“I don’t like being told what to do,” Alexa Demie tells me, describing why she never liked school. On paper, those words could easily be attributed to the character she’s best known for playing, flippant cheerleader Maddy Perez, but in-person, it’s clear that Demie and her Euphoria counterpart share little common ground.
Stepping into the studio in an oversized Alexander Wang suit and a gold nameplate “Demiegod” necklace, her lips painted a striking shade of rust brown, Demie plays the role of eclectic cool girl with ease. You might not see it on screen, or in the stylized portraits she shares on Instagram, but there’s an unexpected warmth to the actress. Demie breaks out into an unguarded fit of laughter when she tells me the name of her first celebrity crush, the excitement audible in her signature Angeleno accent as we discuss her latest project.
For someone who hated her own high school experience (and the whole “being told what to do” thing), it’s interesting that she’s gravitated toward projects set in the very world she sought to escape. But setting aside, Demie’s filmography is hardly reflective of your average teen fare. This year, the actress stars in two projects from A24: Euphoria and Trey Edward Shults’s music-driven Waves, as Alexis, a high school senior in a relationship that hinges between “Teenage Dream”-style ecstasy and flat-out dysfunction.
Demie’s role in Waves isn’t large, but it’s pivotal — a sentiment that could be applied to the small but mighty indie film itself. But despite the relatively small scale of the projects she’s chosen up to this point, Demie’s plans for the future are big. Next up, she’ll be starring in and producing a film about the life of her mother, makeup artist Rose Mendez.
Fashion and music are part of the plan, too — so is education. She drops into conversation that she hopes to open a school one day, as casually as if she’d told me she was ordering sushi for lunch. “I have a very specific idea for the school that I want to make,” she assures me, explaining that she’d be mindful of the frustrations she faced with her public education. “My empire is being built,” she says with a laugh.
Alexa Demie: For Alexis they really wanted no makeup and if there was makeup they even wanted it to be a little messed up sometimes because [my character] was going through these emotions, and so sometimes they would put a little bit darker shadow under my eye or just kind of make me look like I wasn’t all together. I wanted to do that. I wanted to have a more natural take on that character. I think I always bring a bit of myself to everything. The makeup artist on that was also really lovely and collaborative and we both agreed that a little less makeup for this, the better.
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That totally makes sense. You’re almost 25 now, but you’ve played high school in few different projects in the past couple years. What is it like to sort of go back in time like that? Does it make you nostalgic for your own high school experience at all?
Honestly, no. I love schoolwork. I love research and I love working, but I don’t like being told what to do. I think I struggled a lot in school because you’re on a schedule and you’re being told what to do and when you can go to the bathroom. I was always getting in trouble for talking too much. But no, I don’t want to go back to high school. I’m good.
It does bring back memories of the relationship that I was in at that age. But I was never involved in any of the activities. I didn’t really have any friends in my school. They all went to other schools and I just met them around L.A.
Does it feel at all like you’re experiencing a new version of high school?
It does, yeah. I mean, Euphoria felt like that just because we would all hang out on set, whether it was in our trailers, or we’d walk around the Sony lot or go across the street together. We would always say it feels like a field trip because it’d be six of us going across the street to get coffee and tea. But that felt like high school and that felt fun because I didn’t do that in my school. I didn’t go to any of my high school dances — I didn’t go to my prom or anything. So it was fun in that sense.
I think that Euphoria and Waves have two of the best soundtracks of the year, if not ever.
Right?
As a musician yourself, have these projects and the music on them informed your creative choices at all?
[They haven’t informed] my creative choices, but they made me really happy. I love people with amazing music taste. I mean, that’s something I look for when I’m reading scripts, because both Sam [Levinson] and Trey [Edward Shults] put the titles of their songs [in the scripts]. Trey took it a little further. He embedded the songs into the script so you can play them along with the scenes.
I kind of look for that. If I see a really whack song in the script, I’m immediately kind of like, “I’m not doing this.” I just felt really grateful because music means a lot to me.