Jack Haven, the faceless killer of Camp Miasma who had to ask Hollywood for work

Jack Haven

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	August 10, 1994 Dallas, Texas
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Bombshell, Irrational Man, The Glass Castle

Little Death has no lines. For most of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jack Haven does not have a face either: the ghost who climbs out of the lake to pick off the campers in Jane Schoenbrun‘s slasher is a mask and a way of walking, and the sequence people leave the cinema talking about is one unbroken killing spree cut to Counting Crows’ “A Long December”. The role helped carry the film to a prize at Cannes and some of the best reviews any American horror picture has had this decade. Weeks after it reached American screens, Haven sat in front of a camera, uploaded a video called “Are You Casting?”, and told whoever was watching that they needed four thousand dollars of union work before the end of the month to keep their SAG-AFTRA health insurance. “I will do pretty much any job,” they said.

That gap, between how the work is received and what it pays, is the most honest way into the actor right now. Haven has spent ten years moving from a Netflix ensemble toward the strangest corner of American independent film, and every step in that direction has been better reviewed and less bankable than the one before.

The family trade made the first steps easy to see. Dallas is where Haven was born, in August 1994, but the house that shaped them was in Alameda, California, where the family moved two years later. Both parents, Laura Lundy and Robert Paine, work as actors and directors, and Haven was acting by the age of eleven. At Encinal High School they were a cheerleader; after graduating in 2012 they went east to New York University, finishing in 2015. The surname they use today reaches further back, to the songwriter Haven Gillespie, a relative a few generations up the family tree, who wrote the lyrics of “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”.

The first screen credits were small: a student in Irrational Man, a girlfriend in Alexander Payne’s Downsizing, the youngest sister, Maureen, in The Glass Castle. The job that made the face familiar came the same year. On Atypical, which Netflix ran for four seasons until 2021, Haven played Casey Gardner, the track athlete whose older brother is autistic and whose own storyline turned, from the third season, into a love story with her teammate Izzie. Most viewers met them there, under the name the credits still carry, Brigette Lundy-Paine.

Around Casey came studio work that used Haven as the sharp edge of an ensemble. In Bombshell, the film about the harassment scandal at Fox News, they played Julia Clarke. In Bill & Ted Face the Music they were Billie, Ted Logan’s daughter, sharing the screen with Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter and Samara Weaving, and some reviewers singled the performance out as the reason to watch. Haven came out as non-binary in 2019 and uses they/them pronouns.

The turn came with Schoenbrun. In I Saw the TV Glow, released by A24 after its Sundance premiere in 2024, Haven played Maddy, the older girl who pulls Justice Smith‘s Owen into a late-night teen series and then disappears from the suburb they share. The film’s most quoted scene is a monologue Maddy delivers inside an inflatable dome in their old high school, shot almost entirely in close-up. It earned Haven nominations for supporting performance at both the Gotham Awards and the Independent Spirit Awards; they won neither. In January 2025 they announced, on Instagram, that they were going by Jack Haven, a name they had first used two years earlier in a workshop for trans actors led by Saman Arastoo.

The second Schoenbrun film is where the argument about Haven gets harder. Little Death is a masked trans killer in a movie written and directed by a trans filmmaker, and the objection writes itself: why give an actor who had just been nominated for what their face can do a role that hides it, inside the oldest bad habit horror has about trans people? Haven’s answer has been to embrace the trope instead of apologizing for it. “The film is about playing with the history of the trans monster,” they told iHorror, and to Out they said, “I feel proud to represent the fear of what this fluidity embodies in us.” Whether that reclaiming lands is a fair argument to have, and the reviews suggest it mostly does. What the role cannot do is solve the other problem. A wordless villain in a Mubi release earns festival glory, not the union days that decide who gets health cover, and the YouTube plea made that arithmetic public.

Haven has been building an answer of their own on the side. Their feature debut as director, October Crow, started on Haven’s phone while the actor Peter Nolan Smith was in hospital with liver cancer; Smith and Alexandra McVicker lead a story about a young woman who flees Kentucky for a religious brothel in New York. The composer, Mina Walker, describes the budget as zero, and Haven paid Smith $250 for two days of work. They call the approach “waif”, after the old dictionary sense of anything found without an owner, and set it against earlier commercial jobs for Nike and Netflix. The film had its European premiere at the Trans Image/Trans Experience festival in Dublin in April 2026.

The screen work kept coming in smaller frames. In 2025 Haven appeared in Love, Brooklyn, Queens of the Dead, After This Death and Castration Movie Anthology ii. The Best of Both Worlds. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, with Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in the leads, opened the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in May 2026 and won the Queer Palm, reached American cinemas through Mubi in August and has been streaming on Mubi since October 2.

The next confirmed credit is Grind, in which Haven plays a character named Ricky; it has no release date yet. The more immediate question is the one Haven asked out loud in September, and only a casting office can answer it.

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Tags: actors, Gillian Anderson, Justice Smith, Jane Schoenbrun, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, I Saw the TV Glow, Jack Haven

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