Hunter Schafer Walks Out of Euphoria and Into Blade Runner 2099 on Her Own Terms

Hunter Schafer

Photo: Harald Krichel / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 31, 1998 Trenton, New Jersey, United States
Occupation	Actress and model
Known for	The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Kinds of Kindness, Cuckoo

Hunter Schafer has spent years asking not to be introduced the way most profiles introduce her. The first line of her screen career was written by an Instagram post: an open casting call for transgender girls, no acting experience required, for a pilot Sam Levinson was making for HBO. She answered it as a working model with a portfolio of watercolors and a place waiting for her at Central Saint Martins in London. She never took that place. What she has been building since is slower and more stubborn, an effort to get the industry to see the actress before it sees the category.

That effort reaches its real test now. Euphoria is over, and HBO’s finale gave Jules Vaughn, the character that made Schafer, only a brief appearance. Her next lead is a fugitive in Prime Video’s new Blade Runner series, opposite Michelle Yeoh. Jules was the role that opened every door. Cora is the first big part that asks audiences to follow her somewhere Jules could never have gone.

Schafer was born in Trenton, New Jersey, on December 31, 1998, the eldest of four children of a pastor whose work moved the family between congregations in New Jersey and Arizona before it settled in Raleigh, North Carolina. She came out as a transgender girl in ninth grade. In 2016, still in high school, she became the youngest named plaintiff in the lawsuit brought by the ACLU and Lambda Legal against North Carolina’s HB2, the state law that tied bathroom access to the sex on a person’s birth certificate. She wrote about the case for Teen Vogue and made a short protest film for the online magazine Rookie, and the law was later repealed. Teen Vogue put her on its “21 Under 21” list the following year.

Art came before any of it. She finished high school in the visual arts program of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, painting in watercolor and designing clothes that she photographed for an Instagram account with a following of its own. An agent from Elite Model Management found her there. By the end of 2017 she had moved to Brooklyn and worked for Dior and Marc Jacobs, and within months she was walking for Miu Miu at her first fashion weeks.

The Euphoria casting call arrived in that window. Levinson cast her as Jules, the new girl in the suburb of East Highland, and worked with her on how the character’s transition should read on screen, while she shaped the wardrobe with costume designer Heidi Bivens; Elle later called Jules the most experimental dresser in the show. GLAAD had counted only seventeen trans characters across American television over 2017 and 2018, and here was a lead who was trans, played by a trans actress, and written as someone who fights back rather than a victim. When the pandemic stalled production, Schafer co-wrote the second of the series’ two bridge specials, an hour of Jules talking to a therapist about womanhood and about Rue, and became the only credited writer on Euphoria other than Levinson.

Film arrived on her own schedule. Francis Lawrence cast her as Tigris, the cousin of the young Coriolanus Snow, in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, a performance reviewers called excellent and underused in the same breath. Her first lead came in Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, a German-American horror film that premiered at the Berlinale, as a teenager dragged to a resort in the German Alps where her father’s new employer is hiding something. Slashfilm wrote that she commanded every scene, and the role brought her an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Lead Performance. Yorgos Lanthimos gave her a single scene in Kinds of Kindness. In David Lowery’s Mother Mary, released by A24 in April, she played Hilda, the assistant caught between Anne Hathaway‘s pop star and Michaela Coel‘s estranged designer.

Fashion never dropped away. Prada named her a house ambassador, Mugler chose her as the face of its Angel fragrance, and she has stepped behind the camera to direct music videos for girl in red and for Anohni and the Johnsons.

The tension in her career is that the thing that opened the door is the thing she keeps trying to close behind her. In a 2024 GQ cover story she said she had turned down “tons” of trans roles, called the freedom to refuse them a privilege, and said she wanted “to be a girl and finally move on”. The industry has not always allowed it. When an industry rumor in 2025 put her at the top of the list for Princess Zelda in Nintendo’s live-action The Legend of Zelda, the talk alone set off a wave of transphobic abuse online before the role went to Bo Bragason. Euphoria was an uneasy home as well: her Cuckoo co-star Dan Stevens said that her time on the series had been, by all accounts, not a terribly pleasant one, and the final season, which critics received coolly, handed Jules a storyline as the kept companion of a wealthy surgeon and then left her on the margins of the ending. Schafer herself admits the balance is unfinished. She told Vogue she is always “doing the math of when to reel it in and when to lean into it”.

The next stretch is built to settle that arithmetic. Blade Runner 2099, created by showrunner Silka Luisa with Ridley Scott as executive producer, is set half a century after Blade Runner 2049. Schafer plays Cora, a fugitive who assumes the identity of a Blade Runner and is paired with Olwen, a replicant with days left to live, played by Michelle Yeoh. She promoted the series in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con in July and again at New York Comic Con in October, where Prime Video released a new trailer. All eight episodes, shot largely in Prague, arrive on Prime Video on November 25, 2026.

Further out sits Tom Ford‘s adaptation of Anne Rice‘s Cry to Heaven, now in post-production, in which she plays Christina in a cast that includes Nicholas Hoult and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. She is also attached to Palette, a horror film by first-time director Zach Strauss, and to OD, the horror game Hideo Kojima is making with Jordan Peele. None of these projects is a story about being trans, which is the argument she has been making for years. In November, a global streaming audience gets to decide whether it agrees.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, actresses, Michelle Yeoh, Sam Levinson, euphoria, Hunter Schafer, Blade Runner 2099

Related People

Sean Young

Katherine McNamara

Julia Garner

Mackenzie Davis

Phoebe Dynevor

Rebecca Hall