On December 4, the IndieWire Honors Winter 2025 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best films. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the filmmakers, artisans, and performers behind films well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the Los Angeles event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.
Has anybody had a better 2025 than Chase Infiniti? This time last year, the Indianapolis native was a rising TV star with a single credit to her name: “Presumed Innocent.” She had yet to appear in a film, but obsessive cinephiles were learning her name after news broke that she’d be appearing in a still-untitled film with a mysterious plot from Paul Thomas Anderson.
To say that a lot has changed since then would be an understatement. “One Battle After Another,” Infiniti’s feature debut, is among the best-reviewed films of 2025 and a widely accepted Oscar frontrunner. As Willa, the kidnapped daughter of revolutionaries, the newcomer more than holds her own among the film’s cast of A-list stars. With the entire film resting on the familial relationship between her character and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson, Infiniti provides the perfect Gen Z foil to the aging revolutionary in Anderson’s father-daughter epic. She traveled the world promoting the film with the likes of Anderson, DiCaprio, and Regina Hall, and now finds herself squarely positioned in the middle of the Best Actress race.
Infiniti, who will receive the Breakthrough Award at the 2025 IndieWire Honors, isn’t taking any of it for granted. During a career-spanning conversation with IndieWire ahead of the ceremony on December 4, the actress was all smiles. Reflecting on her whirlwind year, Infiniti explained that she almost didn’t pursue film acting at all: It took a pandemic that interrupted her study of live theater at Columbia College Chicago to convince her that Hollywood might be in her future.
“I always say it was the best happy accident possible, because I don’t think I would’ve even considered a shift from theater if COVID hadn’t happened,” she said. “Everything was put on Zoom, and I had taken two on-camera acting classes. I was like, ‘Well, it’s perfect. I’m working with the confines of the box, so let me learn how to film a great self-tape and the foundations of that, and to storytell in a more subtle way.’”
After landing her first role in the Apple TV series “Presumed Innocent,” Infiniti knew she needed a crash course in filmmaking. She took the opportunity to talk to every department to learn how the components of a TV set all come together.
“That was my introduction to a set, because I’d never been on set before,” she said. “I remember my first day shooting was actually the opening of the show itself, and I had to ask Ruth Negga when to say my line because I didn’t know when to do it.”
Infiniti said that Anne Sewitsky, who directs the first two episodes of the series and finale, encouraged her to spend time on set after noticing the actor studying the monitors and asking a lot of questions early on.
“That turned into me showing up to set every single day, and following different departments around,” Infiniti said, explaining she would tail everyone from the costume and lighting people to the show’s DP, asking whatever questions came to mind. “I would follow them around and be like, ‘What does this do?’ and ‘Why do you do this?’ and then ‘How does this connect with this?’ I was a student. I wanted to make sure that I was understanding my workplace and how every job fits in within [it], because we’re all working toward the same goal.”
Amid all the excitement, Infiniti received a life-changing email. She was asked to audition for a character known only as “Girl” in the movie that would eventually change her career.
“I got my first audition via self-tape while I was shooting ‘Presumed Innocent,’” she recalled of her “One Battle After Another” audition. “I was about a month into production, and I got an email in my inbox that said ‘PTA/CK production,’ and didn’t think anything of it. I was like, ‘OK, well, we’ll see if there’s any interest. But if not, it’s OK. I’m doing it; I’m going to put my all in it, and then just send it off.’”
That self-tape led to six months of callbacks, culminating in a karate class observed by Anderson, before Infiniti was brought in to read with DiCaprio and Hall — a daunting prospect for any performer, let alone one trying to land their first film role. “[My agent] told me that Leonardo DiCaprio and Regina Hall were going to be there, outside of Paul Thomas Anderson,” she said. “I was like, ‘OK, great. Cool. So chill. Completely chill.’”
The chemistry read was a success — and the rest is history. Infiniti immersed herself in a rigorous martial arts training program before embarking on the sprawling shoot, which saw the cast and crew cover a massive amount of ground in California and Texas (with VistaVision cameras in tow, of course) over the course of six months.
Infiniti said she could tell early on that she was working on a great movie, but nobody could have prepared her for the film’s rapturous reception. “I knew it was going to be something special, because I could feel the amount of love that Paul had for the film, and for Willa, and for Bob and Willa, and this father-daughter dynamic,” she said. “You could feel the love from everybody that was working on it.”
She added, “But the scale of everything, I couldn’t even … My mind could not compute how [people would react to] it and the love that it’s receiving, because I’ve never done this before. I’ve never been through this before.”
Infiniti’s performance in “One Battle After Another” is a triumph of discipline as much as artistry. Few actors her age could have stepped into such a high-stakes project with so much poise and carried an entire film on their shoulders. But when asked how she handled the pressure, she said she just put her faith in Anderson’s material and showed up ready to work as hard as everyone else she had observed on sets.
“I feel like my determination to do justice by Paul’s writing was so strong that, even on those days where it was difficult, it didn’t feel like it was hard,” she said. “It felt like, ‘I’m here to do my job. I’m here to show up and do my work, and do justice by Willa and by Paul’s writing, and make sure that I’m showing up for everybody within the scene and behind the camera.’”
Where do you go after “One Battle After Another?” Infiniti’s future in Hollywood is as bright as anyone’s, but the actress isn’t thinking too hard about what comes next. She’s more than earned the chance to take a breath and reflect back on a year that changed her life forever.
“I feel like I’m really going to finish this year completely filled with gratitude more than anything,” she said. “I’ve gotten the opportunity to experience things that I’ve been dreaming about since I was a kid. I’ve got to meet people that I’ve been fans of since I was a kid. And I’m just going to look back with so much love and so much gratitude toward everything.”