Meet This Year's Brightest New Stars
How can you spot the year’s most exciting new talent? Just follow the jewels.
Liza Soberano
Although Liza Soberano is set to make her Hollywood debut in the upcoming black comedy Lisa Frankenstein, she isn’t exactly a rookie. In the Philippines, to which she moved from California when she was 10, the 25-year-old is a veteran model and actress—with nearly 18 million Instagram followers to prove it. But success hasn’t made her afraid of starting over. “I began my career here as a nobody,” she says, “which means I’m discovering things about myself that I never knew.”
Will Harrison
If Daisy Jones & the Six hadn’t been a hit, at least Will Harrison would have mastered a new skill. “I got an amazing education in guitar,” he says, “and hope to release music soon.” But the series—in which the 26-year-old Carnegie Mellon grad played 1970s rocker Graham Dunne—was a smash, and his Lincoln Center Theater play, The Coast Starlight, wowed the critics, so a music career may be on the back burner for now. Next up? Manhunt, an Apple TV+ series about the Lincoln assassination.
West Duchovny
After she graduated from Brown with a degree in English, it was performing that lit a fire under West Duchovny. “The exciting thing about it,” the 23-year-old says, “is there are no wrong answers.” At least not with upcoming projects like Painkiller, a drama about the opioid crisis, and Saint X, a thriller set at a tropical resort. Less exciting was declaring her career goals to actor parents who had cautioned her against show business. “I resisted it for a bit but didn’t do such a good job resisting, because here I am.”
Priya Kansara
“You could have asked me at four years old, ‘What do you want to be?’ and I would have said an actress,” Priya Kansara says. Though she took a few detours along the way—studying molecular biology, working in pharmaceuticals—the London native got her big break this year leading the action-packed comedy Polite Society. Still, that other existence served a purpose. “I will not deny it,” she says. “I’ve acted my way through everything in life.”
Khris Davis
It isn’t every actor who can move from Arthur Miller to George Foreman seamlessly. For Khris Davis, who starred last year as Biff in Broadway’s lauded Death of a Salesman revival and hit the big screen this spring as the titular boxer in Big George Foreman, it wasn’t such a leap. “If I can find the authenticity of a character, that’s what draws me in,” says the 35-year-old. “On the surface it could be easy to dismiss Mr. Foreman, but here’s an opportunity to uncover his humanity.”
Kylie Rogers
“Ari Aster is one of my favorite directors, so I was very nervous to meet him,” says Kylie Rogers. “Was he going to be scary?” Luckily, instead of frightening the 19-year-old Texan (who had previously played the young Beth Dutton on Yellowstone), the horror maestro cast her in his starry new dark comedy, Beau Is Afraid. “It was intimidating going on set with co-stars like Joaquin Phoenix,” she says, “but once I got there it was immediately comfortable. That’s crazy lucky.”
Photographs by Michael Schwartz. Styled by MaryKate Boylan.
Hair by Jerome Cultrera for Living Proof at L’Atelier NYC. Makeup by Deanna Melluso for Chanel Beauty at L’Atelier NYC. Grooming by Lisa-Raquel for Oribe at See Management. Nails by Martha Fekete for Essie.
This story appears in the May 2023 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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