Thanks in part to his debut in Call Me By Your Name, actor Timothée Chalamet has become one of Hollywood’s biggest A-list actors. The 26 year-old actor’s new film Bones and All – a romantic cannibalistic coming-of-age horror story – has shined the spotlight on him once again. But this time, people aren’t just talking about him, they’re talking about his new co-star, Taylor Russell.
In the film, Russell plays Maren Yearly, a teenage girl who inherited her biological mother’s cannibalistic urges. After getting abandoned by her father on her 18th birthday, Maren uses the artifacts her father leaves behind to track down her birth mother, whom she’s never met. What results is a cross-country road trip where she meets Lee (Chalamet), a fellow cannibal who shares more than just a passion for flesh.
Russell is being lauded for her performance in early reviews, which already touts an 88 percent freshness score on Rotten Tomatoes. Similarly to how Call Me By Your Name was a breakout hit for Chalamet, Bones and All could be the start of a whole new movie career for Russell. Coincidently, both films were directed by Luca Guadagnino, so whatever he’s doing in his casting process, he’s doing it right.
Moviegoers dying to see the film are growing curious about Taylor Russell. Is this her first movie? If not, what have we seen her in before? Here’s what we know.
Who is Taylor Russell?
Russell is a 28 year-old Canadian actress who’s no stranger to acting alongside big-name actors. In her 2019 drama Waves, she shared screen time with Sterling K. Brown. In her 2021 comedy-drama Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets, she played alongside Lucius Malf — we mean Jason Isaacs. In her 2021 survival horror movie Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, she starred as the lead, and then in 2021, she concluded three full seasons of Netflix’s Lost in Space.
On the outside, Russell appears to be an actress singularly focused on her career, inching closer to the top with every project she completes. That could partly be because of how much time she’s freed up after deleting social media.
The move comes following Russell’s desire for more privacy, no doubt in part due to her ascension up the Hollywood ladder. “When I’m in a more peaceful state and looking at the bigger picture, I recognize that it is possible to move through the world in the way you desire and still get the result that you want, which for me, is having privacy,” she told Byrdie. “I mean, the boundaries that I have now…I deleted social media for a year before this last September because I needed space in my own head to think.”
Russell’s Instagram is back up and running now, although she confessed that wasn’t part of the plan.
“I wasn’t planning on coming back, but I had a conversation with a good friend and we were talking about being young Black creators and the type of space we wanted to take up in the world. She posed a question to me, which was: ‘If we had Black girls growing up that we saw who were directors or producers or actresses, or who were aspiring for the type of careers that we are in, would we have progressed sooner to our path?’”
Thinking of herself as an inspiration to young Black creators is a new concept for Russell, but one she’d best get comfortable with. Her role in Bones and All is set to launch her farther than any project has before. Perhaps most inspiring of all is that her career is not one which “made it overnight,” but is instead the result of over a decade’s worth of hard work. If that’s not inspiring, we don’t know what is.
