The Stunning Transformation Of Cailee Spaeny

If you're not already familiar with the name Cailee Spaeny, chances are you'd recognize her face. You may have seen her as the dead girl in the smash HBO hit "Mare of Easttown," or in Sophia Coppola's glossy biopic "Priscilla." You might recognize Spaeny as the breakout star of "Alien: Romulus," the ambitious young photographer in "Civil War," or as Dakota Johnson's little sister in "Bad Times at the El Royale."

Or maybe you don't know Spaeny yet at all, and she's okay with that, too. After all, she knows herself. Even though her career has been one of transformation and reinvention, she's always had herself and her drive to rely on. "I've always been hungry," she told Empire. "It's a combination of arrogance or blind faith and also being absolutely terrified and insecure. But from a young age, for some reason I just knew."

Hollywood knows now, too. Her career took off relatively recently, but Spaeny has already made fans out of some of the industry's biggest names. "She has a very natural ability. You connect with what's going on in her soul," Kirsten Dunst told The New York Times, giving her young co-star a glowing review. "When you have that, people want to watch you. They feel like they're watching someone real." If it feels like Spaeny came out of nowhere, then read on: this is the stunning transformation of Cailee Spaeny.

Cailee Spaeny grew up in Missouri, and for as long as she could remember, she knew she wanted to leave. "I was just so ready. I definitely had a feeling that I needed to experience something else really early on," she recalled to The New York Times. "I wanted out of this Midwestern box."

As a result, the young Spaeny quickly turned to performing, guessing that it would be her ticket out of her small hometown. At an early age, she began performing at the Springfield Little Theater, spending all of her time learning how to entertain people on stage. "I was there probably six days a week just taking dance classes, vocal lessons, acting classes," she told 417 Magazine.

That upbringing in the theater also meant spending a lot of time as the youngest person around. "I started working in a professional setting at 13, just surrounded by adults," she explained to Empire. "My friends were 40-year-olds, who were like moms, or big sisters, or mentors." While that might be a lot for some kinds to handle, it only made Spaeny desire change even more. "I always wanted to be around people who were challenging me, or knew more than I did," she remembered. "I was always on a hunt to grow and learn."

Cailee Spaeny left school at 13 to pursue her acting career, but it would be several years before everything took off. In the meantime, she spent a whole lot of downtime watching any movie she could get her hands on. "I just wanted to know the difference between the subtleties of different genres, and what would make an '80s action film work in terms of performance, or a small indie movie," Spaeny later told Empire. "That was my teacher. I didn't go to an acting school."

Instead, her family took her to Hollywood to audition for bigger parts than she could find in Missouri. "I was begging my mom to take me,"  she explained to 417 Magazine. "Basically I told everyone I knew I was moving to LA. My family kept making the drives out there." They would stay with friends, and Spaeny would run lines in bathrooms in an attempt not to bother the other inhabitants of the house. 

"There were times my mom didn't know if we could afford going out there, but she didn't want to tell me. She was praying every night, 'Please let something happen.'" Thankfully, it wouldn't be long before Hollywood knew Cailee Spaeny's name.

Though Cailee Spaeny left school and began focusing on acting full time when she was only 13, it was several years before she got her big break. That came with her role in 2018's "Pacific Rim: Uprising," a massive-budget sequel to the Guillermo del Toro film. "I went full out for this audition. I put dirt all over my face, I was in a hooded jacket, and there was no air conditioning in the house, so I was actually sweating," Spaeny told 417 Magazine. "I actually slammed myself down on the ground."

It worked, and she got the part, suddenly finding herself going from community theater to acting alongside people like "Star Wars" vet John Boyega. The role quickly took her from being a small-town Midwestern girl to an international star, as the film shot in Australia. "We had to get into a boat, and they had to take us to this island off Sydney called Cockatoo Island. I'm on an island on my first day in this giant haunted warehouse," she recalled. "It just kept getting like, 'What? What? What?' I just rolled with the punches like I knew what I was doing."

After the sci-fi spectacle, more roles quickly followed. She acted in "Bad Times at the El Royale" and even had a lead role in "The Craft: Legacy," a reboot of the witchy 1990s cult hit. Suddenly, Spaeny's career was off and running.

For a moment there, before Cailee Spaeny's acting career really took off, she branched out and made a go at having a music career, too. She's a pop super-fan, after all, as she explained to Jimmy Kimmel on an episode of "Jimmy Kimmel Live." At the Golden Globes in 2024, she even got a chance to speak to one of her favorite people: Taylor Swift. "I was just staring at the back of her head the whole night. I couldn't believe this is my life," Spaeny recalled. Eventually, they were able to chat. "She stood up and said, 'Oh my god, I loved you in the movie,'" Spaeny gushed, "and it was so surreal."

Years before that meeting, though, Spaeny tried to be a singer-songwriter just like Swift. The last vestiges of her music career are still online: a single called "Fallin" here, a cover of "Rolling in the Deep" there. While Spaeny's career ultimately went in a different direction, she wound up meeting another up-and-coming pop star whose music career very much didn't peter out. Trying to crack the pop scene from her home base in Missouri, Spaeny came across a Missouri-based artist now known as Chappell Roan. "We used to do talent shows together!" Spaeny told MTV. "Cailee and Kayleigh. She would always win, though."

After she moved to Los Angeles and quickly found herself starring in films like "Bad Times at the El Royale," Cailee Spaeny pivoted to television. In shows like "Mare of Easttown," "Devs," and "The First Lady," Spaeny made her mark on the small screen just as her career took off on the big one. That's what we call versatility.

In director Alex Garland's "Devs," Spaeny played Lyndon, a role written as a boy. Garland was taken with her audition, and he gave her the role without re-writing the character. "He said it's like how a lot of women play Peter Pan on stage — he just wanted something sort of boy-like, and wasn't finding that in the men he was auditioning," Spaeny explained to Empire. "I just knew that I was gonna be safe. If it was any other director, I'd be like, 'This is too weird.' But I knew Alex does things like that, and it just sort of works."

In "Mare of Easttown," on the other hand, she played a teen mom who was down on her luck. The show gave Spaeny a chance to work with the stunningly talented Kate Winslet. "She's just f***ing Kate," Spaeny told Empire. "Heart on her sleeve, she is what she is. Those are the people that I look up to."

As Cailee Spaeny's career began to take off, it makes sense that fans would start to be interested in her personal life. To that end, Spaeny went public with her first high-profile relationship. She dated fellow up-and-coming actor Raymond Cham Jr., best known for starring in Disney Channel films like "Teen Beach 2."

As Spaeny and Cham came up through the entertainment industry together, they leaned on one another for support and style inspiration, as they explained to The Bare Magazine. "Well, she likes soft boys so I've been in touch with my softer side," Cham joked. "I'm trying to look pretty too now." For her part, Spaeny said she stole her boyfriend's clothes sometimes, playing around with an androgynous look inspired by her role in "Devs." "I steal most of his vintage tees. He has a pretty impressive collection," she revealed. "I feel like I helped Raymond get in touch with his feminine side a bit."

Aside from that one joint interview, the two young stars managed to keep their relationship pretty private. These days, they no longer follow one another on social media. We won't speculate, but you can make of that what you will.

In 2023, Cailee Spaeny took on her biggest role yet, playing the title character in Sofia Coppola's "Priscilla." The film, which chronicles the life of Elvis Presley's wife Priscilla Presley, saw Spaeny play the icon from her early teenage years up through her divorce from The King. Priscilla left her life to marry Elvis, and Spaeny saw a parallel there to her own experience quitting school to pursue acting. "Like Priscilla's family, my family made incredible sacrifices to support that decision," she told Deadline. "And you're not only having to get it right for yourself, but also make sure that you don't let them down."

In this film, Spaeny got to stretch her range, and she won rave reviews across the board, from critics to her director. Coppola told The New York Times, "[Spaeny] can express so much while barely doing anything. She has that rare ability to say so much, just with her face, her eyes."

"Priscilla" paired Spaeny with another rising star: Jacob Elordi. As the Elvis to her Priscilla, Elordi and his pint-sized co-star seem to have gotten along very well on set. "Very quickly, I learned that he approaches roles in the same way that I do," Spaeny reflected to Deadline. "Basically, we're just two nerds." Her nerdy preparation paid off; though she didn't win, she was nominated for a Golden Globe, surely the first awards recognition of many to come.

As the hype around Cailee Spaeny's work in "Priscilla" kicked into overdrive thanks to her Golden Globe nomination, it's only natural that the fashion industry would take notice of the exciting new star. Still, she told Empire that she's not a fan of playing dress-up. "I find [glamour] boring," she told Empire. "I mean, it was fun to dress up [in 'Priscilla'] and I love doing these fun photoshoots, but I just find it uninteresting. I hope I never slide into that."

That being said, Spaeny made her Met Gala debut at the 2024 incarnation of the event, dressing in a stunning Miu Miu gown that fit the event's "Garden of Time" concept. Just as stunning was her blush-heavy makeup look, a striking departure for a star who usually goes fresh-faced in her film roles. "For Cailee, it's all about beautiful skin and minimal foundation," her makeup artist Loren Canby told Byrdie. "Any way we can stimulate the skin and create a hydrated glow from within is key."

Even though Spaeny may not be comfortable with the glitz and glam of Hollywood, it seems that her Met Gala appearance was a natural one. "You just know when you know! And it really felt like me! It felt like the perfect first Met look," she told Harper's Bazaar. "And it was just ultra chic. The silhouette was just gorgeous."

Thanks to her role on Alex Garland's show "Devs," the director tapped Cailee Spaeny for a major part in his 2024 film "Civil War." She was cast opposite Hollywood veteran Kirsten Dunst as a young photojournalist named Jessie, a precocious, brave young woman who tries to capture images of a war raging across America. For the part, Spaeny actually learned to use the film cameras that her character wields like weapons, capturing her own photos on set just as her character does. The film builds to a climactic moment where Jessie photographs a shocking event, and Garland gave Spaeny freedom in those incredibly tense scenes. "The ending sequence was really fun because I composed the shots. I chose what shots I wanted to take," Spaeny proudly told Entertainment Weekly. A few came out blurry, so they re-did it with professionals following Spaeny's lead. "I then got to do a really fun round with our amazing camera operator, Dave," she recalled. "We went around and grabbed those actual shots that I had chosen."

The film involved a number of harrowing action sequences, and Spaeny told Empire that she doesn't like the way some other actors talk about starring in films like this one. "I feel weird comparing it because sometimes I see actors go, 'It's like we're in a war!' and I go, 'Oh God, don't say that!'" she said. "But if we're just comparing it to other films that I've done: yeah! It was very intense."

After "Civil War," Cailee Spaeny's banner year kept right on rolling with the release of "Alien: Romulus." Director Fede Alvarez cast Spaeny as the heroine of his film, a rough-and-tumble final girl heir to Sigourney Weaver's iconic Ripley from the original film. He told The New York Times that he was intrigued by the depth Spaeny brought to the role, explaining, "At first glance she has this Midwest girl next door aspect of her. But then when you look closely, there's the darkness."

While Spaeny had done sci-fi before, in "Pacific Rim: Uprising," this was her first proper horror role. She told Empire that she's always been terrified of horror movies, and the "Alien" franchise is no exception. Because Alvarez used a lot of practical effects on set, Spaeny had to get over her fear of the Xenomorph in real life, too. "The second you see that creature, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. And it's still shocking," she said. "I've seen that creature so many times, and when it's right there in your face, and we're doing scenes where I'm acting against it — it's still terrifying."

She also noted that the role marked a different milestone in her career: it's one of her first proper adult roles, where she's not just playing a youngster among grown-ups. "I think I need to move on. Find something else," Spaeny reflected. "I am growing up."

In many ways, it seems as though Cailee Spaeny's Hollywood domination is just getting started. After all, many of the positive reviews of "Alien: Romulus" pegged the young actor as a major force to be reckoned with in the industry, predicting that she would soon be a proper movie star. "Cailee Spaeny is the best actress of her generation," one fan wrote on X, formerly Twitter. "With ALIEN ROMULUS, she didn't sell out to Hollywood, she became the best young actress working in Hollywood today. A movie star, for sure."

Now that she's finally reached the place where she's always wanted to be, Spaeny, shockingly, isn't sure she wants it anymore! Speaking with The New York Times, she confessed that she's already thinking about whether she wants to give it all up. "This could really easily be a chapter of my life and not my whole life. There's only so many tricks an actor has up their sleeve," she said. Spaeny attributes part of her crisis of faith to the break she took after filming "Romulus," during which she finally had a chance to relax after many years of pounding the pavement. "I went, Oh, what are the other options?" she said. "Is this always going to be my life?"

Time will tell whether Spaeny settles into her fame or steps away from it. All that's clear is that, right now, her transformation is still ongoing.