You probably haven’t heard of Sasha Lane – yet.
In the summer of 2014, the then-18-year-old was your average college student partying it up on a beach at Spring Break. Two years later, she was front row at Paris Fashion Week alongside Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner and Outlander‘s Catriona Balfe.
What happened in between that time is she was approached by a stranger on the beach, asked to star in a movie – the critically acclaimed American Honey – and is now being talked about as one of the biggest finds of the decade.
Her fame is extremely new-found. She’s graced the covered of Dazed and Wonderland, yet her Instagram and Twitter accounts remain unverified (at the time of writing, anyway).
“I feel like I’ve been given a unique situation,” she told PEDESTRIAN.TV about her new celebrity status. “I came into this very different to most people. I feel like I’m focused, and I feel like the only reason I’m in this is so I can show a different way of doing it. I still struggle. I just want people to understand that I’m a person as well as [an actor].”
She stars in American Honey as Star, a teenager who runs away from an abusive home to join a group of delinquent teens selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door across America. It’s a sharp look at poverty in the Midwest. The the film literally begins with Star dumpster diving for food when she meets Jake (Shia LaBeouf), the leader of this band of misfits, and becomes seduced by a life of money, drugs and freedom.
Academy Award-winning director Andrea Arnold brought an entire vibe of authenticity to the film, casting 11 actors in the magazine crew – including Sasha – who’d never acted before, and mimicking the movie’s road trip in the filming schedule.
She discovered Sasha on Panama City Beach in Florida, where she was scouting for talent after her lead dropped out a week before filming. Finding herself drawn to Sasha, she literally approached her on the beach and asked her to audition for the movie.
“I was like, [sarcastically] ‘Yeah, sure, okay’,” Sasha told P.TV. “Especially being on Spring Break, and someone mentioning a movie, you kind of get bad associations.”
But she said something about Andrea seemed “really gentle and sweet”, so she basically abandoned all plans to go home to Texas and spent a week doing improv and auditioning in Walmart carparks.
If you spend any length of time talking to Sasha, you’ll learn she’s all about energy. It’s how she connects to people and places. Andrea is good energy; North Dakota – where they filmed some of the heavier scenes involving a seedy group of oil workers – is dark energy.
It’s why she chose to trust Andrea in the first place.
“I’m more about energy and how things feel and it was weird,” she said, “because even though [auditioning for a film] is not something I expected to be doing and that’s not something I’m normally comfortable with, it was just this sense of like something was telling me to be very open to it and just kind of go with it.”
That trust came in handy when it came time to film her sex scenes. They’re beautiful and powerful and incredibly raw, but they’re also – and there’s no way to write this without making you think of porn, although that’s absolutely not it – pretty graphic.
So was she nervous? “Not really,” she replies thoughtfully, “because I trust Andrea and I trusted Shia, and I trusted everyone who was involved. You’re in it, and there’s a lot of trust.”
The chemistry between Sasha and Shia is pure, red-blooded lust. The pair were rumoured to be dating after being papped holding hands in June, but Sasha declined to comment. (A few days after this interview, Shia made headlines for marrying girlfriend and Nymphomaniac co-star Mia Goth in Vegas.)
Perhaps the closest she has come to commenting on this relationship is in an Instagram post around this time last year.
“I know struggle, pain and survival,” she wrote. “I’ve kept true to who I am and have been very blessed with opportunities because of this. I did not make it to LA bc of a relationship, nor did I by conforming, I was chosen because of ME, and I worked long hard house ands months to uphold the beauty Andrea saw in me.”
Sasha grew up in Fresno, Texas, and while she wasn’t dumpster diving like her character Star, she does know what it’s like not to have money – and she has hinted at a difficult upbringing.
“I don’t know how to speak on it yet,” she told The Guardian early in October. When asked what she was into growing up, what kinds of posters she had on her walls, she said: “I didn’t have that type of upbringing. I read books in my closet, I didn’t have a personalised room. Tattoos were probably the most open way to express what I’m into and about. I waited until I was 18, and it went downhill from there. They’re my posters now.”
She has 17 tattoos now, and yep, they’re the ones you see on Star in the film. Like Sasha, Star is from Texas, and the dreds are also hers. So was anything else about the film autobiographical?
“I definitely connected [to the character] a lot, always being naive in that you’re trying to find beauty in people and the world, and also being kind of impulsive and a little free-spirited,” said Sasha. “I think Star’s very resilient, I connected to that hard.”
She told P.TV the hardest scenes to film were in fact the early ones with her abusive father.
“It’s just a very vulnerable moment and I don’t like that feeling,” she said. Wait, I say, that was your dad? Like most reviews, I’d assumed the character was her step-father, or possibly an abusive boyfriend. Not, y’know, a blood relative. “Yeaaaah,” she replies, with a kind of grimace. “That was my dad.”
The film itself an almost indescribably beautiful thing that sticks with you for days, even picking up the Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival (where Sasha caused a stir for going barefoot on the red carpet).
“[Cannes was] surreal and wow and really amazing,” she said. “It was really good ’cause I finally got to be back with [the cast and Andrea], I hadn’t seen a lot of them in a year pretty much, so that was really, really cool.”
Three years ago, Sasha was working for minimum wage at a Texan restaurant, with zero interest in acting but a strange feeling that something pretty good was going to happen.
Now she’s a 21-year-old sitting FROW at Paris Fashion Week and with a promising film career ahead of her (she’s set to appear in ‘Shoplifters of the World‘ with Joe Manganiello in 2017, as well as indie flicks ‘Born in the Maelstrom‘ and ‘Hunting Lila‘.)
“Every day,” she says. “I still do.”
American Honey hits cinemas November 3.
Photo: Supplied.
