This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.Can Chloë Sevigny Ever Really Go Mainstream?

Story By Laia Garcia-Furtado, Photographs by Chaumont-Zaerpour; Styling by Robbie Spencer... See moreThu, April 23, 2026 at 12:00 PM UTC

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Can Chloë Sevigny Ever Really Go Mainstream?Chaumont-Zaerpour

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Meeting Chloë Sevigny was always going to be a very New York affair. The plan is to meet for lunch at Revelie, a tucked-away-in-plain-view French diner in SoHo, complete with a dark-wood bar and vinyl-topped chrome stools where one may sit and enjoy a classic jambon beurre with a Coke float.

I arrive a few minutes early to find Sevigny already ensconced in a booth in the back, where she can observe the entire room. She is wearing a black turtleneck, and her blond hair frames her steely gaze. We shake hands like we’re about to close a business deal, but whatever bit of awkwardness exists before the first time an interviewer and interviewee meet in person is immediately extinguished the minute I take off my coat, exposing my almost-six-months-pregnant belly.

Her expression changes, and she gestures with her hands, seemingly asking, “What’s all this? I wasn’t expecting this!” I mirror those same gestures back to her, this being a question I ask myself daily. Sevigny launches into the familiar speed round of questions when two mothers first meet; she and her husband, Siniša Mačković, an art-gallery director, had their son, Vanja, in 2020. How far along? Any pregnancy sickness? How many children? How old? In typical mother-of-a-young-child fashion, she has not been sleeping well. “He was in our bed, and there was a lot of kicking, so I’m a little…not functioning on all cylinders,” she says. Now we exchange classic bedtime-routine nightmare scenarios. But it’s so fun! We wouldn’t trade it for the world! She laughs and orders a coffee with a side of honey.

Dress, scarves, and Mary Janes, Chanel.Chaumont-Zaerpour

Sevigny is gearing up to promote The Five-Star Weekend, an eight-episode drama coming to Peacock in July. It’s based on the book by Elin Hilderbrand, the best-selling author also responsible for 2024’s The Perfect Couple, which starred Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber as a Nantucket couple whose seemingly idyllic life is turned upside down after a murder derails their son’s wedding. The Five-Star Weekend stars Jennifer Garner as Hollis Shaw, a famous food blogger with a seemingly idyllic life that falls apart after her husband unexpectedly dies—though “this one is less racy and less about a murder,” Sevigny notes. To cope, Hollis organizes a weekend getaway at her vacation house in, you guessed it, Nantucket, inviting her best girlfriends from each stage of her life (played by Sevigny, Regina Hall, Gemma Chan, and D’Arcy Carden). It turns out to be much more than any of the women bargained for.

It is not the kind of project that one would immediately associate with Sevigny, who has crafted a singular career out of playing offbeat characters who would surely never fit within Hilderbrand’s Nantucket universe. But that’s precisely why it also makes sense; she’ll never fit neatly into any box.

“Hearing that they were going out to Chloë [for the role], I was like, ‘There’s just no way she would ever do this!’” Garner says, laughing, when I reach her during a break from shooting her latest movie. “But then, not only did she say yes but she showed up, and she’s such a fierce actor and a pussycat. It was amazing to get to know her and to be embraced by her.”

Sevigny describes it as “one of the most fulfilling times of working on a project” she’s had in a while. “We were really like open books. Everybody overshared, and there was an ease and a comfort between us. With the mourning and the grief in the show, there was a lot of support for one another. It was a really good feeling.”

It’s true that Sevigny almost passed on the role. “My agents sent it to me, and I was like, ‘This is too mainstream. My fans are not going to like it,’” she explains as we wait for our coffees. But Sevigny read the scripts and thought they were “really strong. It’s really about a woman grieving and how she navigates that through friendships, and I know it sounds like such a sound bite, but I really feel there’s really something for everybody.”

It’s not that Sevigny has eschewed the mainstream completely during her career; there was her five-year run as Nicolette Grant in HBO’s Big Love (she won a Golden Globe for the performance), and she has appeared in four Ryan Murphy productions, including two American Horror Story installments; Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, playing C.Z. Guest; and 2024’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story as Kitty Menendez, a role for which she earned an Emmy nomination. But Hilderbrand reaches a different and broader audience. Her books have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. “This is the first time my mom will be able to walk through the grocery store and not have to try to come up with something clever and positive to say about a project that I’ve been in,” she says.

Although in recent years Sevigny has expressed wishes that she’d gone for more mainstream roles when she was younger (she passed on the role of Vivian in Legally Blonde, which eventually went to Selma Blair), there is still a sense of friction at play between being the “indie queen” and an actor who wants to continue to expand and experiment. She’d love to do Broadway sometime: “I love musicals, but I’m not very good at singing. Maybe if Cole [Escola] was writing something new, that would be fun.” But, she explains, “I have a loyalty to my fans and what they’re expecting or want of me. I think that I have carved out something because of what I’ve stood for to people.”

Sitting across from her, I can’t stop staring at the way her little eyelash triangles frame her blue eyes. She has a presence that seems to attract all the energy in the room to her, but not in the obvious way some stars command attention with an always-on, outsize performance quality to their everyday interactions. It’s more subtle, and the response is like the way a flower slowly makes its way to face the sun throughout the day.

Dress, Saint Laurent By Anthony Vaccarello. Bag, Prada.Chaumont-Zaerpour

In 1994, Jay McInerney profiled a 19-year-old Sevigny for The New Yorker based on her “cool” cred alone. The word appears 10 times in the story. She was still filming her feature-film debut as Jennie in Larry Clark’s harrowing coming-of-age film Kids, which would be released the following year. Sevigny was already known in the city’s fashionable circles, thanks to her modeling for Sassy magazine, beginning in 1992, and her starring role in Sonic Youth’s 1993 video for “Sugar Kane.” She followed up Kids with a role in Steve Buscemi’s directorial debut, Trees Lounge, and a turn on the runway for Miu Miu’s Spring 1996 collection.

By 2000, she’d received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role opposite Hilary Swank in 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry. She’s worked steadily since, always straddling the line between independent films and more mainstream projects. What she stands for, and what she’s stood for since the ’90s, is a kind of preternatural authenticity, an unwavering sense of self.

Sevigny credits her family for her strength of conviction. “My mom and my dad were so supportive and really wanted to give us a sense of security,” she says. She was born in 1974 and grew up in a polite Catholic middle-class household in the wealthy town of Darien, Connecticut, with her parents and her older brother, Paul, who also became a fixture of the downtown New York scene. It was a house where creativity and self-expression were valued, but there were still rules to follow. (When Sevigny pierced her nose as a teenager, she was briefly kicked out. “I was like, ‘Fine, I just won’t live here anymore,’ so then they let me come back.”)

She adds, “I’m pretty normal, and I’m not conservative politically, but I have a nice background, and I’m a polite and well-mannered person. My mom is very compassionate and very considerate of others, and that was drilled into me, so I think having that foundation was a place for me to have my wild outcome.”

Regina Hall, her costar in The Five-Star Weekend, was struck by Sevigny’s generosity. “I don’t think I realized how big Chloë’s heart is,” she tells me a few days before the Academy Awards take place. “She’s an incredibly smart but also incredibly warm person—especially once you know her and you know her sense of humor and her wit. She’s well-versed in everyone being cared for on set—not just her needs, but everyone’s, all the time. It’s hard to describe because it’s not ‘a thing.’ It’s the totality of someone.”

Sevigny seems to have saved her rebellion mostly for the characters she chooses to play and, in her personal life, for her approach to getting dressed. She’s quick to point out, though, “I don’t think my fashion’s that wild.” And it’s not. She doesn’t dress provocatively or in a way that requires long-winded discussions about the idea of good taste and bad taste to justify her point of view. But her style is rebellious because it has never conformed to anyone else’s ideas of what’s cool. (There’s that word again.) Her story in the public eye is as tied to personal style as it is to her acting, and she’s managed to sustain it for more than 30 years in fits that have never missed.

It made sense for our date to include some shopping. We finish our lunch and make our way to a vintage shop on the edge of Chinatown. It’s one of those brisk late-winter days when it feels like spring is just around the corner, perfect for walking around the city. I am finally able to take in her whole look: black turtleneck, slim black leather maxi skirt, cropped puffer jacket, Ugg boots, and a funky colorful knitted hat, with a brown suede Loewe Flamenco bag over her shoulder. On our walk, she vents about people who let their dogs off-leash at children’s parks (“There’s dog parks exactly for that purpose!”) and expresses her love for both Mickey Mouse and Vera Bradley quilted bags, the latter a natural effect of growing up in Connecticut.

Walking up the three flights of stairs to the Women’s History Museum Vintage shop started by Mattie Rivkah Barringer and Amanda McGowan, who also have a fashion label-cum-art practice under the same name, Sevigny utters those words familiar to everyone who loves vintage shopping but hates spending money: “God, I hope I don’t like a lot of stuff.”

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We methodically make our way through racks full of absurd Y2K-era graphic tees, 1980s statement belts, and tons of Hysteric Glamour stuff. She spots a Norma Kamali heathered-gray hooded zip-up jersey onesie, which she seriously considers, even though it shows signs of having been thoroughly loved by its previous owner.

“I like it all fucked up like this,” she says, looking at the tears. “I used to have one just like this. I wore it in L.A., and Us Weekly made fun of me—they used to always make fun of me—like, ‘What was she thinking?’” Well, we knew what you were thinking, I tell her. If you were a fashion fanatic during this era, odds are that you knew that at least one of the offending outfits was actually something brilliant that the magazine’s editors just didn’t understand.

Sevigny is getting ready to leave for Paris, where she will walk in the Miu Miu show for the third time, and she is anxious about packing. “Now you open your phone and you see videos of people leaving the hotel,” she says. Not that she has anything to be nervous about; if there’s one thing Sevigny can do truly effortlessly, it’s pull off a Look.

She often works with a stylist, her friend Haley Wollens, but Wollens’s role is more akin to that best friend whose taste you trust implicitly, someone you always text to approve your outfit before you leave the house or to help you make shopping decisions.

Jacket, sweater, shirt, and bag, Bottega Veneta.Chaumont-Zaerpour

“Before I met her, I was doing everything myself, calling things in, and a lot of times one thing would show up, and I wouldn’t have an option, so I’d have to wear it even if it was ill-fitting or I didn’t really love it,” says Sevigny. “She has really helped me, I think, with my body changing, aging, and everything to feel more confident on the red carpet.”

On the red carpet, Sevigny is known for mixing überluxury labels like Saint Laurent, Gucci, and Miu Miu with of-the-moment and under-the-radar labels like Giovanna Flores or August Barron, along with a dose of vintage. And although fashion fans can recall her most iconic looks off the top of their heads, she cheekily suggests we’ve not even seen the real goods. “Everyone’s always like, ‘Chloë’s style!’ but it’s like, none of you even know my style because you don’t see me every day! There’s very few paparazzi [shots] of me day in, day out or me going out to Sway once a week. Nobody sees all those outfits, sadly, and they’re really good.”

The Miu Miu Fall 2026 show is back to basics—but a specific kind of ’90s basics that references the brand’s first collections, including the one that Sevigny modeled for. Her appearance on the runway, in a slightly oversize leather jacket worn with a matching minidress, chunky clogs, thin-rimmed glasses, and one of those Bend It Like Beckham–era zigzag headbands, sends ripples through the internet. In the one paparazzi photo taken of her as she leaves the show, she is wearing leopard-print flares, a blue Polo shirt, a double-breasted navy coat slung over her shoulders, and black ballet flats. A Look, indeed.

Back in New York a few days later, we hop on Zoom to catch up on the latest. Sevigny sits on the floor of her bedroom wearing a frilly knit sweater, with a giant painting by the Hungarian artist Rita Ackermann framing the back wall. She looked good on the runway, happy, I tell her. “Well, one of my little tricks on the runway is to do a tiny smile, because otherwise I have a resting-bitch, dour, whatever, old-lady face,” she reveals. “So I also have to just bring a little joy.”

There it is. “Old-lady face.” Can we talk about aging in Hollywood?

“I don’t really feel like I’m a part of Hollywood,” she responds quickly. Of course!

But as Sevigny sees it, the real problem is the unforgiving technology. “The more challenging aspects and more annoying aspects are the way we’re photographed now: phones, public, the lighting on the red carpet, the lighting on the runways. Nobody’s doing anybody any favors,” she says. “There’s no more glamour or nuance to it. As an aging woman, it sounds less enjoyable to be a part of all that, because it just feels really vulnerable and exposed, and then you’re just being picked apart on the internet.”

Sevigny is 51, and she looks exactly terrific. Not “good for her age” or like “she could pass” for whatever, but just exactly terrific. “I think because I’m so involved in fashion, there’s a pressure to maintain a sense of whatever it is that I’ve cultivated,” she says. “You know what I mean? And so that can sometimes be challenging, and wanting to not disappoint people with my looks.”

At the same time, that “pressure to maintain” is often what drives her peers to procedures and injections in an effort to keep up appearances. “I’m going to do all the little things. I just haven’t done the major things,” she adds, laughing. Nothing that would change her face. “But I think also for women, if you were always touted as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world,’ it must be just really, really challenging,” she says. “I don’t have that. I’ve never felt that.”

“Yeah, I’m the unconventional beauty,” Sevigny says, sort of spiritually rolling her eyes while also being totally real. “I never felt pretty my whole life. There were very pretty girls in my class, very conventionally pretty, especially within the ’80s standards of what that meant. I knew that I wasn’t.” Her mother, she also says, was naturally beautiful, and though she endured criticism from her (“Sorry, Mom! Love you!”), there was also acceptance. When Sevigny shaved her head between junior and senior years, her mom “loved it.” It was with this haircut that she got a job at the mecca of all-American-ness, the Polo Ralph Lauren store at her local mall. She learned early on to find alternatives to fitting in; disregarding convention allowed her to carve out her own space. But after experiencing rejection as a child model and actor (her mom made her quit and told her to “do it later”), was it weird then when she started getting attention from the fashion industry?

Apron and dress, Miu Miu. Gloves, Versace. Shoes, Hodakova.Chaumont-Zaerpour

“That’s when grunge was coming in and [the idea] of more ‘alternative beauties,’ and I was just lucky,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, people do think I’m something, and I want to take advantage of it in a way that is beneficial for me too.’” Even then, Sevigny knew that modeling would not give her the creative freedom and control over her career that she wanted for herself. “I remember doing the X-girl fashion show [in 1994] and seeing everybody in the audience [and thinking] I wanted to be one of the creative types that was invited to watch the show and not one of the girls walking it. It was a crystallizing moment for me.”

There aren’t very many people who, when given the chance to be in the spotlight, decide there’s somewhere else they’d rather be. It’s hard to try new things and experiment when everyone is staring back at you. As we grow older, youthful curiosity can often take a back seat to “more important things.” It’s something that Sevigny seems to be struggling with. “I need to find the essence of why I love things again because it’s getting very clouded,” she says. “I was in a cycle of going to the movies, art shows, reading books, listening to new music…and then it was Covid, and then I had a child, and now I feel like I’m just outside of all of that.”

But maybe the secret to her It factor is simply not giving up so easily, that the desire to be in touch with the world is not just to “keep up” but her innate way of being in the world. “I think it’s going to be just experiencing things, you know what I mean?” she says. “It’s not going to happen in the phone.”

Dress, Chloé. Tights, Calzedonia.Chaumont-Zaerpour

This story appears in the May issue of Harper’s Bazaar.

Hair: Louis Ghewy for Oribe; makeup: Karin Westerlund for Victoria Beckham Beauty; manicure: Cam Tran for Lili Creuk Shop; production: Un/Produced; set design: Seth Walpers

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