Alexandra Daddario dropped out of acting school. While this fact may ring rebellious, especially regarding an actress known for her sweet, girl-next-door roles, it’s actually quite the opposite. Calling it on college is just one item on the list of what makes Daddario seem so down-to-earth.
The school she left was a small performing arts college on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where she grew up. She wasn’t admitted into the acting program, and she didn’t necessarily fit in with the groups of theater kids roaming the dorms and scream-singing the Broadway show du jour. (I went to the same school, and these nightly off-off-off Broadway performances were a thing.) Testing out higher-ed, only to find her acting education in other ways, is indicative of how she’s moved through her two-decade long career — with purpose, sure, but without constraints.
“I’m not super-strategic,” Daddario admits on a Zoom call from her house in Los Angeles. She comes across comfortable and effortless as we chat, stopping to check on her barking dog. Another check on that aforementioned list. “For the majority of my twenties, no one was throwing offers at me,” she explained, going on to say she learned to take jobs that felt “cool,” and tune out the rules of Hollywood. “There’s stuff I’ve done that people don’t take super seriously, which is fine, but I’ve always taken my characters seriously, and so I’ve always found something in each project.”
This atтιтude has made for a robust résumé filled with movies and television shows that span genres from action to comedy to horror. In the last 10 years, she’s starred in Texas Chainsaw Mᴀssacre, the Baywatch remake with Zac Efron and The Rock, she had a pivotal role in the first season of HBO’s breakout series White Lotus, and now she’s leading the highly anticipated series Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches on AMC. And that’s just a small snippet.
It’s not just her roles that are executed without a care for norms, though. It’s her whole public persona. She embraced that duality wearing inflatable Moschino one minute and swapping to Chanel and Gucci the next. She analyzed every look, including the porcupine quills that came from hairstylist Peter Gray’s dog’s run-in with one, with the mindset that she’d be able to inject her personality — public as it is — into each outfit. And the Miu Miu bra set? It puts her squarely in a different kind of coven: Hollywood It Girl.
On social media, she’s candid if not silly. In 2020, she started a YouTube channel with her former roommates, Kate and Morgan. Quickly, it amᴀssed hundreds of thousands of subscribers who watch videos of her everyday life — cleaning out her closet, answering fan questions, watching and rating movies, and visiting tourist attractions in different cities. One of the most watched videos (with around 4.4 million views) is just the three women swimming around in a pool talking and making jokes. It’s access that typically gets withdrawn as an actor’s star rises. 
“I wouldn’t film myself sobbing about a breakup and be like, ‘I can’t handle it anymore. I’m so upset. Why did he do this to me?'” she admits when discussing her comfort with that level of exposure. “I think there was part of it, not even consciously, but part of it that was like, come on, all this other stuff you see isn’t real. And being ridiculous and weird and strange or a little bit less polished about things, that’s life. We’re all a little weird, so why hide it?”
The irony is that for many of the characters Daddario plays, hiding the truth makes them fun to watch. In Mayfair Witches, a show based on the series by the late author Anne Rice, her character, Dr. Rowan Fielding, is a successful neurosurgeon who seemingly has it all together. Behind the façade, though, she’s dealing with significant changes in her life in relatively destructive ways.
These transitions are something Daddario embraces. She grew up in New York City, surrounded by all of the creative culture that comes with it. At a young age, she knew she wanted to act and when she was a teenager, she landed a role on a soap opera. By the time she was 22, she was cast as the lead in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the popular novel series turned two-part blockbuster film franchise. “You’re building and building, and you hope that you don’t regress, but, at times you do regress,” she says about the ups and downs of her career. 
She admitted that while a blockbuster film like Percy Jackson was an obvious step up for her, she remained humbled by the unknown. “I never was like, ‘I’ve made it,’ even now I don’t feel like, this is it, I’m good for life now. I’m very, very proud of what I’ve accomplished, and I’m grateful, but it’s a ladder. You’re always sort of trying to figure it out,” she said, adding a little callback to our earlier conversation. “When you reach a certain age, and you’re still doing it, you go, ‘Well, I’m not going back to Marymount now to get my degree and figure out what to do; this is my job.’”