All Hail Anna Baryshnikov, Queen of the Weirdo Soft Girls

When you first see Anna Baryshnikov on screen in Love Lies Bleeding, you’ll probably feel one word drilling holes into the back of your mind: teeth, teeth, teeth! Yellow and rotting, they immediately demand our attention, signaling, as Baryshnikov puts it over lunch at a bistro in Chelsea, the “sickly sweet” disposition of her character.

Usually, it’s Baryshnikov’s eyes that make the first impression. They’re big, blue, and piercing, imparting a disarming, almost childlike quality when she smiles. But then, as I learned over lunch at a bistro in Chelsea, she’ll sometimes lean over and tell you something deeply insightful about Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—whom she diagnoses as one of our earliest literary examples of “main character syndrome”—and suddenly, her whole look changes. In moments like that, she snaps back into focus as a 31-year-old actress and writer with a keen understanding of the industry, how it writes women, and the kinds of characters she wants to play. Baryshnikov excels at empathizing with the “desperate” seekers on screen, but just like (well, most of) her characters, she’s also got a lot more to offer.

In writer-director Rose Glass’s pulpy ’80s thriller Love Lies Bleeding, Baryshnikov plays a stringy-haired, brown-toothed hanger-on named Daisy, who spends most of her time on screen fawning over Kristen Stewart’s be-mulleted gym manager, Lou, while Lou falls in love with an ambitious, impulsive bodybuilder named Jackie (Katy O’Brian). Daisy fits squarely within Baryshnikov’s canon of quirky young women—characters who each crave something down to their bones, and who, perhaps above all, want what they want when they want it. You could call them stunted, or you could perhaps just call them painfully human.

“I relate to characters who don’t have what they want,” Baryshnikov says as she cuts into her croque monsieur. “Who feels like they’re winning all the time?”

Unlike her characters, Baryshnikov has an easygoing affect. She’s got the energy of your coolest cousin, who breezes in from New York for the weekend and entertains everyone with great stories told through a gently self-deprecating filter. When she arrives at the restaurant in a clean black coat on a sunny Wednesday morning, vintage tortoiseshell purse in tow, she goes in for a hug without pausing. The word “effortless” comes to mind, but the stories she shares afterward about feeling alienated from absurdly confident roles makes me reconsider. Maybe, just like on screen, she’s simply gotten very good at creating the illusion. The good energy, on the other hand, feels genuine from start to finish.

Alas, the same cannot be said for Daisy in Love Lies Bleeding. At one point during our conversation, Baryshnikov laughs when she remembers that a friend once pointed out her apparent affection for playing “desperate” women. She sees the overlap between Daisy and other characters she’s played—like Emily Dickinson’s oddball little sister Lavinia in the Apple TV+ series Dickinson or the sexually empowered Sandy in the Oscar darling Manchester by the Sea. In each of her eccentric roles, Baryshnikov embodies the frustrated little freak who lives inside all of us. Daisy and Lavinia, in particular, share a sort of “deranged soft-girl” quality, as she puts it. And in Love Lies Bleeding, she plays up the admittedly comical tragedy of being down horrendous for an ex who clearly stopped caring ages ago. (Who among us, right?)

“She’s kind of lovelorn” Baryshnikov says of Daisy. “But there was a creepiness and a kind of sinister quality, and a true desperation to her that felt like something that I’d never done.”

Which brings us back to the teeth. Any time Daisy speaks, it’s hard to look away from her grin. To Baryshnikov, her character’s rotting tusks reflect “that she’s in a situation where she’s not taking care of herself. She’s in bad circumstances.” (For those wondering if they were dentures or make-up, Baryshnikov confirms that they were painted on, but because they tended to fade over time, they also benefited from some post-production enhancements.)

The daughter of legendary dancer, choreographer, and artistic director Mikhail Baryshnikov (who also famously played one of Carrie Bradshaw’s most infamous boyfriends in Sex and the City, and who two years ago received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award from the U.K.’s Royal Academy of Dance) Anna shares her father’s star quality. With every line read, she manages to surprise. Sometimes, it’s her her shifty eyes and twitchy lips, and sometimes, it’s her delivery—the way she chews on lines like, “What were you doing with that big girl,” rolling the words over her slightly poked-out tongue while bobbing her head to the beat of her character’s obvious jealousy.

In person, Baryshnikov is more measured than any of her characters but not a bit less gregarious. She speaks with enthusiasm about all of her past roles, and with slightly embarrassed admiration when it comes to her Love Lies Bleeding co-star, the legendary Kristen Stewart. When it comes to her latest project—a “very dark comedy” helmed by a first-time feature director in which she tackles her first-ever leading role—Baryshnikov is carefully excited. As she puts it, she plays “a kind of deeply anxious but stoic, very Russian clown kind of character” in the new project. The role sounds right at home among the other enchanting weirdos Baryshnikov has played.

When Baryshnikov was just getting her feet wet in the industry, she observed that a lot of the roles she found herself auditioning for seemed to have little in common with the women she knew in real life. Sure, they were “powerful,” but that often manifested as selfishness or crudeness. Sometimes, she says, “that intertwined with their sexuality, in that they’d be these very idealized young women who found themselves to be really hot.” She tended to shut down while reading these descriptions because they didn’t seem like characters she could really play.

“There are entire careers that are built on people being devastatingly hot, and that’s very impressive to me,” Baryshnikov says, “but that’s not how I feel in the world.” Playing strange characters has freed her from the actorly obligation to feel (or at least project) superhuman confidence all the time. Instead, she says with amusement, “I can play how I often feel—which is desperate for affirmation.”

Baryshnikov was initially drawn to Love Lies Bleeding because of the script, immediately loving that it was a “delicious and weird” story. She had not yet seen Rose Glass’s first film, Saint Maud, when she first read the pages, and Stewart’s involvement had not yet gone public. “I’m such a sucker for the writing,” she says, “and that script in particular was so tight and so original.”

When it came time to film, however, Baryshnikov didn’t find it difficult to play a character obsessed with Stewart.

“I’m so embarrassed in these interviews, because I basically am Daisy,” Baryshnikov says. “I’m like, ‘She’s so amazing!’ But she really is. She’s an actress that’s aware of the ecosystem of the entire set. I don’t know if that’s because she grew up on them or because she’s interested in directing.”

It was Stewart who gave Baryshnikov the advice to nail her huge death scene. Stewart told her, “Don’t worry, just do this,” and then pretended to choke to death on the spot—flickering eyelids and all.

Baryshnikov also credits Glass and her clear vision for the project with boosting her confidence. The film has a playful use of tone and even slapstick; according to Baryshnikov, Glass’s reference points ranged from Starship Troopers and Showgirls. Baryshnikov was also fascinated to see how Glass, who is English, would distill America’s classic ’80s cinema on screen. “As someone with a parent who wasn’t born in America, I’m always interested in non-American creators making Americana, because I think that’s an interesting perspective,” she says. What would ’80s America have looked like to someone who grew up, in Glass’s case, in Essex?

Although Baryshnikov’s father has not yet seen Love Lies Bleeding, she anticipates that he’ll admire how audacious it is. After all, as she points out, part of why he himself came to the U.S. was he wanted to work with as many collaborators as possible. “I think the things that he tracks and gets excited about on my behalf are really pure and are really about what I’m passionate about,” Baryshnikov said. “I’m very lucky. So many people have to constantly justify working in the arts to their parents, and I don’t have that at all.”

Because she was not raised in a heavily Russian-American community while growing up in Palisades, New York, Baryshnikov said that her new project—which takes place in a heavily Russian-Ukrainian area of Hollywood and centers on a Russian-American family—turned out to be a “really cathartic, incredible experience.” She adds, “There were little things about my childhood that really deeply resonated.”

The film is “about a family in that neighborhood with a daughter who is trying to become a fashion designer and gets on a kind of cheesy reality show,” while her father “is coming home from prison for Medicare fraud,” Baryshnikov says. (As for what the reality TV series might be, imagine a “jankier” Project Runway knock-off.)

This new project gives Baryshnikov a chance to tackle a meatier part. Still, her performances in past roles, and particularly across three seasons of Dickinson, have already given us a considerable glimpse at her potential. In the Apple TV+ comedy, she delightfully steered Lavinia through an emotional odyssey from a boy-crazy rule follower to a liberated, carefree spider dancer. She credits her co-star Hailee Steinfeld (who played Emily Dickinson) for teaching her one of the most important lessons of her career.

“Coming from a theater background, I think I was used to having more control over my performance,” Baryshnikov says. In her film and TV work, she would often seek that same control by mapping everything out intellectually. But then, she noticed that Steinfeld usually did multiple takes, each with a new emotion. She trusted the process and the people around her to make the best choices for her character. In Love Lies Bleeding, Baryshnikov emulated that.

When a friend convinced her to attend a Love Lies Bleeding screening on a whim, Baryshnikov got to enjoy the results of her creative liberation first-hand. “It’s funny to see everyone laugh in scenes that I felt very heartbroken doing,” she says, citing a moment that made even her laugh out loud when she saw it in the theater. “It’s a tiny tiny moment, but it’s when Lou is falling in love with Jackie, and they cut to Daisy, and she’s sitting on the side of the gym smoking and crying,” she says. “People are so ridiculous when they’re in love, but I felt dead-ass serious when I was doing it.”

In the moment she filmed the scene, she felt utterly devastated and in love with Stewart. In the theater, however, everyone cracked up. Any time an actor makes a movie, she acknowledged, they’re really making three: the one they envisioned while reading the script, the one they actually wound up making on set, and the one audiences interpret once the project makes it to screen. While watching Love Lies Bleeding in that theater, she felt the joy of submitting to the process, whatever it may bring. At this point, she said, “I’ve really started to take pleasure in the fact that it’s not mine anymore at all.”