At first glance, Dree Hemingway seems to be all over the map. Before becoming a model for Valentino, Givenchy, Calvin Klein and many others, she spent years as a classically trained ballet dancer. She also designs clothes herself, and now she’s begun acting as well, playing the lead in this week’s Sean Baker film Starlet. She’s been wildly successful in all four areas and brings a unique sensibility to each. But for the latest scion of the fabled Hemingway clan to rise to prominence, it’s all connected by one common thread—feeling.
“You have to be present with yourself,” she explains, “which is my biggest thing. I moved out of the house when I was 17, traveling a lot. And I think it was—I know I wasn’t ready to act. If I had done a movie four years ago, or even three years ago, it would have been completely different. I wasn’t ready in my own skin to take that on. I don’t think I knew myself yet. I think the whole thing with modeling was that it was inching my way into that.”
But modeling wasn’t even the beginning for Hemingway. It all began in pointe shoes and tutus. “I started out being a ballet dancer for 15 years,” Hemingway says, “and wanted to act. So I studied acting while I was a ballet dancer. And that led to modeling because it was a way to incorporate both. That’s why I love modeling so much, because you’re able to play a character at each and every shoot. And from dancing, you can incorporate that flow of things into the shoot. What I love about ballet is that you have to listen to music and you have to feel something. It’s so beautiful. But in modeling, you have to incorporate both, and it’s the most amazing feeling.”
Modeling would seem to be awfully passive compares to acting, but Hemingway sees an intimate connection. “It was like one tiny role with each photo shoot,” she insists. “And that was kind of an exploration, getting to do that. And for me, even though I’ve done acting classes, being thrown into things I learn better than being told how I have to be in that time. Because I don’t think you actually know how it is until you’re there.”
She doesn’t completely negate the importance of training in acting. But the value she sees in the process doesn’t come where you might expect. “Besedka [Johnson, her 80-year-old Starlet costar] said she took acting classes after getting a divorce when she was 30. And she said the only reason she did it was to find out about herself, and to know herself better. That’s so genius. I think that’s only way that acting classes are beneficial—to be able to break down walls and to really feel yourself.”
Talk to Hemingawy for long enough, and you’ll find out just how important that concept of knowing oneself is to her. It even affects her view of fashion. “Another reason I got into modeling is because I love different people’s different sense of style. I could watch it for days. I think it’s so great. There’s something about a woman or a man carrying themselves when they feel they look good—it’s my favorite thing. And it has nothing to do with what or how expensive their look is. It’s just the way some people throw things on and how they carry themselves because they feel good that makes me so happy.”
That fascination led her deeper into the fashion world, into becoming a designer herself. “I wanted to design something,” she says, “that can be thrown on and should be incorporated with anybody’s wardrobe and this and that. Everything I do is based off of feeling. I know it’s really weird. I have an idea in my head but I know it has to feel right.”
“Feel.” It’s a slippery word. The way Hemingway uses it, she seems to be pointing to something similar to what others call flow. Or the zone. Or chi. That focus served her well in the largely improvised scenes in Starlet, which required a great degree of presence and authenticity. “I think that my whole life has been about being real, in a way,” she muses. “And through my acting training, everything was about really being present and listening to what the other person is saying to you. And I was really like that. I’ve always taken it in a day-to-day basis with my own life and really, you know, paying attention to who you’re with. It was amazing to see how all of us, who are all in an improvisation kind of state, reacting to one another, how well it flowed.”
Not that everything is always comfortable. In fact, sometimes the discomfort can produce some of the most interesting moments. “The nice thing about this movie,” she says, “that I love and I’ve always loved in movies before, are people’s nuances that they have, and their awkward moments and awkward silences. I feel that you feel more things sometimes from silence than you do from words.”
Hemingway, appropriately enough, pauses. And as if in reaction, she continues: “I love a long pause. I really want to work with Sofia Coppola. A lot of people didn’t like her movie Somewhere but I loved it. I thought that it was so real. I love her sense of the awkward silences, and just these shots that are so beautiful but there’s also so much meaning behind them. And I think that there’s some of that in Starlet as well. I was so happy to see what’s captured because I think it takes balls for a director to take it and let it all hang out. Because you’re not comfortable when you’re making it. We don’t have music in the background while awkward pauses are going on. It’s awkward. But it’s great. And if you can stick through it, it has the most amazing feeling.”
Her conception of feeling that runs through each of her creative outlets also extends to other areas as well. Her boyfriend, for example, is an interior designer.“The one thing that we have in common in our work,” she explains, “is that he does everything based on feeling as well. It’s about how you enter a room and how it makes you feel. And for me, that’s about how people wear their clothes. It’s about how they feel in that moment and can make such a bold statement. It can affect people in the same way. I think whether or not people want to face it, feeling is—how you are affected by your environment and the things you put on and the things even that we consume, if we’re really paying attention to how we feel about it can affect everything.“
“I’m all about that,” she continues. “I’m all about paying attention to what you’re craving in life, to what your body wants, even. It should be moderation but it also should be based on how your body takes things in. And how it feels. Also, how you feel around other people. Everything for me is about that. All my friends are about how they make me feel, and if they don’t exhaust me, and how you feed off one another and give back in some way. I don’t know. It’s so weird. It’s hard to explain feeling. It really is everything. But it’s about being aware and going back to being present in some way.”