Alana Haim

Alana Haim is an American actress and musician born on December 15, 1991, in Los Angeles, California, who first built her public profile as a member of the rock band HAIM alongside her sisters Este and Danielle. For most of the 2010s, that's where the world placed her — on festival stages, in music videos, in the orbit of pop-adjacent indie rock. What changed everything was a single phone call from a filmmaker who'd been shooting her band's videos for years and decided, apparently on instinct, that she could carry a movie.

That filmmaker was Paul Thomas Anderson, and the film was Licorice Pizza — released in late 2021 and set in the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s, a stretch of asphalt and ambition that Haim herself grew up adjacent to in a different era. She played Alana Kane, a 25-year-old drifting through a series of jobs and half-formed feelings for a teenage hustler named Gary Valentine. It's a performance that's hard to categorize because it doesn't feel performed. What's striking is how much of the film's emotional weight she carries through stillness — through the way Alana Kane listens, hesitates, and then bolts into action in that final running sequence, which became one of the more talked-about endings of that year. The Hollywood Foreign Press took notice: Haim received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, and Variety reported that her casting had been one of the more unconventional gambles of the production cycle, given she had no prior acting credits.

She doesn't come from a traditional acting background, and that's probably part of why the performance worked. Her instincts weren't trained into formulas. Anderson had been directing HAIM's music videos since at least 2017 — the videos for "Right Now" and "Little of Your Soul" are practically short films — so there was already a shorthand between them, a trust built over years of collaborative work that doesn't usually exist between a first-time actor and a director on a major production. That relationship remains the defining creative partnership of her screen career so far, and it's worth noting that the Valley itself functions almost as a third collaborator in Licorice Pizza, a landscape both of them clearly know in their bones.

Her recent work extends that momentum. She appears in The Mastermind (2025), a film that signals she's committed to building an actual acting career rather than treating Licorice Pizza as a one-off. Hard to say if The Mastermind will carry the same personal-history weight that Anderson's film did — few projects could — but the fact that she's taken on another substantial role suggests she's serious about the craft, not just the opportunity. The specifics of her character in that film place her in territory that demands range, and based on what Licorice Pizza demonstrated, she's capable of it.

She occupies an interesting position right now. Not quite a movie star in the conventional sense, not simply a musician who acted once. Something in between, which is maybe the most honest place to be. The music career continues — HAIM released Women in Music Pt. III in 2020 to strong critical reception, and the band hasn't dissolved into her film work. Whether she'll keep threading both careers together or eventually commit more fully to one remains an open question, but the trajectory since 2021 suggests someone who isn't in a hurry to be categorized.