Sky Ferreira
Sky Ferreira is an actor, born 1992.
Music came first. Sky Ferreira was posting videos of herself singing on Myspace as a teenager in Venice, California, which got her found by the producers Bloodshy & Avant and signed to Parlophone in 2009. The EPs came before the album: As If! in 2011, then Ghost in 2012, which stripped the production back, brought in Jon Brion and Shirley Manson, and produced Everything Is Embarrassing, the track that made critics take her seriously. Night Time, My Time followed in 2013. This catalogue holds one album for her, and it is that one.
Acting arrived alongside the music and has quietly outpaced it in volume. She is good in a specific and limited way: she plays wary, watchful people who are not performing for anyone in the room, which suits a musician whose entire public posture has been a refusal to be packaged. Kaycee in The Green Inferno. Charlotte in Elvis & Nixon. Ann-Marit in Lords of Chaos. Renee in Reptile. Bridget Callahan in American Woman.
The most widely seen credit is the smallest: Baby's mother in Baby Driver. Seven films and one album is an unbalanced record for someone whose reputation rests almost entirely on the album, and that imbalance is the honest summary of the decade that followed 2013.
Movies (7)
Music (1)
Where to start with Sky Ferreira
Begin with the record. Night Time, My Time is the work everything else orbits, and one listen explains the screen choices that came after: brittle, loud, deliberately unpolished in places where a label would have smoothed it.
For film, Baby Driver is where most people have seen her, though the part is small. The better performance is Lords of Chaos, where she is one of the few characters allowed to behave like an adult in a film about boys, and Reptile is the most recent and the most restrained thing she has done.
Elvis & Nixon is fun and slight. The Green Inferno is the outlier, a nasty jungle horror picture that she is perfectly fine in and that is not for everyone. American Woman rounds it out for anyone working through the whole list.