Emma Pasarow, the actress who turned her Netflix lead into a director’s chair

Emma Pasarow

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	January 23, 1996 Los Angeles, California
Occupation	Actress, filmmaker
Known for	Along for the Ride, Am I OK?

The credits roll differently when you’ve sat in the director’s chair yourself. Emma Pasarow learned this in 2023, when she wrote, directed, and produced The Plug, a short film that had nothing to do with the sunlit Netflix romantic world that had made her visible. Something shifted in that transition — from the actor who takes direction to the filmmaker who gives it — and it explains a lot about the choices she’s made since the summer of 2022, when Along for the Ride positioned her as one of the more promising young faces in streaming drama.

Pasarow grew up in Los Angeles, a city whose entertainment industry is either an advantage or an overexposed fact. She chose to leave for a while: she enrolled at Wesleyan University, a liberal arts college in Connecticut with a serious theatre program, and graduated with a degree in Theatre. The move away from Hollywood while preparing for a Hollywood career is worth noting. It suggests someone who wanted to understand the craft before occupying the industry. She was born on January 23, 1996, attended Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, and stepped outside the city’s orbit at the moment most aspiring actors stay inside it.

She made her screen debut in 2012, as a teenager, in a single episode of Touch, the Fox series starring Kiefer Sutherland. A decade passed before her next substantial screen work — a gap that encompasses her years at Wesleyan and the quieter process of building technique. That gap is not unusual for actors who prioritize training over visibility. It makes 2022, when Pasarow appeared in three separate projects, feel less like the start of a career and more like the arrival of one.

Along for the Ride, the Netflix adaptation of Sarah Dessen’s novel, cast Pasarow as Auden West, a high-achieving teenager spending the summer before college in a coastal town, relearning how to live outside her own ambition. The film debuted in May 2022 and rapidly entered Netflix’s global top ten, reaching millions of viewers in its first weeks. Alongside it, Pasarow appeared in Am I OK?, a comedy-drama directed by Stephanie Laing and Tig Notaro, and in Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, the Showtime series about Silicon Valley’s most scrutinized company, where she played Penny across three episodes. Three projects in a single year, each in a different register.

The Netflix romantic-lead category has a well-documented short shelf life. Along for the Ride is a competent, commercially intelligent film that gave Pasarow a global platform, but it also placed her firmly inside the streaming-era YA romantic lead category — a category that tends to define actors faster than they can define themselves. What makes her trajectory interesting is that she appears to have been aware of this. Rather than chasing the next streaming lead, she directed The Plug in 2023, a short she also produced, and in 2024 she directed a music video for singer-songwriter Sarah Grace White, working as associate producer. These are not the moves of someone coasting on streaming visibility. They are the moves of someone building a different kind of career from the inside.

In 2024, Pasarow appeared in BOB, an independent film where she plays Hannah. In early 2025, the short horror film Animas Forks, in which she starred and which screened at Panic Fest, brought her into festival-circuit filmmaking — a fourteen-minute film about a hunting trip that turns threatening. The festival appearance marks a deliberate step outside the Netflix pipeline that initially gave her visibility, into the kind of smaller, stranger work that tends to build a more durable reputation.

Pasarow’s personal life remains largely private. What she has made public is the texture of her creative interests: theatre training, genre versatility, and a growing body of work behind the camera that suggests her long-term ambition is not to repeat the Auden West role but to outgrow it.

The next project is Waubay, a coming-of-age drama directed by James Fishback, in which Pasarow plays Carol — a film set in South Dakota, which is about as far from the coastal beach-town aesthetic of Along for the Ride as a production can get. For an actress whose breakthrough happened inside a carefully optimized Netflix romance, South Dakota may be the most revealing choice she’s made yet.

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Tags: actors, actresses, streaming, Along for the Ride, Am I OK?, Auden West

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