If you’ve seen one of the biggest movies of the year, Marty Supreme, or one of the biggest TV shows of the year, I Love LA, then you’ve seen Odessa A’Zion. While A’Zion seems to have come out of nowhere, she’s had a Hollywood presence for years, just with a different look.
The actress is one of the few in the business who emphasize their unique features, rather than blending in with the rest of Hollywood, and this choice has made her, her. She chose to dye her hair darker, keep its natural curl, and use makeup to emphasize her strong features rather than hide them. As someone with similar heritage and features, I’m especially happy that she chose to keep her natural nose. Seeing her on screen feels like an overdue correction to the beauty standards of my youth, which were defined by a sea of identical nose jobs. A’Zion is completely herself, right down to her Vogue “Get Ready With Me” video, where she wore her grandpa’s PJs and “fish flops” to prepare for the Golden Globes.
This reference to her grandpa is one of her only real public connections to the rest of her family, which is surprising, considering that her mother is the actress, producer, and director Pamela Adlon. A’Zion is one of the few nepo babies who actively tries to hide her connection to her famous parent, to the extent that she changed her last name and refused to act in Adlon’s semi-fictional show about their family. This risky but worthwhile decision allowed A’Zion to create an independent brand for herself, and to once again stand out as a unique presence in Hollywood.
While the actress is known for her maximalist style and magnetic personality, A’Zion manages to bury all of this charm for her role in Marty Supreme. If I’m being completely honest, I hated everything about this movie. Timothée Chalamet’s character was impossible to root for, and there were a million things wrong with his relationship with A’Zion’s character, Rachel. She has a husband for the entire movie, and cheats on him to be with Marty throughout (despite his zero redeeming qualities). Rachel even decides to paint on a fake black eye towards the end of the movie, in the hopes of manipulating Marty into staying with her. Once again…him? It was a hard watch.
Meanwhile, her character Tallulah in I Love LA was the complete opposite of Rachel, and I hated her in a completely different way. I realize this is sounding bad — but this really emphasizes her range as an actress. She took two completely different challenges, and made them both extremely complex in their own ways. Tallulah’s character development in I Love LA was especially impressive, because she went from being my least favorite character to the main reason I was watching the show. Tallulah is essentially the opposite of Rachel, in that she is extremely loud, chaotic, and unpredictable. This demeanor seems harmless at first, if a little obnoxious, but her true life is quickly revealed when a rival influencer announces in a cafe that Tallulah’s designer bag is a stolen one. A’Zion is able to take this character and make the viewer like her more, even as more terrible things are revealed about her life. In my opinion, that’s complex acting at its best.
A’Zion continues to be offered impressive roles, including A24’s movie Deep Cuts. However in this case, the actress was made aware that the original character was Mexican, and she fully dropped the role. Not wanting to whitewash the movie, she posted on her Instagram story that she’d “never take a role from someone else that’s meant to do it” and included that “there are a plentitude of people more than capable of playing this role.”
Seeing someone like A’Zion in the spotlight right now is a breath of fresh air from the constant conformity to the rapidly changing beauty standards being forced on women. Her rise serves as a blueprint for something much more sustainable: authenticity and a strong moral compass.