Emily Alyn Lind Is a Proud “F***ing Know-It-All”

Emily Alyn Lind was seven years old when her first feature screened at a major film festival. “I didn’t go,” says the now-24-year-old over Zoom from Nova Scotia. The actress wears a toasty-looking fur hat and sits cross-legged on the floor, the Canadian road traffic muffling her voice slightly. “But I had the experience of working with auteur filmmakers. We shot in Montreal, and everyone was extremely creative. People would drink at lunch. I loved staying up late. It just felt like the best thing in the world.” The New York-born star is talking about Gaspar Noé’s surrealist art film Enter the Void, which premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Lind, a child actress born to producer and assistant director John Lind and actress Barbara Alyn Woods, has only ever known showbiz, but Argentine filmmaker Noé was her first taste of international cinema — and it’s a shoot that is etched in her memory. “I was able to sit in a trailer for hours and converse with women in their mid-50s about relationship problems at nine [years old], you know?” she says about growing up in the industry. “That’s what my environment was, so I didn’t really know anything else. I just knew people in all shapes and forms, and I think I found myself trying to be a chameleon and match whatever entity sought to contain me.” She often wonders what life would have looked like had she not started so young, on shows like Criminal Minds, Revenge and Code Black. It has, says Lind, matured her beyond her years a little. “I’ve been lucky enough to have a few things that I’ve done in the past year that really measured up to that feeling I got in the beginning, especially when you’re working with legends,” she says, having starred in around four times as many projects as her peers. “Getting those first-time nerves back is exhilarating. You’re like, ‘Oh, that’s why I continue doing this.'” But every so often, Lind wishes she could rediscover this world all over again. “It can be conflicting, like, is this what I would have chosen? My first answer is, ‘Yes, every time,'” she explains, “but there’s also part of me that’s like, I want to explore what that is again, and I think a lot of coming into being an adult is finding ways to do that.” Her adulthood big break — “My big break! I love old Hollywood phrasing” — came with the revival of HBO Max’s Gossip Girl, in which she starred as the blonde-haired, sharp-tongued Audrey Hope (a reincarnation, most audiences agreed, of Leighton Meester’s Upper East Side queen bee Blair Waldorf). With the majority of the heavy-lifting done by the original show’s cult following and the shared nostalgia of an entire generation, the reboot swiftly broke the record for the most-watched HBO Max original series over its launch weekend. Lind in ‘Gossip Girl’ Courtesy of HBO Max Lind says the exposure was a gradual reckoning. She enlists the help of a flu analogy: “You feel you’re going to be ill forever, and then it ends, and you don’t really think about it anymore… I thought it would be this thing that happens and I’m going to fully fucking realize it in the moment and it’s gonna change the trajectory of my life. But it was slow and steady, and things shifted, and they haven’t gone back since.” The trajectory of her life has, she concedes, been permanently altered by Gossip Girl. In fact, Lind believes that the show was at the very beginning of “the reboot fucking era.” She continues: “Everything’s rebooted. You don’t see anything that’s not getting a reboot of some kind.” Being at the bottom of that mountain was overwhelming. “Without even premiering, we were on billboards. Months and months in advance.” But she felt as though none of the work had been done yet. “There was this fear of like, ‘Okay, but what about proving it? Let’s deliver a good show.’ That’s where I’ve always stood,” says Lind. “So there was this weird uncertainty of, ‘We haven’t even shot it. Why do you care about me all of a sudden?'” Perhaps surprisingly, the weight of its popularity wasn’t a burden for Lind. “That weight is for the people who write the thing, direct the thing, and mostly [who] are showrunning the thing. And the studios,” she tells THR. But there is a public misconception that actors have “more control than they really have.” She laughs recalling some of the reaction to Audrey online: “I remember I got cancelled a bunch of times for something my character said. And I’m like, ‘Dude.’ Delete Twitter!” Thankfully, although she has “an extremely addictive personality,” the actress never finds herself reaching for social media these days. Lind’s industry-spanning connections predate the Gossip Girl phenomenon. Venice veteran Casey Affleck, the director of competition feature Company, is a friend from a previous film, 2021’s Every Breath You Take. His latest is a mystery set on a winter night in 1975, with the filmmaker, Nick Nolte, Ben Mendelsohn and Sydney Chandler all co-starring. Lind was not asked to audition. Affleck knew he wanted her for Evelyn, a narrative-driving force of the film. “She arrives like somebody out of a fable,” explains the star. “She walks into this house in 1975 and starts telling a story, and then suddenly the whole room belongs to her. She’s a doorway into the movie.” It has, as she describes it, an “old-school Russian fairy tale vibe to it,” a depiction of what fear and pain turn you into; whether you carry it forever, use it against somebody else or release it entirely. “It has a supernatural mythic shell. But in the end, it’s just painfully human,” says Lind about Company. “It treats storytelling as survival.” Affleck’s directorial style is like nothing she’s ever experienced before. “He’s very interested in accidents,” explains an enthralled Lind. “He doesn’t want you to show him the scene. He wants to catch the second before you’ve figured it out.” It’s not a mechanical process, working with the Oscar winner, but a pretty loose one. “He has a nonchalant energy to him that not a lot of people can pull off. [There’s] a certainty that everything’s going to be okay.” She doesn’t doubt that Affleck’s source of strength will emanate at her (long-overdue) Venice Film Festival debut. “It’s surreal, because making a movie is really unglamorous — night shoots, ADR, repeating lines 50 times over,” says Lind, smiling. “Then suddenly someone says you’re going to Venice, and it’s like, ‘Hell yeah! Let’s go dress up!'” That carefree feeling — attributable to nearly two decades of experience — will carry her through a buzzy premiere on the Lido. She has “zero expectations” of the Venice audience (“That’s just instilled from a young age. I don’t expect anything of a viewer”), but Lind is crossing her fingers that, 17 years on from Enter the Void‘s Cannes launch, the experience will keep allowing her to scatter herself: “It’s a very pivotal time in your early 20s — to explore different parts of yourself. I want to be extremely intentional about where I put my energy.” Casey Affleck’s ‘Company’ Venice Film Festival Right now, Lind’s energy is split between a raft of prestigious filmmaking talent. She’s shot David Mamet’s film adaptation of his own 1988 film Speed-the-Plow with Sharon Stone, a chapter that’s thrown even a fairly self-assured Lind for a loop: “When you’re working with David Mamet, every fucking day is the most daunting day of your life,” she laughs. “I got home from set every single day and I just wanted to fucking write down everything that I learned, and that’s crazy because I’m such a fucking know-it-all and think I know everything!” She also has season two of We Were Liars (hence the months-long shoot in Nova Scotia) as well as Tyler-Marie Evans’ Pretty Babies, which just had its world premiere in Edinburgh. Lind is even working to direct a film of her own, about young actors and families moving to Hollywood, backed by Christine Vachon’s Killer Films. This self-professed filmmaking nerd is keen to learn everything she can about the trade, and is thrilled to have enlisted Vachon’s door-opening capabilities: “She’s done as much, if not more, for cinema than Miramax and Harvey Weinstein, but she just did it better and wasn’t a fucking creep.” Adam McKay, Alexander Payne, Sean Baker and Ali Abbasi are among some of the writers and filmmakers she’d love to work with. That high-brow list is a testament to her years in the biz. But let it be known: Emily Alyn Lind is keen to free herself from the shackles of child stardom. “That’s where it becomes kind of a killer, starting early,” she says. “It’s put me on this trajectory to have it figured out. I don’t have it figured out, and that’s awesome.” The 2026 Venice Film Festival runs Sep. 2-12.