Chloë Sevigny

In November 1994 the New Yorker ran a seven page profile called 'Chloë's Scene'. Jay McInerney wrote it, and the piece presented a nineteen year old from Connecticut as the new it girl of downtown New York. No film of hers had come out at that point.

Born on 18 November 1974 in Springfield, Massachusetts, she grew up in Darien, Connecticut, in a fairly strict Catholic household. Her mother, Janine Malinowski, comes from a Polish family; her father's side is French Canadian. Weekends meant the train into Manhattan with a skateboard and thrift shop clothes, until an editor at Sassy magazine stopped her in the street in the East Village and took her on, first as an intern and then as a model.

'Kids' and the independent years

Harmony Korine, her boyfriend at the time, was writing Kids for Larry Clark and put her name forward. What she had auditioned for was a minor part. When the actor cast as Jennie left the project, the lead went to Sevigny a few days before the shoot began, with no previous experience at all.

It came out in 1995, caused a sizeable row over the way it showed a group of New York teenagers, and got her an Independent Spirit nomination. A whole decade of independent cinema followed: 'Trees Lounge', Steve Buscemi's first film as a director, 'Gummo', on which she also did the costumes, and 'Julien Donkey-Boy', both of those for Korine.

Somewhere in among that came The Last Days of Disco (1998) for Whit Stillman, alongside Kate Beckinsale. That part was the opposite of what people expected from her, a shy well brought up girl in the nightclub New York of the late seventies, and it broke the idea that scruffy teenagers were all she could do.

'Boys Don't Cry'

Kimberly Peirce cast her in Boys Don't Cry (1999), the true story of Brandon Teena, the trans man murdered in Nebraska in 1993, played by Hilary Swank. Sevigny is Lana Tisdel, the girlfriend who loves him without quite understanding what is going on. That performance brought an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the March 2000 ceremony, the Independent Spirit win, and the supporting actress prizes from five critics' circles, Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago among them.

What came out of it was a career that moved between art house and studio work without asking anyone's permission. She was Christian Bale's lovestruck secretary in American Psycho, made two films for Lars von Trier, Dogville with Nicole Kidman and Manderlay with Bryce Dallas Howard, and played one of the colleagues of the reporter who made his stories up in Shattered Glass, with Hayden Christensen and Peter Sarsgaard.

A list of the directors she worked for then tells its own story. Olivier Assayas put her opposite Connie Nielsen in Demonlover, Woody Allen gave her a part in Melinda and Melinda, Jim Jarmusch used her as the frosty assistant who greets Bill Murray in Broken Flowers, and David Fincher made her the cartoonist's wife in Zodiac, with Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.

Far more ink went on 'The Brown Bunny', Vincent Gallo's film, which screened at Cannes in 2003 and is remembered for an unsimulated sex scene in its closing minutes. Roger Ebert called it the worst film in the history of the festival, though years later he gave the final cut three stars. Reports said her agency had dropped her, which she denies: nobody fired her, she says, and her first studio film arrived right after it.

Nicolette Grant and twenty years of television

HBO launched 'Big Love', about a polygamous Mormon family in Utah, in 2006, and Sevigny spent five seasons and 53 episodes as Nicolette Grant, the manipulative and permanently aggrieved second wife, with Bill Paxton, Jeanne Tripplehorn and Ginnifer Goodwin filling the rest of the house. That role won her the Golden Globe in January 2010.

Television work has barely stopped since. Two runs of American Horror Story followed, 'Asylum' and 'Hotel', then 24 episodes of Bloodline, the neighbour to Joey King and Patricia Arquette in The Act, Natasha Lyonne's mother in Russian Doll and the colonel taking command of an American base in northern Italy in We Are Who We Are, the series Luca Guadagnino made for HBO. Portlandia, Louie and Poker Face all had her too.

Two parts in 2024 got people talking. For Feud she became C. Z. Guest, one of the wealthy friends Truman Capote betrayed, with Tom Hollander, Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Demi Moore and Molly Ringwald.

The other was Monster, Ryan Murphy's Netflix anthology. She played Kitty Menendez, the mother shot dead by her sons in Beverly Hills in 1989, with Javier Bardem as José Menendez and Nicholas Chavez and Cooper Koch as Lyle and Erik. It brought her a first Emmy nomination in September 2025, in a category Erin Doherty went on to win.

Film work carried on throughout, nearly always on small budgets. Stillman and Beckinsale came back around for Love & Friendship (2016), adapted from 'Lady Susan', an early Jane Austen novella, and 2017 brought five releases: Alex Ross Perry's Golden Exits, Beatriz at Dinner with Salma Hayek, The Dinner with Richard Gere and Laura Linney, The Snowman with Michael Fassbender and Andrew Haigh's Lean on Pete.

Then came The Dead Don't Die, the zombie comedy in which Jarmusch paired her with Murray again, and Queen & Slim, Melina Matsoukas' first feature with Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith.

Behind the camera and behind the clothes

Directing has interested her for a while. Her first short, 'Kitty', screened at Cannes in 2016; 'Carmen' followed, shot for Miu Miu's commissioned film series, and in 2019 'White Echo' competed for the short film Palme d'Or.

As a producer she got Lizzie (2018) made after years of trying. In it she plays Lizzie Borden, the woman acquitted in 1893 of killing her father and stepmother with an axe, opposite Kristen Stewart and under the direction of Craig William Macneill.

Clothes amount to a second career. Co-running the label Imitation of Christ in the early 2000s came first, then several collections for Opening Ceremony from 2009 onwards, eyewear for Warby Parker, a handbag for Chopard, and campaigns for half the industry. From 2023 she has also been selling off her own wardrobe, which her followers find a good deal more consistent than odd.

What she has on now

Guadagnino has hired her three times. After the series came Bones and All, with Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet, and then After the Hunt in 2025, where she is Dr Kim Sayers, the faculty friend Julia Roberts' character leans on, with Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri rounding out the four.

One recent part came with some history attached. In 2024 she played Anne in a new version of 'Bonjour Tristesse', from the Françoise Sagan novel, the role Deborah Kerr had in Bonjour Tristesse, the film Otto Preminger shot in 1958. Also waiting is 'Atropia', Hailey Gates' first feature, which won the grand jury prize at Sundance in January 2025 with Alia Shawkat and Callum Turner, and 'Magic Farm', directed by Amalia Ulman, born in Argentina and raised in Spain.

Her most widely seen job of 2026 has been 'The Five Star Weekend', the Peacock series that launched on 9 July, in which she plays Tatum McKenzie beside Jennifer Garner, Regina Hall, Gemma Chan and D'Arcy Carden. Peacock renewed it for a second season on 5 August. Still unreleased is 'The Lonely Woman', the first feature by the electronic duo Boy Harsher, shot in upstate New York with FKA Twigs.

She has been married to Siniša Mačković, who runs an art gallery in New York, since 2020. They married at a courthouse weeks before their son Vanja was born on 2 May that year, and held a proper wedding two years later. A practising Catholic still, she says so without making a thing of it. Vanja made his first red carpet appearance in July 2026, at the premiere of the Peacock series.

More than thirty years have gone by since that New Yorker profile and the pattern has hardly shifted. Recent credits include a directing debut, a small Argentinian film and an electronic music duo that has taken up filmmaking. None of it would have struck the nineteen year old in McInerney's piece as strange.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Chloë Sevigny is Kids (1995); in all, 27 films and 10 TV shows over 30 years. They have worked as actress in 37 and producer in 1. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is American Horror Story (2011), with 254 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 19 titles. The person they have worked with most is Steve Buscemi, on 3 films, among them The Dead Don't Die and The Dinner.