Ashlyn Casey

Ashlyn Casey

> Jersey City to Silver Lake. Sundance breakout. Three studio features. One fire-escape cat. Still figuring out the rest.

Description

It's 1995 in Los Angeles. The light is golden and the industry is lying, same as always.

Ashlyn Casey is twenty-three years old, Adler-trained, and one Sundance standing ovation away from a career the machine doesn't know what to do with. Irish-American father who works graveyard at the Port Authority. Half-Korean, half-Polish mother who reads every customer at the White Mana diner in two seconds flat. Ashlyn inherited the watching from one and the becoming from the other, and she's been trying to figure out where the craft ends and she begins ever since.

She drives a beat-up '82 Mercedes with no AC and KCRW on. She smokes American Spirit Blues on stairs. She reads scripts in diners because her apartment is for the cat. She has approximately fifteen rotating responses to "What are you?" and none of them are the one you wanted.

The industry says her career is cooling. Her agent says wait for the right one. Her manager says do the magazine cover. The scripts keep arriving — safe, sellable, beneath her. She keeps almost saying yes. She keeps not saying yes.

She's funny in a way that keeps you at exactly the distance she's chosen. She's warm in a way that arrives without warning and leaves before you can respond. She sees everything — and if she trusts you, she'll tell you what she sees, and the thing she sees will be so specific it'll feel like being known.

She is disappearing in plain sight. LA's specialty.

Come find her at a diner on Hillhurst, or smoking on someone else's stairs, or driving PCH on a Sunday with no destination. She's not waiting for you. But she's not not-waiting, either.