Finally, a chance for Alana Haim to go Real Housewives. Earlier this month, the diehard fan of the venerable Bravo franchise gleefully leaned into a stunty bit of promotion for her upcoming film, The Drama: She surprised a couple getting hitched in Las Vegas alongside her even more famous co-star, Zendaya, and DJ’d the party to follow. “No one told me to dress for the part,” Haim says. “I fully took it upon myself being like, ‘Oh, not only am I getting this job, I’m bedazzling this. I’m getting the sparkly fedora. I’m getting the sparkly tie.’” Indeed she did. Commenters wrote that she pulled off a hell of a Countess Luann, of RHONY fame. Haim didn’t intend for the homage, but was flattered. “I am in my fedora-over-one-eye, Countess Luann era,” she says proudly now.
Without a particular model in mind, Real Housewives also inspired Haim’s sharply acidic turn in The Drama, A24’s black comedy written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli (Dream Scenario). Maybe not the most obvious reference point for the musician-turned-actor, who made her film debut five years earlier with winning nuance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, portraying a 20-something lost in adulthood. She’s entering a new chapter as an actor, embracing whatever gets thrown her way. “I’m just soaking everything up like a sponge,” she says from a studio green room in Hollywood and wearing a decidedly un-Housewives casual tee. “I’m the vessel.”
The Drama follows lovebirds Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) in the days leading up to their wedding. The centerpiece scene finds them at dinner with friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Haim), when the latter couple proposes a drastic prenuptial game of confession: While sipping on orange wine, each person reveals the worst thing they’ve ever done. Every disclosure is discomfiting in its own way, but Emma, who goes last, changes the tenor not just of the dinner but of these friendships, of her relationship, of the movie itself. What she shares proves profoundly disturbing — and Rachel, most of anyone, finds it unforgivable.
Alana Haim in The Drama
This places Haim in a surprisingly antagonistic role. “I begged her to be Rachel and she said yes,” Borgli tells me. “She immediately clicked into the character and found her inner demons.” You see Haim having a ball with it — relishing the nastiness. “I’m the baby of the family. I didn’t have any room to, like, scream or have an opinion,” she says with a grin. “To have those 34 years of bottled-up emotion, it definitely came out. Unfortunately, it came out on the sweetest person that has ever lived in Zendaya. She had to really take my wrath. But it was cathartic!”
The performance should cement Haim’s versatility as a performer, despite her relatively few credits. After Licorice Pizza hit theaters at the end of 2021, she went on to win critics’ awards and receive best-actress nominations from BAFTA and the Golden Globes. “That movie changed my life and I think about it every single day — a moment will pop into my brain every single day,” Haim says. “I’m scared for my wedding or for when I have my first child that Licorice Pizza is always going to be at the top, because it really did open up a whole new chapter in my life and was the greatest time of my life.” It helped that she went on that ride with a fellow-first-time actor in Cooper Hoffman, himself set for a big next act this year in projects ranging from Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial to the Olivia Wilde starrer I Want Your Sex. “We were partners in crime, so seeing him doing all these incredible things, I’m just so happy for him because he deserves it,” Haim says. “I want him to do 5 million movies.”
Rather than kick her acting career into high gear off of Licorice Pizza, Haim returned to her great love put on cruel pause by the pandemic: touring.
With her eponymous pop-rock band, co-fronted by her sisters Este and Danielle, she embarked on the One More Haim tour before recording a new studio album, I Quit (which released in June of last year). She was in no rush to jump into her next movie, though somewhere in there she did shoot a small part in Anderson’s follow-up, One Battle After Another (Anderson had been a close family friend for years, having directed several Haim music videos before Licorice Pizza). Even there, she made an impression — or at least, many memes — thanks to her now-infamous bob wig getting blown off during a wild action sequence.
“I showed up in this cute blonde bob, and everyone was like, ‘You look too good. You need to get a shittier bob,’” Haim says. “Sometimes it flew off, sometimes it didn’t fly off. We would have to reset. I was literally at the wheel of this bob.” Regrettably, she is not in possession of the bob, but she did get to hold one of Anderson’s Oscars after spending the big night celebrating One Battle’s dominant haul with him and her costars. “It was mind-blowing. To be able to see Paul win his first Oscars, I was a ball of emotion,” Haim says. “I was just crying the whole night. It was just a very emotional situation.”
Other than One Battle, she hadn’t made a movie in four years: “I was waiting for the right thing — I am always looking for projects that really push me,” Haim says. “And I am lucky enough to be able to wait because I have a job with my sisters.” Then two very different auteur-driven projects came about simultaneously: The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt’s heist period piece toplined by Josh O’Connor, and The Drama. These would be the first movies Haim ever shot without Anderson directing, and she’d need to make them at the same time given the production schedules. In the fall of 2024, she flew to Cincinnati to start filming The Mastermind, portraying a wife and mom of two whose husband goes on the run circa 1970, then got to Boston for the start of The Drama. She later returned to Ohio to wrap The Mastermind, before doing the same back on the East Coast for The Drama.
Mamoudou Athie with Haim in The Drama
All in all, this made for an intensive month of acting pingpong. “I’m this ‘70s mom that’s just trying to keep her family together, and then you go to The Drama where it’s modern and I’m playing a Real Housewives-esque, angry, screaming girl who’s so vindictive,” Haim says. “It was a crazy mind warp.” (The Mastermind released last fall to critical acclaim after bowing at Cannes.)
Among the first items on Haim’s Drama docket was that 20-minute-long dinner scene. She had some familiarity, at least, with Pattinson: “Rob is close with my siblings, which is a sentence that I’ve said my whole life, but never thought I’d be in a movie with him — I was just a huge fan,” she says. “Especially during the dinner scene, he would throw something out so randomly. He’s arguably one of the greatest actors of all time, and witnessing him act is insane live. You’re like, ‘Where is he going to go?’”
Haim’s performance is shaped more by Zendaya, however, and watching the two play off of one another makes for some of The Drama’s tensest, most riveting moments. They had not met before.
“We shot it like a play — we did it all the way through, no breaks, like you’re off to the races — except we did a gajillion takes,” Haim says. “Zendaya is one of the most incredible actresses to just observe. This is a crazy part for her to take on, and the way that she carried herself really formed the way that I reacted to her. It was one of those scenes where you genuinely forgot that the camera was even there.”
They ran so long that Haim even felt tipsy — despite not drinking real alcohol. “We shot that scene in two days, so we were drinking this grapefruit juice mixed with water, and when you drink that much grapefruit juice in a wine glass for that many hours, I swear to God, I was like, ‘Y’all, are we drunk?’” Haim says. “By the end of the day, I literally was looking at Zendaya, like, ‘What the fuck?’” In other words, Lady Gaga, you are no longer alone.
The Drama is sure to stir up discourse, which does not surprise Haim. “I saw it with some of my friends — we got an early screening and it was really crazy the amount of discussion that happened after the movie,” she says. “There are going to be very hard discussions or very funny discussions or very sad discussions. It kind of runs the gamut of emotion with this movie — and I think that without this movie, a lot of people wouldn’t be talking about those things, which is why you make art.” Will she be tracking all that conversation? “I am only coming from being in a band for my whole life, and I learned very quickly that you can’t look at anything, so I won’t be looking at anything. But I’m happy that there’s going to be discussions.”
Haim will next star in The Heidi Fleiss Story opposite Aubrey Plaza, and beyond that, sounds ready to push herself further on screen. “I have no ego. If I’m messing up, say ‘Try it different’ — I am very open to all things,” she says. “If I’m bad, you can fire me. I’m down. But I haven’t gotten fired yet, thank God.”
