A few years ago now, Chase Infiniti — then an aspiring actress, grinding away and willing her first big job to materialize — auditioned for two projects the same week.
One of them was One Battle After Another, the dizzying thriller that would go on to shower director Paul Thomas Anderson with Oscars and make Infiniti, fresh-faced and disarmingly awestruck, an overnight superstar. Cue a whirlwind awards season in which Hollywood all but bowed at the 26-year-old’s feet: She came away with BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations, Leonardo DiCaprio in her corner and a devoted fanbase of millions rooting for her next film.
That next film just so happens to be the other project she read for alongside One Battle, and Niki Byrne’s The Julia Set has been just as weighty an experience for Infiniti as PTA’s awards darling. “One Battle and The Julia Set have been in my life for about the same time,” begins the rising star to The Hollywood Reporter. “It was one of those things that gave me butterflies the first time I read it, and it’s hard to find the things that do that. But I’m somebody that when I find something, I’ll put everything into auditioning for it — to getting as close as I can to it. Because I know it’s that special.”
Byrne’s coming-of-age story starring Infiniti, Christopher Briney, Gillian Anderson, Nina Hoss, Jason Isaacs, Alex Dillard and Nico Hiraga is earning its world premiere at TIFF on Friday night, and it is decidedly special. The feature, repped in the U.S. by Gersh and internationally by HanWay Films, follows Infiniti as Julia, a mathematics student with untapped talent who is drafted into preparing for the country’s most challenging math competition. She is swept off her feet by the dashing Pascal (Briney), a fellow student keen to break free from the shackles of his famously brilliant father (Isaacs). But Julia’s gifts soon threaten Pascal’s genius. It is a poignant, powerful tale of a young woman who comes to realize she is the lead character in her own story, anchored by a potent performance from Anderson as Anne, Pascal’s mother, who was forced to abandon her own mathematical ambitions long ago.
And for Infiniti, who also serves as an executive producer on The Julia Set, it was a deeply personal — and empowering — journey. “While I was reading it, I was like, ‘Oh, I remember a point in my life where [I was] kind of scared to grow into what I’m capable of,’” she continues to THR. “I remember when I was scared to show the world what I could actually do, and getting to see that in a world that is so far away from what I do, high-level mathematics, I thought that was really interesting to see.”
It wasn’t a smooth ride. There was a point in time when Infiniti was admittedly “heartbroken” because The Julia Set‘s shoot clashed with Hulu’s The Testaments (a TV role that would earn the actress her first Emmy nomination). But she and Byrne had formed a close bond, kept in touch and when Infiniti told them, “Guys, I really would love to be a part of this,” Byrne and her crew made it work and pushed production back by a month.
Grateful doesn’t cover it — Infiniti was overjoyed. Though it was the same sense of chaos onboarding Briney, who was riding the stratospheric high of The Summer I Turned Pretty and eager to carve out a career for himself in projects from distinctive, original filmmakers. “I don’t know what else to call it other than maybe a rush job,” the 28-year-old laughs to THR ahead of the premiere. “I know that they’ve been trying to get this movie made for years, and I think there were a few different iterations of it that almost went into production and then didn’t. And to my understanding, they lost their Pascal a few weeks before they started shooting.”
Chris Briney plays Pascal in The Julia Set.
Antonio Calvache
Briney was flying to Vegas when a script landed in his inbox. “My manager was like, ‘Can you just read this? Because it’s really good.’” At the time, he was actually looking forward to some richly deserved time off. “As soon as I finished it, I was like, ‘Fuck, man. This is a special movie, and I’ll do anything I can to be a part of it,’” says Briney, his determination to work with Byrne echoing that of his co-star.
A lot of the work for Briney — undertaken in a matter of weeks — was finding empathy for his character. Some audiences might leave The Julia Set believing Pascal to be the villain of Julia’s narrative, but Briney and Byrne’s discussions were focused on two talented people who were raised very differently. “I’ll leave it to other people to discuss whether or not his actions are forgivable and such,” he says. “But the job was to find where I loved him and in all the ways that he was shaped by the world he was placed into. He’s not devoid of blame and ignorance and the things we see him do, but he was not really set up for success in a social way. He was more just expected to be a great mathematician.” Briney feels really bad for Pascal in many of those moments. “I have a lot of love for this kid who just can’t do the right thing.”
He can’t help but gush over Byrne, director of 2021’s Evan Wood, and the sense of freedom she cultivated across the 25-day shoot. “Credit to Chase and to Niki for just being game to play,” says Briney. “I think it helps that we all really cared about this movie, and obviously I’m too close to the source here, but meeting Niki and hearing the way that she wants to shape the world was a weight off my shoulders because I was like, ‘Oh, I can put all my trust in you, and I can do my thing, and you will guide us in the right direction.’ I don’t want to speak for her, but I would imagine that Chase took the same sort of approach.”
What was also liberating for Infiniti was getting to flex some new muscles as an EP. She giggles thinking about how daunting the prospect initially seemed. “I remember when I did my first job, I kept asking everyone what [their] job was. I couldn’t really understand what a producer was, and it felt so foreign to me,” she explains. “[It was] almost like you would have to… not fear them,” she pauses. “But you’re like, ‘I don’t really understand them, so I’m a bit scared of them.’ At least that’s like what it was when I was first starting out,” she laughs.
Coming away from The Julia Set, Infiniti is much more assured about the responsibilities of a producer. “Over time, I’ve learned how important a producer’s job is — not only getting things happening on the day, but championing something,” she says. “It was a way that I could vocalize needs and protect myself and protect my cast in a way that I hadn’t experienced before.” For example, she recalls pulling up a picture of what she’d like Julia’s hair to look like at school. “Small things like that,” says Infiniti, “but also if a cast member had something they were struggling with or had a question about or that they felt a bit awkward bringing up, I could be a nice middleman and empower them to bring it up to production, or I could if they were comfortable with me doing it.” She likens the experience to having a safety blanket on set.
Naturally, with seasoned pros such as Anderson, Isaacs and Hoss around, not every actor would have been in need of a middleman. Both Infiniti and Briney confess to fawning over watching their seniors at work, and Briney says it was even a little Shakespearean. “It’s marvellous and mind-blowing, and they just source it from different places, and they were all wonderfully kind,” he says. “We had a moment watching it in the classroom and [Hoss] deliver these paragraphs of technical math speech. It felt like Shakespeare,” he laughs. “She was wildly talented and it was really amazing to see up close.”
Infiniti concurs with Briney on the work of Hoss, who plays their elusive, hard-to-impress math professor. “She has this ability to just completely pull you in. She could not even be saying anything in the scene, and she could just suck you in immediately. I just became so in love watching it,” says Infiniti. “I remember the days I would be there with Gillian and Jason, and they’re the type of people that when you call action, everyone was up in [front of] the monitor and sucked into the scene, laser-focused on them. I’m somebody who’s always observing, always learning, asking questions,” she adds, “but I was really struck with the confidence of movement that they had.”
She’s no stranger to A-list talent, having trodden an entire awards campaign alongside DiCaprio, Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor and Regina Hall. But the two shooting experiences are hard to compare because, oddly enough, The Julia Set was so much faster-paced. “[On] One Battle we had 100 days of shooting and this might have been 30 or less,” says Infiniti. “Luckily, it didn’t feel fast on the day because Niki would be there to make sure that if anybody — at any point — was rushing for an unnecessary reason, she would [say], ‘We need to slow down. We have to make sure that we’re minding the scene, we’re minding the characters, doing justice by their words.’ So not rushing the actors was always something that she was emphasizing.”
Byrne’s approach encapsulates exactly where Briney wants to go from here. “I don’t know if I can overstate it, but this movie is sort of all I’ve ever wanted to do, and I knew that right after I read it,” he tells THR. “Niki has this profound sense of storytelling that I just wanted to be part of, and I think it’s a great story. She’s a phenomenal director. That’s why I fell in love with movies, it was good directors and good writers and good storytelling,” he says, adding that the small budget and intimate shoot made it feel like an independent movie. “We did it for ourselves in the moment, and now we get to share it, and I think that’s where I find the most joy in this career,” he says.
He’s thrown for a loop when probed on other filmmakers he dreams of working with — there are simply too many. “Greta Gerwig’s doing such interesting things, Joachim Trier is proving his brilliance over and over in all his movies. And Ruben Östlund too. I could go on for days,” says Briney.
The U.S. star has the hotly anticipated The Summer I Turned Pretty movie on its way. Just this summer, Prime Video and author-writer-director Jenny Han had to make a statement requesting that fans stop crowding Briney and his co-stars on set. He tells us about his final outing as global heartthrob Conrad Fisher: “I try to go into everything with the notion that we are doing it for ourselves. Because I think if you go into a job trying to service somebody else, you’re doing a disservice to the project and the characters and the story. And obviously, we’ve spent a lot of time with that world. So yeah, I hope people like it, but I think that we just buckled down and got it done, and I’m grateful for all the things that it’s brought to all of us and the people involved.”
Briney, who maintains he is not a natural mathematician — “I thought I was… The past 10 years have not been kind to the math side of my brain” — is arriving at his second TIFF. For Infiniti, it’s her first film festival appearance ever. “For the most part, everyone’s been like ‘Don’t forget to enjoy it,’” she says about advice from those around her. “I’m excited. It’s so hard to picture it when you haven’t done it yet. That’s what’s going through my mind right now.”
Both Chase Infiniti and Christopher Briney are on the precipice of immense careers. With The Julia Set, they’re just hoping that the love and care poured into this film shine through in front of a Toronto audience. “I hope people discuss [being a product of your] environment,” Briney adds. “It brings to light a lot of things that I think are easy to take for granted — the way you grew up, how the world works, but everybody grew up under their own circumstances, and I think this movie addresses that in a really interesting way.”
The 2026 Toronto International Film Festival runs Sept. 10-20.
Credit: Source link