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 It’s access that typically gets withdrawn as an actor’s star rises.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.’”