes you get in your head.”

The unadulterated joy of watching a half-hour comedy such as I Love LA followed by the gritty chaser of Marty Supreme will have Odessa occupying the minds and hearts of those who are still dining out on Brat Summer and the adventures of Hollywood’s next-gen in equal measure. With this pair of genre-hopping pivots, Odessa is pushing all her chips to the centre of the table. Everyone around her is betting big on the outcome, but she is tuning them all out, having the time of her life with another roll of the dice, looking to impress nobody but herself.

“I really hope that from these two things I can have the career I want to have, because that’s what I care about: making art and making good movies that someone is going to walk out of the theatre and not think, ​‘Well that was a waste of my time.’

“I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited for something in my life,” she continues of the movie that might just be The Big One. ​“It’s a life-changing, career-shifting role, with people that you’d only dream to work with. It just felt like this crazy gift.”

PROP STYLIST Philipp Haemmerle PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANTS Kotaro Kawashima and Anthony Lorelli DIGITAL TECH Charles Meyer STYLIST’S ASSISTANTS Sierra Estep, Natalya Clarke, Amilia Howells, Gemma Baguley and Maia Burt