‘Marty Supreme, HBO’s ‘I Love LA’

Several years ago, Odessa A’zion had a promising audition to join the cast of HBO’s Euphoria. She read in front of casting director Jennifer Venditti, known for her uncanny ability to discover fresh talent, including the show’s stars Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi. A’zion, only a teenager at the time, earned a callback and a meeting with creator Sam Levinson.

“He asked me to come in and do the table reads with the whole cast, so I knew he was really serious,” she says. But the COVID pandemic abruptly halted production, and A’zion never heard from the Euphoria team again. The part went to someone else (she declines to say whom), and she — perhaps unfairly — blames herself. “I mean, it’s my fault because I don’t think that I followed up or asked about it or anything,” she explains.

All was not in vain, however. Her Hollywood fate would again rest in the hands of Venditti when, four years later, Josh Safdie was starting to put together Marty Supreme. It was to be his first solo feature after the dissolution of his longtime creative partnership with brother Benny, with whom he’d made the propulsive hit Uncut Gems. Safdie was looking for someone to hold her own opposite the already-attached Timothée Chalamet, someone who could bring a level of mischief, yearning and a Fievel Mousekewitz energy to the role. He also wanted a discovery, an actress who would present to the audience zero pretense or baggage. Safdie asked Levinson and Venditti for recommendations, and they suggested A’zion. A few months and several auditions and Zoom meetings later, A’zion got a FaceTime from Safdie.

“He’s like, ‘Odessa, Odessa, Odessa, this is where we’re going to film the end of the movie, and this is Jack Fisk, who’s doing all the production design, and that stage over there, that’s going to be Wembley Stadium, look how incredible this all is,’ ” A’zion recounts. “I was thinking, ‘Does this mean I get the part?’ But I was too afraid to ask. And I can’t remember a lot of what he said next, but I remember the last part so clearly. He said, ‘I can’t wait to make this movie better with you.’ “

Now, in early 2026, the 25-year-old is sitting in a café near her Los Angeles home, unpacking her experience as the breakout success of the season. Marty Supreme is A24’s highest-grossing film in North America at $81 million and counting (it’s also the studio’s most expensive, at $70 million) and an awards-season darling, with nine Oscar nominations, including best picture. She’s still coming down from her Golden Globes high, which she says was the first time she truly understood the impact of the movie’s success. “Steven fucking Spielberg came up to me and was like, ‘Can I say hi to you?’ “

She’s also one of the new faces of HBO’s Sunday night programming; as the seemingly cursed third season of Euphoria faltered through delays and rewrites, the network bet on a new crop of hot young talent with I Love LA, the ensemble comedy from creator Rachel Sennott that both trades in and excoriates zillennial internet-fame culture. She stars as Tallulah, a TikToker trying to pivot a viral moment into lasting fame and fortune with the help of her best friend and manager (Sennott). The network was quick to renew the show for a second season (“I want Odessa to do many seasons of the show,” says HBO comedy boss Amy Gravitt), and the show has launched a flurry of think pieces and discourse, much like its spiritual predecessor Girls. “Honestly, the first thing that made me realize the show was working was the fan-cams,” says Sennott. “Seeing all those videos, or people saying, like, ‘I’m such a Tallulah.’ I was sending them to everyone [in the cast], like, ‘You’re a star, you’re a star.’ ”

A’zion knows that she’s in the middle of an atmospheric rise. The signs are everywhere, including being asked to do her first major magazine cover. But despite her onscreen bravado, and growing up in the industry as the daughter of Emmy-nominated actress Pamela Adlon, she feels woefully underprepared. There’s the schedule — the slog of doing back-to-back press tours, plus an awards campaign, all while starting production on her next (yet-to-be-announced) project on location in Montreal. And there are the eyeballs, both IRL (she has stage fright) and online. “I’m not used to this many people paying attention to me,” she says.

Before the publication of her cover story, A’zion announced that she exited Sean Durkin’s A24 film Deep Cuts following online backlash to her casting given the character is described in the book as half Mexican and half Jewish. A’zion apologized and explained on her Instagram Stories that she took to heart the comments and concerns about whitewashing the adaptation of Holly Brickley’s novel: “I’m so sorry that this happened…I’m so pissed y’all, I hadn’t read the book and should have paid more attention to all aspects of Zoe before accepting… I’d never take a role from someone else that’s meant to do it. That SHOULD do it! That’s not me. There are a plentitude of people more than capable of playing this role and I am NOT one of them.”

She lives in Los Angeles’ Mid-City neighborhood, a laid-back, family-filled area that has the opposite vibe of the ultra-hip Eastside neighborhood that the I Love LA characters call home. Think less Marty Supreme jacket and more Vuori zip-up. She has three roommates, a mix of friends and internet connections. When she’s traveling for work, they step in to take care of her menagerie of pets; currently, it consists of two dogs, two cats and three tortoises, but at one point there were snakes, a bearded dragon, ferrets and bunnies. “She’s messy, but in the way a planet has moons stuck in its orbit,” explains Safdie.

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She arrives at the coffee shop carrying an iced coffee she made at home and declines my offer to treat her to something more. She hasn’t developed the taste for luxury goods that her Marty co-star Chalamet has honed over the years of receiving blockbuster-level salaries (and dating a billionaire). She’s dressed in her signature wardrobe of baggy jeans, baggy top, vintage boots. When asked how she’s celebrated big moments like her recent projects’ successes or SAG’s Actor Award nom, she comes up empty. “I didn’t do anything the day of the nominations; I think I literally just ate pickles,” she says with a laugh. “I’ll always be eating pickles.”

To some degree, A’zion’s career feels preordained. Her mother has been a respected Hollywood fixture for decades (best known for Better Things, she also worked on King of the Hill and Californication); her father also worked as a producer and director (though not nearly as successfully as her mother). Her sister Gideon Adlon, five years her senior, is an actress best known for the 2018 comedy Blockers. “I remember that I knew of her,” says her I Love LA co-star True Whitaker, daughter of Forest. “Her older sister knew my older sister, and L.A. is kind of small in that sense.” It’s an upbringing easily (and often) dismissed as one of nepo baby privilege, but the reality is more complicated.

She attended CHAMPS Charter High School of the Arts in Van Nuys but then went to boarding school in Germany for a year (her parents divorced when she was young, and her father has lived in Germany ever since). But she didn’t speak the language, so she was sent to a special language institution. By the time she went back to the boarding school, she was behind in the actual curriculum, so she came back to L.A. and took summer school classes to catch up. A’zion describes the experience as “weird” but not traumatic.

When she was 16, her mother’s show Better Things premiered. It ran for five seasons on FX, starring Adlon as a divorced actress raising three daughters on her own. Adlon received widespread critical acclaim, plus an Emmy nomination and a Peabody Award for the series, which is widely known to be thinly veiled autobiography. The series depicted her onscreen daughters experiencing common coming-of-age issues like puberty but also more heightened and vulnerable moments; the middle sister, Frankie, has a period of gender dysphoria and is often shown being quite cruel to her mother. Adlon has always insisted that Better Things‘ storylines are exaggerated, but the comparisons to real life are still a sore spot for A’zion, who began using a stage name inspired by her middle name (Zion) in 2021, and she’s still uneasy talking about it.

“People will assume things based off of watching the show,” she reads from a note she has saved on her phone, which she wrote in advance, expecting the question. “And all I can say is it’s very much from one person’s perspective of possible shared experiences.” When asked whether watching her mother’s career inspired her to become an actress herself, she is equally guarded. “It’s really hard to talk about without getting into personal specifics that I probably shouldn’t let the world know about,” she says. Did her mom try to talk her out of it? “Again, that’s really hard to answer.” A’zion declined to discuss her current relationship with her mother.

Adlon declined to participate in an interview, but she spoke in depth about the show’s impact on her daughters during a 2016 episode of NPR’s Fresh Air. “At first, I was being very protective of [my daughters] in terms of what I was doing and the material so my kids didn’t feel like they were being co-opted or that anything was besting them,” she told host Terry Gross. Eventually, she says, her kids got “very involved” in helping her cast the actresses on the show. “They’re very much a part of it, and the show is completely dedicated to them and all that they do. The show really gave them a voice.” She hasn’t spoken publicly about A’zion’s newfound success but did post both the trailer for Marty Supreme and the poster for I Love LA on her Instagram.

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The first job A’zion booked was a five-episode arc on Nashville, playing a teenage runaway who befriends Maisy Stella’s Daphne Conrad; she was 17 when it aired. “I had no fucking clue who anyone was on set,” she recalls with a laugh. “Meaning their job positions. The director versus the first AD versus the gaffer. And every time we did a take, I was like, ‘Am I doing this right? Should I be looking at a different spot?’ I was so young and bad, and I hope people don’t judge me for my early work because I feel like I’ve come a long way.”

(Whitaker says A’zion is one of the few actors who always knows whether her takes went well. “She’s not afraid to be like, ‘You know what, I didn’t love that one,’ and she’s willing to fight for a take that she feels good about,” she explains.)

Jobs followed steadily, if quietly, from there. She starred in the one-season-long CBS sitcom Fam opposite Nina Dobrev and on the Netflix high school drama Grand Army before pivoting to indie movies as a way to figure out what sort of material she connected to most; she says her role as Yara Shahidi’s best friend in 2023’s Sitting in Bars With Cake was the first time she really connected to a character. “I remember I saw her in this movie Good Girl Jane,” says Sennott. “She’s a supporting character, and I was like, ‘Who is that girl? She’s so magnetic and charismatic.’ “

In early 2024, Sennott was working on what was then just a pilot for HBO, inspired by her first year living in L.A. A’zion heard about the auditions and sent in self-tapes for the roles of Alani (the lovable nepo baby played by Whitaker) and Tallulah. The sides described a scene in which Tallulah runs across the street and is nearly hit by a car, and A’zion decided to do it in her backyard.

“I was always told that casting directors want you up against a blank wall, that they don’t want your reader doing too much, but I think that’s bullshit,” she says. “And as soon as I stopped listening to that and doing what I thought was right, I started booking.” HBO brought A’zion in to read with Sennott in front of Gravitt and CEO Casey Bloys. Says Sennott, “I just felt so activated by her in our scene, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s her.’ ”

By all accounts, the character of Tallulah is the show’s chaos agent. She’s brash and bold — Sennott points out that, according to an often-missed Easter egg in an early episode, she’s also a Gemini — and her wardrobe wouldn’t be out of place at a club of either the night or strip variety, even if the scene finds her at a funeral. “First and foremost, the thing that is most different about Odessa and Tallulah is wardrobe,” says Josh Hutcherson, who plays Sennott’s easygoing boyfriend on the series. “Odessa is always dressed in oversized, boyish, super cool clothes. Tallulah is wearing next to nothing most of the time.”

A’zion struggled with the chasm. “Playing someone who’s out there, personality-wise, is fun, and I know I’m not the quietest bitch on the block, but clothing-wise, that was really difficult for me,” she says. When they taped the first iteration of the pilot, she pushed back on the wardrobe. She also asked to do her own hair and makeup. “I have a lot of mental disorders, and I get really overwhelmed when people are touching me and in my face and in my hair — it’s an anxiety thing.”

Sennott had never worked with anyone who requested that before but easily obliged: “It was great, she’s amazing at it, and I was like, ‘Girl, I’m about to hire you to do my hair.’ ” A rumor started going around on TikTok late last year that A’zion’s hair is fake, but her co-stars are quick to shut it down. “She’s Miss Hair, she takes forever to accentuate every little curl, but it’s not a fucking wig, let me tell you,” says Whitaker.

By the time HBO ordered the pilot to a full season and the cast and crew reconvened on set, A’zion had come around on the wardrobe. “I was like, ‘Make the shorts shorter, I know who Tallulah is now,’ ” she says. “She’s confident, and I’m really grateful to her because she helped me get more comfortable with my own body.”

When A’zion learned about the role in Marty Supreme, she knew the character instantly. To her, Rachel is just like Marty — a woman who will do whatever it takes to get to her end goal (money and security), who is driven, emotional, foolish, enigmatic; it was instantly clear to her that it was a role designed to make an actress pop.

“It was so juicy and meaty, and I got to do everything: I was kidnapped, I was shot, I was a beggar, I was a really strong, independent woman going through an emotional roller coaster,” she says. “I knew people would respond to that character no matter who played her.”

For her audition, Safdie and Venditti asked her to self-tape a scene in which Rachel calls on a pay phone and shakes down Abel Ferrara’s gangster character Ezra Mishkin. She was filming the horror flick Until Dawn in Budapest, and there were old-timey phone booths all over the city, so A’zion set up her tripod — she brings it with her everywhere — and asked her co-star Belmont Cameli to read as Mishkin. The audition, which A24 released on its social media channels, has since gone viral.

When Safdie met her in person for the first time, she brought him and Chalamet souvenirs from Budapest. “She showed up with a shoulder bag that she seemed prepared to live out of for weeks,” he says, “and gave us these strange objects, which spoke to how she spent her downtime.”

Marty was an easy yes — she’d long had both Safdie and Chalamet on her own wish list of dream collaborators — but not an easy job. They filmed exterior shots during the winter while A’zion was dressed in a pencil skirt. Several scenes called for her to scream or hyperventilate, which started to affect her psychosomatically. The prosthetic pregnant belly she wore gave her welts and cuts (she whips out her phone to show dozens of photos she took of her injuries, which did look particularly gruesome). And she did all this while couch-surfing in New York.

During short productions, films often put actors up in a hotel, but on longer shoots the industry standard is to offer a relocation fee and leave it up to the actor to find their housing. “Very few times does that actually cover rent,” she explains. A’zion first landed at a friend’s place in Brooklyn but soon found herself in need of a new arrangement, so she called Whitaker. “She told me I could come stay with her, but she was living there, too, so we were either sleeping in her bed together or I’d sleep on the couch,” A’zion says. If she needed solitude to memorize her lines, she’d put on headphones and walk around the East Village. “I’d give her an A [as a roommate],” says Whitaker. “She’s really clean — she’s very OCD about it.”

Despite growing up the way she did, A’zion says she didn’t truly understand the way the industry worked until this year. Her previous jobs either didn’t garner enough success to warrant a press tour or — in the case of Grand Army — the pandemic prevented her from going to premieres and junkets. She watched her friend [and Better Things star] Mikey Madison go through the machine last year with Anora but says that it didn’t prepare her for the intensity of instant exposure. “The first time we did a Q&A after a screening, I was sweating and shaking,” she says.

She has a prescription for beta blockers, the preferred red carpet antidote of several of her I Love LA co-stars, but she’s so far declined to take them because she’s more scared of the possibility that they might make her feel weird than she is of her current anxiety. I ask if she’s going to prepare a speech for the Actor Awards, and her eyes widen. “I think I’m going to have a heart attack just from you saying that,” she says. She shared a table at the Golden Globes with Chalamet and Rose Byrne — Mary Bronstein, the director of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, is married to Marty Supreme co-writer Ronald Bronstein — and watched in horror as the room’s eyes turned their way. “When they both won, they’re so deserving, but all I was thinking about is, ‘Now they have to go do the scariest thing on planet Earth: go up there on that stage and talk in front of people they admire.’ “

The natural question for someone experiencing this type of moment is, “What’s next?” but A’zion insists she doesn’t have a good answer. There will be more projects coming: the movie she’s filming in Montreal and the second season of I Love LA, which doesn’t have a production date. She’s been making music for years — she took formal piano lessons as a kid and has since learned to play the guitar and the ukulele — and spent any free moment of 2025 in a recording studio, with the goal of releasing an album this year.

“It’s really hard after doing Marty Supreme to think about what I would do next because that was my ultimate goal,” she says. “I guess I just hope to keep playing insane women. I hope I’m never the straight man. I just want the juicy, fucked-up roles. I will play whatever insane character somebody wants me to play.”

This story appeared in the Jan. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

Jan. 29, 8:30 a.m. Story was updated to include Odessa’s announcement of her exit from Deep Cuts.