Actor, Model, Journalist—and Now Film Director

We’re here to discuss her directorial debut, Atropia, a screwball sendup of the military-entertainment complex that draws on her years of researching U.S. military training sites. We put in an order for two Diet Cokes, burgers, one meat, one fish, both with the works, and fries. She removes her coat to reveal a monogrammed navy sweater over a white Oxford: “HBG,” but Hailey Gates is fine too. It's a real dealer's choice,” she says, dryly, about her name preference.

It’s a Friday afternoon and a special one at that—Atropia is officially open in select theaters—and Gates is still feeling a little hungover from the premiere afterparty earlier in the week. Atropia is set in 2006 and follows an aspiring actress (Alia Shawkat) and a veteran (Callum Turner) who are performers in a “24/7 warfare simulation” used to train U.S. soldiers for deployment, in this case, to Iraq. It’s essentially an anti-war rom-com, and the party, at the AIA New York Center for Architecture in Greenwich Village, captured Atropia’s cheeky sense of humor. There were overflowing platters of dates and Turkish delight, a performance by singer Zahra Alzubaidi, who appears in the movie, and throw pillows upholstered with former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous quote about “unknown unknowns.”

Gates had been popping up across my cultural radar since at least 2017, when she played a brief yet memorable role in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (drugged-out mother). She went on to become something of a character actress for the A24 set, with appearances in the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems (annoyed auction house employee) and Luca Guadignino’s Challengers (Tinder swipe). There were various fashion campaigns, most notably for Miu Miu, as both a model and campaign director; I’m willing to place money that her long hair and signature plait were on the Poor Things moodboard. Gates had yet to see her second effort with Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. “Hopefully I'm still in it,” she says. “I do such small parts, you never know if you make the cut.” She did indeed, and pops up briefly as “Trish,” an impatient girlfriend at a bowling alley.

This year, Gates is set to appear in two anticipated films—or at least the trailers suggest that she made the cut. First up is Aidan Zamiri’s The Moment, a mockumentary starring Charli XCX as an alternative version of herself circa Brat Summer. In April, there’s The Drama, a mysterious romantic comedy starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. In between all this, Gates has also been chipping away at a variety of off-the-record projects. “I just shoot and shoot, do a fashion job, then take that money and go out with my two-person crew,” Gates says. “We shoot, and then we sit on it. I like things to gestate.”

Atropia is dedicated to Gates’ maternal grandmother, Joan Tewkesbury, a director and screenwriter (including for Robert Altman’s Nashville). Gates was raised in Los Angeles and describes her younger self as a “really humiliating experimental theater teenager” who enrolled in writing classes at UCLA to study with adults twice her age. (One classmate was Sherilyn Fenn, a.k.a. Audrey Horne on Twin Peaks; both appeared in The Return but never crossed paths).

After moving to New York in 2008, Gates spent the next four years studying playwriting and experimental theater at NYU. “The other day I found a video of a dance piece from that time, we were jerking off baby powder bottles while Rush Limbaugh played in the background,” she says with a laugh. “I'm really glad I got that shit out of my system at the right time.” After graduation, Gates worked in the advertising department of The Paris Review and auditioned for films. She landed her first break as a young bride in Jonathan Demme’s 2015 film Ricki and the Flash. When she wasn’t performing a choreographed dance to the tune of Meryl Streep singing Bruce Springsteen, Gates could be found hanging out with the production crew. “I always had too many questions,” she says. “At one point, the DP turned to me and was like, ‘All right, you’ve got to give us some space.’”

“Jonathan really made me feel at home, and he populated this big, silly, shiny Hollywood movie with real downtown freaks and amazing musicians that he loved,” Gates says. “I was really moved by the idea of bringing your community into your film, and I’ve really tried to do that.”

Gates continued modeling and auditioning while working on a revival of Glenn O’Brien’s beloved public access cable show TV Party, which originally ran from 1978 to 1982 and introduced New Yorkers to downtown characters like Klaus Nomi, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Fab 5 Freddy. A segment featuring Gates landed her a meeting with Vice, and she was cast as the host of State of Undress, an investigative docuseries about fashion, gender, and beauty. Gates laughs as she recalls how her long braid was immediately marked as a liability during risk assessment training. “This guy took one look at me and was like, ‘We have a big problem.’ He grabbed my braid and showed me all the ways that I could be assaulted by it,” Gates says, miming being yanked from the back. “I started wearing it in front of me. My sound guy always called it the snake: ‘make sure your mic is never on the same side as the snake!’”

State of Undress aired in 2016 and 2017, during which Gates interviewed factory workers in China, surfed in Gaza, and attended a concealed-carry fashion show in Ohio. I feel extremely confident in saying that she is the only so-called It Girl who has interviewed hardline Islamic cleric Abdul Aziz Ghazi. “Next to shooting the movie, it was the most fun I've ever had in my life,” Gates says of the show, adding that “feeling the tentacles of the American empire everywhere that I went definitely laid the groundwork for what became Atropia.

“When State of Undress was not renewed for a third season, Gates began developing a new show in which she would “audition for walk-on roles all over the world.” She had caught glimpses of the fake towns from the highways of her Southern California childhood, and “wanted one of the episodes to be me getting hired as an actor to play a reporter in the training village,” Gates says.

That concept evolved into a documentary, and Gates spent the next few years in deep research mode, interviewing role players and visiting military bases. The Department of Defense was receptive, to an extent. She and a producer were even invited to speak at a Marine symposium in San Diego, “to pitch them our filmmaking style and make our case for the level access that we were interested in,” Gates recalls. They were scheduled after General ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, “who told the room full of marines that it’s not a great idea to say to the press, ‘it's fun to shoot people,’ which he famously said in 2005 talking about the Taliban.” Needless to say, “it was quite an act to follow.”

In 2019, Gates was invited to participate in Miu Miu’s short film series Women’s Tales. She applied her research to a fictional narrative and made the movie Shako Mako, an abbreviated Atropia that also stars Shawkat. Behind the camera for the first time, she was able to apply lessons learned on set, among them Lynch’s advice “to make sure the practical doesn’t infect the possibilities.” After a screening at the Venice Film Festival, Gates’ fellow Women’s Tales director Lynne Ramsay threatened to stab her with a fork if she didn’t turn the idea into a feature, and quickly, before a male director stole the idea.Ultimately, the DoD would not give Gates the access required for her documentary, but all of Gates’ research into their deranged world felt ripe for satire. While on set for Challengers—she plays “Helen,” a snubbed date who still shares her bed—Guadagnino assigned Gates to send him a script in a month.

This encouraging gesture was consistent with Gates’ longtime friendship with the Italian director, a producer on Atropia: “Luca is one of the most generous and athletic directors I have had the pleasure of working with. He is a master of blocking,” Gates says. “People use this ugly word ‘tone’ to talk about movies a lot but for me Luca creates something more important: a tempo. He can hold two very important things in him at once: tenderness and doggedness.” In Atropia, Shawkat plays Fayruz, whose dreams of Hollywood stardom are complicated by an affair with Turner’s insurgent, “Abu Dice.” The script also incorporates Shawkat’s pregnancy, which is revealed in one of the film’s best (and sexiest) scenes.“It was an extraordinary moment in someone’s life to be able to capture on film,” Gates says. “I didn't change the character that much; it adds to her intensity and determination.”

Atropia was filmed over 19 days on a California movie ranch. Specifically, the same “Third World Village” set as American Sniper, a fitting piece of meta-commentary for a film that confronts Hollywood’s “long-standing” PR work for the Pentagon. There was also a guerrilla shoot at the Venetian in Las Vegas. “Callum was dressed in fatigues, and people were coming up to thank him for his service,” Gates says. “I was in heaven, nothing is more exciting for me than having a tiny, secretive crew.”

Atropia went on to win the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic features at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. One of the film’s admirers was noted cinephile Charli XCX, who reached out after watching Atropia on the festival’s streaming service. A friendship grew, and at last year’s Coachella, the pop star declared a “Hailey Benton Gates summer.”

Gates will be back at Sundance this year, this time on screen. In The Moment, Gates plays a character based on Charli’s creative director, Imogene Strauss. She’s apparently a rare voice of reason, asking in one trailer, “What’s metaphorical cocaine?” “I was really charmed by their approach,” Gates says of Charli and Zamiri, “and it's exciting to be around somebody else making their first film, having just done it.”

After Sundance, everybody was “really afraid” of Atropia, Gates says, and the film struggled to find distribution. Gates paraphrases Truffaut’s line about how “there’s no such thing as an anti-war film” because combat is inevitably glorified when presented as cinematic entertainment. But Atropia portrays the mid-aughts American military as a remarkably pathetic venture. Smells of chai, gunpowder, and burning flesh are piped into the simulations, courtesy of the military’s deal with Glade. The commanders (Sevigny, Tim Heidecker) are cartoonish and have little faith in the young men they are training with laser tag, broken animatronics, and baby powder suicide vests. Many of the actors playing the soldiers were born after 9/11, and Gates had to sit them down to discuss what living in that moment felt like.

Today, Gates refrains from revisiting her adolescence beyond her passion for playwriting, but she does mention the Patriot Act as a pre-teen political awakening. “I think the anger and uproar was so warranted, it was kind of the last moment where anybody had any impulse to protect their privacy,” she says. “Now it’s like, ‘Here's my birthday and my blood type.’” Gates admits that she can be paranoid about privacy and that her team makes fun of her for turning off her tech.

“It's obviously an incredible hypocrisy, because I am a photographed person and out in the world,” she says. “Someone once described being around me as like driving pedal to the metal on the freeway with the emergency brake on. It resonated with me. It's true. I am going so hard, but I'm always doing something that's making it more difficult.”

“I have to have some sort of public-facing thing,” she says. “But I’m also putting my phone in the microwave.”

Quinn Moreland writes about art, culture, and style.