Haley Lu Richardson, the actress Kogonada keeps calling back

Haley Lu Richardson

Photo: David Siegel / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 7, 1995 Phoenix, Arizona, USA
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Split, Five Feet Apart, The Edge of Seventeen
Awards	SAG Award (shared)

The career of Haley Lu Richardson makes most sense when you think of it as two careers running simultaneously, without acknowledging the other. One is the career of a reliably compelling presence who can anchor a mainstream romantic drama — Five Feet Apart grossed nearly ninety-three million dollars — and earn ensemble prizes for prestige television. The other belongs to the actress that Korean-American auteur Kogonada keeps casting: a figure of interior stillness, slight dislocation, and unusual attention to architectural space. No other working actor straddles those two registers as consistently as Richardson does, and she does it without apparent conflict.

She grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, the only child of a branding professional and a golf course architect. Born on March 7, 1995, she began formal training as a dancer at an early age, spending eight years with a competitive company and putting in more than twenty hours a week before moving to Los Angeles at sixteen. The initial foothold in the industry was still dance — she found a dance agent before an acting agent — but within a few years she was landing lead roles in independent films. Her first two features, The Last Survivors and The Young Kieslowski, both from 2014, showed the self-possession that would eventually make her impossible to overlook.

Two films in 2016 established her as someone worth watching closely. In The Edge of Seventeen she played Krista, the best friend whose easy social charisma is its own kind of cruelty toward the protagonist. In M. Night Shyamalan’s Split she faced James McAvoy across twenty-three personalities — a genre exercise, deliberately theatrical, but Richardson’s stillness in the face of the film’s calculated hysteria made her conspicuous. Neither role was the lead, yet both showed a performer who could hold the center of a scene without appearing to try.

The following year she starred in Kogonada’s Columbus, an essay film built around the mid-century modernist architecture of Columbus, Indiana. Her character — a young woman who guides a Japanese film scholar’s adult son through the town’s buildings while deferring her own plans — is Richardson at her most concentrated. The performance is largely about listening and about what she chooses not to say. The film earned her a Gotham Independent Film Award nomination for Best Actress, introduced the collaboration that would define her artistic identity, and put Kogonada on the international auteur map.

In 2019, Five Feet Apart placed Richardson in entirely different territory. She played Stella, a teenager with cystic fibrosis who falls for a fellow patient. The film’s budget was seven million dollars; it earned ninety-two million. Richardson had to be accessible in a way Kogonada’s films never require — emotionally declarative, asked to carry both a disease’s physical logistics and a romance within the same scene. She managed it without sentimentality, which is ultimately why the film earned the audience it did.

The White Lotus Season 2 gave Richardson her widest audience. Her Portia — an assistant accompanying her employer Tanya McQuoid to Sicily — occupies the season’s moral edge: neither predator nor victim, neither funny nor tragic, perpetually adjacent to catastrophe without being absorbed by it. The SAG Award the ensemble won in early 2023 was legitimate. Critical attention, however, focused so strongly on Aubrey Plaza, Meghann Fahy, and Jennifer Coolidge that Richardson’s performance in the show’s least showy role went largely unexamined. Portia is the character the season’s architecture depended on for human coherence; the fact that she barely registered as a standout is itself evidence of what Richardson does best.

After Yang (2022), her second film with Kogonada, deepened the collaboration’s terms. She played Ada — limited screentime, maximum precision, a figure at the edge of a household’s grief over a damaged android. Their third film, Zi, premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. The story of a young woman in Hong Kong haunted by visions of her future self, it acquired North American distribution through Grasshopper Film, with a fall theatrical release planned. Three features with the same director, the same economy of gesture, the same refusal of easy emotional resolution. That Richardson chose to make all three while also starring in Five Feet Apart and The White Lotus is not incidental — it is the whole argument of her career.

In late 2025 she published a poetry collection with Simon & Schuster titled I’m Sad and Horny — raw, disarming dispatches from what she described as the chaos of being a woman in her twenties. It confirmed a pattern visible throughout her career: she tends toward disclosure in unexpected registers, whether in interviews, on social media, or in print. She has also maintained a small Etsy shop selling crocheted accessories for years, a fact she references without embarrassment and without self-deprecation.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, directed by Gore Verbinski, opened in February 2026. She also stars in Ponies, an espionage thriller series for Peacock. The pairing — a high-concept studio action comedy and a genre series — is typical of her appetite for range. For an actress whose artistic identity is most legible in slow, collaborative, director-driven work, she has never treated mainstream accessibility as a retreat from it.

Zi reaches theaters this fall, which means Richardson’s most ambitious creative statement to date arrives in the same year as a Gore Verbinski film. She seems entirely comfortable with the contradiction.

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Tags: actors, actresses, The White Lotus, independent cinema, Haley Lu Richardson, Columbus

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