Hunter Schafer on 'Cuckoo' and Queer Representation in Movies (2024)

Hunter Schafer didn’t set out to be an actress. Things just worked out that way.

“It wasn’t my plan,” she says, looking positively luminous on a Zoom call to discuss her new film Cuckoo. “It’s not necessarily my end goal to be an actress. But I’m having so much fun!”

The 25-year-old New Jersey native made an impressive acting debut in 2019 on HBO’s hit series Euphoria, playing a transgender high school student. In the years since, Schafer has veered away from talking about her own queer identity in the press, as she doesn’t want it to define the roles she’s offered.

Still, one thing that can be safely revealed about Cuckoo is that her character, a sullen teen named Gretchen who is forced to spend time in an eerie Austrian mountain resort with her father, stepmother, and younger, mute half-sister, is exploring her sapphic side.

“I understand the significance of us taking up space in these narratives that ultimately do affect culture in really tangible ways,” she says of LGBTQ representation in cinema. “That’s what art should do. I think it’s important for queer people to see queer people in movies.

“I also think it’s really important for people who have no ties whatsoever to the queer community to spend real time with a character that’s queer, and relate to them and have moments where they find themselves in a character that they might think they have no resemblance to. Because I feel like those are the people that can really benefit from just spending time with queer characters. That’s one of the most exciting things to think about as far as how representation can shift culture.”

Written and directed by German filmmaker Tilman Singer (Luz), Cuckoo is a progressively intense and insane affair, with Schafer’s Gretchen put through a brutal wringer by the film’s… well, we’ll leave that tidbit for you to discover.

“This was my first project outside of Euphoria,” says Schafer, whose second movie appearance, as Tigris in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes landed in theaters first, in 2023. “So I was coming into it already with the anticipation of having no idea what this is going to be like. I was certainly nervous, but I had so much fun. I know it looks very gnarly [what Gretchen goes through] — and it’s supposed to — but making the movie felt like summer camp.”

“Hunter has a beautiful way to tap into something emotional, like an emotional pool within herself in a relaxed, but not casual manner,” says Singer. “I remember we had to do some really heavy lifting emotional, intense scenes right at the beginning [of the shoot]. And what Hunter let loose there — I knew she was going to give something to our movie that was going to be really special.”

Though not exactly cut from the same horror cloth, Cuckoo should nonetheless benefit from the recent runaway success of the thriller Longlegs. Both films throw convention out the window and embrace their genres in an original, ultimately profound way.

“It’s really an emotional story,” says Singer. “It is a joy ride and it’s a thrill ride. I see the movie as a sequence of things that I cannot put into words — I guess that’s why I made the movie, because I cannot vocalize them… I think it is sort of a family story in maybe a broader sense, and it’s about cycles. It’s about loops and repetition and it is about generation in conflict. I’ll leave it at that.”

Eventually, the conversation with Schafer returns to the question of her ultimate career goal. (The actress is currently overseas shooting the Amazon TV miniseries Blade Runner 2099 — “I can say I’m shooting it,” is all she’ll reveal with a sly grin.)

“That’s a big question, and it’s sort of gotten muddy,” she says of her professional ambitions. “I used to think I knew exactly what I wanted to be, and life has continued to hand me other amazing opportunities that I’m having so much fun taking. So I don’t know what my end goal is. I know the next area that I want to explore is being more behind the camera. I’ve directed a couple of small projects, and written on a couple of things, but I really want to start thinking bigger in that space.”

Cuckoo is playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.