From there it was a Broadway scholarship at Professional Children’s School before landing the role in Never Rarely Sometimes Always at 16. Her sensitive, naturalistic performance as a Pennsylvania teen who travels to New York City to help her cousin get an abortion received rave reviews, even more impressive considering it was her first onscreen acting role. “We were really taken care of by Eliza,” Ryder says of Hittman, the director, who remains a close friend. “I feel that maternal caretaking is important to have as a director, always.”

Ryder spoke passionately about abortion access while promoting the movie, and she still has a highlight in her Instagram profile that links to resources. Asked if she thinks of herself as political, Ryder responds: “How could you not be?”

That same year, Ryder was cast as a dancer in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. It was a small role, but she wasn’t going to waste a chance to learn filmmaking from one of the greats. “I was like, ‘This is such an embarrassing question, but what’s a storyboard?’” she recalls. Spielberg brought her into the studio and showed her the walls of meticulous illustrations planning out each scene, which blew her away. Even after her scene was done, she kept returning to set to watch him work. “I think the ADs and PAs must have been like, ‘This chick again, oh my God,’” she says. 

She kept auditioning for movies, and in 2023, she starred in Sean Price Williams’ The Sweet East, an experimental arthouse pic with inspirations ranging from D.W. Griffith to John Waters. She played a high school senior named Lillian who ends up on a road trip through a dark, phantasmagorical version of the Northeastern US, taken under the wing of neo-Nazis and anarcho-punks, excitable indie filmmakers and EDM-obsessed terrorists. Probably thanks to her dance training, Ryder has a stillness and self-possession, an ability to communicate wordlessly, that makes her a director’s dream. The Sweet East opens with her singing an original track composed for the film while gazing at herself in a bathroom mirror. Throughout the course of her misadventures, Lillian’s companions become infatuated with her beauty and seeming innocence, seeing her as a blank canvas on which they can project. Yet it becomes clear that she’s far more savvy and complex than she seems. “I like to play characters that are in the driver’s seat,” Ryder says. “A lot of times women in movies are very reactionary. That’s because it’s usually not written by a woman, and that’s the purpose they’re serving in a story.”

I ask Ryder if that’s because she craves control in her own life. “I mean, everyone wants control, I think,” she says, before breaking into a rendition of Radiohead’s “Creep.” “I want to have control. I want a perfect body. I want a perfect soul,” she intones softly. “I love that song, but... I mean, yeah, who doesn’t want those things?”

Being a young woman in the public eye is not for the faint of heart. But Ryder seems to have a firm handle on her boundaries. “I think it’s important to remain mysterious,” she says. Last Paris Fashion Week, she was papped holding hands with her 4 Kids costar Spike Fearn after the Saint Laurent show, leading to speculation about their relationship. I ask Ryder if she’s comfortable talking about her personal life, and she shakes her head. “I’m never going to confirm or deny anything about myself,” she says. 

This also goes for her sexuality, which has been a subject of speculation since the famous Maya Hawke makeout, as well as her roles in sapphic projects like Honey Don’t! “The devil works hard, but the Twitter gays work harder,” she says, laughing. “They’ll find pictures of me that I don’t even have on my phone. I’ll see photos posted that I’m like, ‘Where did they get that?’ But it’s cool. I’m very glad that my work mostly resonates with queer women, because that’s the crew.” That being said, she doesn’t mind leaving a few crumbs. “I think you can make inferences based on what I make work about,” she says. 

The day after our tearoom meet-up, I stop by Ryder’s cover shoot in an abandoned convent in Ridgewood full of bizarre ephemera: an old rocking horse, crucifixes, boxes of Polish erotica. She’s been hands-on throughout the process, proposing locations and sending styling notes. (“Tell her to dress me like she dresses LA boys,” she requests of stylist Zoey Radford Scott.) Over the course of the day, Ryder is in firm control of the playlist — lip-synching to Lil Uzi Vert, Gucci Mane, Madonna — and speaks her mind when something doesn’t feel right. (Asked, at one point, to do a joking MTV Cribs–style intro for a social video, she demurs, “Maybe I’ll just stay silent.”)

“She kind of adds her sauce to everything she does, because she just can’t help it,” Schubert says. “She doesn’t half-ass anything because nothing’s just a job to her.” 

Many actors find directing later in their careers, but Ryder has wasted no time getting behind the camera. Her first foray was shooting a music video for her friend Holden Jaffe, aka Del Water Gap, back in 2023. Currently, she’s working on a series of music videos for Lace Manhattan and Dixie Normus, the musician alter-egos of Ryder’s and Qualley’s characters from Honey Don’t! “Even if we didn’t find each other at work, we would have found each other,” she says of her transformative friendship with Qualley, who also came up as a dancer. The pair have created fake Instagram accounts for their personas and given interviews in character, telling The Face they met “at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas. Norman Mailer introduced us.” The first two videos, featuring songs that were co-written by Ethan Coen and produced by Jack Antonoff, were directed and choreographed by Ryder. “The next video is quite a bit bigger,” Ryder says. “There’s a lot of dance and a lot more people involved.” 

“The thing that I find most attractive in a relationship with a director is feeling seen, and I’ve never felt more seen by anyone than I do by Talia,” says Qualley (who has also been directed by Quentin Tarantino, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Richard Linklater, to name a few). “She’s like my little sister, and also I look up to her. She’s a total visionary and uncompromising.”

Film is the medium that’s inspiring Ryder most right now, although dance always seems to find its way in. Currently, she’s shooting a film school thesis for her sister, MiMi (“a genius, and I’m not just saying that because she’s my sister”), in which Ryder plays a ballet dancer preparing for her last college performance, alongside Harris and PinkPantheress’ DJ Joe. “It’s touching on this weird anomaly of having an onstage relationship versus a separate, and maybe not separate, relationship in real life,” Ryder says. She’s also working on her own project that she’s written and will direct, a ballet film that she’s reluctant to spill many details on. “I feel like it’s taken me 23 years to write,” she says. “I’m really excited. I feel like I’m stepping into people seeing me as an artist rather than just an actress now.” 

“Whatever the fuck Talia wants to do, she will find a way to do it,” says writer and film critic Nick Pinkerton, who wrote the screenplay for The Sweet East. He says the last text he got from her, about a week ago, was asking about the namesake for her Sweet East character, silent film actress Lillian Gish. She’d just finished watching Gish in Victor Sjöström’s 1928 feature, The Wind, and had some questions. “It’s not like anybody’s sitting there, like, pumping this stuff in her direction. That’s just who Talia is,” Pinkerton adds. “What makes her such a fine actress and also just a cool person is how totally open she is — that insatiable curiosity.”

Ryder’s next big acting role is in 4 Kids Walk into a Bank. The film is about a headstrong high-school misfit named Paige, played by Ryder, who enlists her three best friends to rob a bank as a way of preventing her grandfather (played by Neeson) from getting sucked into the criminal underworld. Ryder says that when she read the script, based on a graphic novel, she knew, deep in that instinctive part of her, that this was her next project. Frankie Shaw, the director, recalls that Ryder somehow got her number and left her a voice memo after the audition, convincing her that she was the only girl for the job. “I loved that this girl was leaving it all on the court,” Shaw says.

While it’s a more commercial movie than many of Ryder’s past projects, she liked that Shaw was willing to embrace the avant-garde, incorporating French New Wave sequences, nods to Korean cinema, and other experimental flourishes. And of course, Ryder brought her sauce. “I’d come in with an idea for a scene, and she’d show me something that blew my idea out of the water,” Shaw says. 

Ryder ended up choreographing a scene for the film in which Neeson’s character dances with hers to U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The two had already formed a bond, with Neeson serving as a sort of “on-set grandpa,” making sure she ate enough and wasn’t too cold. “I would have shot that scene forever. It was so fun and so sweet to see him throw his head back and spin,” Ryder recalls. “I don’t know who doesn’t like dancing. Even the people that say they don’t, secretly I think, always do. 

“One day when I have my real studio and we do an interview, I can make you dance,” she adds, with an impish smile. After all, if you’re not having fun on the job — as Ryder would say — what’s the point? And really, how could you not be? “I’m not for the tortured artist narrative. Shit is depressing enough,” she says. “That should be the one thing you’re not tortured about.”