**LOEWE** dress and **ANA KHOURI** earrings.
_This is
A nod to small things
that make life better.
Like the egg from
the chicken or a
Little spirit friend
formed by gifted
Hands. There is
a full moon tonight,
Seeming small in
the sky, and yet it
Turns the tides._
_Patti Smith, @thisispattismith Instagram caption, April 26th 2021._
**CELINE** dress and **BVLGARI** earrings and bracelet.
Both Oscar weekend and a Scorpio super moon are looming. Two mythical orbs of intrigue and influence, no doubt stirring the conversational hot pot, and perhaps… primal urges. Indeed, here we are in late spring, and yet it feels a harvest of sorts is upon us—the garden yields. And we ask: what has joyously sprouted from humble seeds? What began with grandiosity and died on the vine? What shall flourish, what shall perish? Why the hell are the Oscars in April?
So much is in flux and flounder, but some things we can always count on, like the moon. No matter the swell of the tide, we know its origin story. Consider this: with a first name made famous by an esteemed Roman Goddess, backed by a luminous surname synonymous with a rare and precious metal, there is no doubt a mythic quality to young actor Diana Silvers’ origin story—simple truths met with unusual odds. Being scouted as a model via Instagram in 2015—contemporary star-gazing—proved only the first icy crystal in what has amassed as something of a career snowball; in the six years since, Silvers has evolved from doe-eyed ingenue to buzzed-about player with recognized power and potential.
I catch up with Silvers on Zoom at the beginning of her mandated two week quarantine in Vancouver. She’s on location in Canada to shoot the second season of Netflix comedy series _Space Force,_ reprising her role as Steve Carell’s rebellious daughter, Erin. Snacking on yogurt, in a casual t-shirt and loosely tied back hair, she’s the embodiment of chill. To get the ball rolling, I ask her to play a game with me: blurt out the first words that come to mind when she thinks back over each of her major roles so far.
**CELINE** dress and **BVLGARI** earrings and bracelet.
She screws up her face. Then responds to each prompt quickly, with precise comic timing.
_Glass_: “Cheerleading Girl number 2, baby.” \[laughs\]
_Booksmart_: “Hope and Amy get it on in the bathroom.”
_Ma_: “Kung fu fighting with a soda-can tower.”
_Ava_: “Me and John Malkovich doing a combat fight scene.”
Add _Space Force_, and Silvers has worked with John Malkovich twice. Do they get on well?
“Yeah. He’s very cool.” After a beat, she continues with an impromptu paean to her complex co-star, who plays Dr. Adrian Mallory, savant scientist. It’s even (perhaps subconsciously) space-themed. “John Malkovich is the most interesting man on planet earth,” she declares. “At _least_ on planet Earth. Probably on other planets, he would also be the most interesting man on them, too. Probably in other galaxies and in parallel universes, he would still be the most interesting man. He’s truly a legend.” And Silvers should know. She’s been on set with a few legends already—Bruce Willis, Samuel L Jackson, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain, and Juliette Lewis among them. She has range from comedy to horror to drama to suspense, with her screen time and credit ranking rising with each role.
Accepted into the acting program at NYU’s Tisch School of Drama, Silvers later transferred her major to 20th Century History, with a minor in Film. It’s all given her a sound theoretical background, and a philosophical perspective. “Every film that anyone’s ever done is like a home video, or a ‘time capsule’ of a particular moment,” she considers. “You make choices as an actor, and you learn and you grow from them, then you move on to the next thing. It’s so subjective about how _you_ view your best work, and how someone _else_ views your best work. You cut your hair and you think it looks amazing, but a week later you hate it, even though you loved it before… You know what I mean? I really feel that there’s no such thing as ‘this was my best work, and I’ll never get better than that.’”
**ALEXANDER MCQUEEN** dress, belt, and boots.
Silvers’ latest work in front of the camera is a lead role in _Birds of Paradise_, written and directed by Sarah Adina Smith (_Buster’s Mal Heart_, _Hanna_), forthcoming from Amazon Studios. Adapted from the young adult novel _Bright Burning Stars_ by A.K. Small, she’s Kate, an ambitious ballerina studying in an exclusive academy. Her rival for a position in the Paris Opera Ballet is Marine, played by Kristine Froseth. The classical facades of Budapest, Hungary, stand in for the book’s setting of Nanterre, France.
Sarah Adina Smith, who worked closely with her two leads to help them engage with the dramatic task at hand, kindly took a moment away from her pre-production duties to speak to me about her nascent star. “Diana is smart, dedicated, and driven. She was absolutely perfect for the role of Kate. She’s a former competitive tennis player, so she brought an iron-willed, fighting spirit to the character, which I really admire.”
Silvers is equally full of praise. “Sarah really moulded the characters according to Kristine and my strengths. At the same time, there also were a lot of things in that character which challenged my weaknesses in a way that I can look back and say, ‘I guess they weren’t really weaknesses, they were just things I haven’t really paid attention to, or exercised.’ You know, certain parts of my… I don’t want to say ‘personality’ or ‘persona’… but like: _psyche.”_
_Birds of Paradise_ was a physical, as well as mental, transformation, with intensive ballet training prior to shooting. No pain, no gain. “Doing a dance film when you are not a dancer is probably one of the hardest things you can ever do.” It was also a rapid-fire indoctrination into the disciplines of a rarified arena. “The ballet world is prestigious, it is cut-throat. It is very… constrained, like the artform itself. It’s a very rigid form of art, but there is freedom within that rigidity.”
**ALEXANDER MCQUEEN** dress.
Jacqueline Bisset—European Cinema thoroughbred, former Bond girl, and evolved ingenue herself—plays the exacting ballet mistress who wants to propel her acolytes onto greatness through suffering. She made quite the impression on Silvers. “Oh man, Jacqueline Bisset is _sooo_—not to be cliché—but that woman is _so_ beautiful, like a true beauty. She has _the_ most intense sparkling blue eyes.” Both Bisset’s on and off set demeanor was strict. “I had this suspicion that she was always partly in character, and that she was being extra tough on me the entire time, because Kate is this American girl who says she wants to be prima ballerina but has a hard time letting go, letting the dance ‘happen’ to her.” Silvers’ suspicions proved _en pointe._ “At the end of filming, she told me, ‘You’re really special’, and she was excited for me… It came from a place of… she was just in it, we were all so into the filming process, and in the end, I was grateful. Because it helped me stay in my character.”
Silvers attempts to express this somewhat inexpressible sensation. “Have you seen _Soul_? There’s this one amazing moment when he’s in this thing called ‘The Zone’… and every artist knows what this is. When I watched _Soul_, I was thinking whether, as an actor, ‘Have I really ever been in The Zone? But with _Birds of Paradise_, I realized—oh my god, I was in The Zone for the entirety of filming this movie. I was no longer Diana, I was so invested, I was like _married_ to this character. I knew everything about her. I knew what made her cry, I knew what made her angry, I knew what motivated her. What broke her heart. I knew her so well.”
Then pandemic panic set in, as it did and has done with so many productions, and filming was stopped six days before completion. Luckily, the production carried on a few months later. “I didn’t know if I could ever do that again,” says Silvers, shaking her head, “I had spent so much of quarantine trying to almost ‘shed’ it. Then we got back to Budapest, I put on my playlist, and I was back in it; I was Kate again.”
**GUCCI** dress and **BVLGARI** earrings and ring.
Silvers hasn’t seen the full cut of the film yet. “There was only one scene where Sarah let me watch all the way through while we were doing ADR… there was this weird gurgle I did, my stomach made a noise, and we were trying to figure out where it was. So I got to watch this one monologue, and I was like ‘Ohhh, I want to see this movie!’ It was reassuring to know that there’s a world where all of your hard work can pay off. That you can watch something, and you’re not actually watching _yourself_ anymore… I didn’t see myself, I only saw the character.”
Ballet movies might be grueling work, but they’re a surefire way for an actress to really prove themselves. NB: _Black Swan, The Red Shoes, An American in Paris,_ both Argento and Luca Guadagnino’s _Suspiria, Girl_ by Lukas Dhont, or 2016’s _Polina._ Silvers began her research early. “I first watched _Black Swan_ in the 7th grade on the way to an orchestra competition,” she recalls. “I had downloaded it on my phone. I love Natalie Portman—love ballet, loved dance school. We’re all on the bus—my teacher is walking past me, and it’s like right at the frickin’ sex scene, and she looks at me, and I look at her, and I’m like, ‘It’s _Black Swan_’, and she’s like, ‘Okay…’ It was very embarrassing, but whatever—you can’t get mad at a 12 year-old.” And did she revisit the lauded film more recently? “I thought about watching it again right before _Birds of Paradi_se,” she shares, “but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to mimic someone else’s performance; I felt like if had rewatched it, that’s what I would have done. But I did watch _The Red Shoes_. I love that movie. It’s so weird.”
**ACNE STUDIOS** top.
Further exploration of global cinema turned out to be a round-about journey for this California girl. “When I was 17,” she recounts, “I went to Paris to model for a couple months—it was horrible—they said I was too fat or whatever, even though I wasn’t fat… That was pre-everyone saying, ‘Why are we telling all these young girls that they should not eat?’ I guess I didn’t fit the model mould, or whatever. But that doesn’t matter.” Because the trip had a silver lining.“I went to Switzerland afterwards to see my grandparents, as my Mom’s side are Swiss, and hung out a lot with my cousin, and he and I spent all our time just watching French films.”
This Franco-binge whet her appetite for the future: “I think it would be very cool to do a French film. I really want to learn the language properly. I feel like I’m still young, and I can figure it out.” I’m sure she can, in the spirit of Jean Seberg, Jane Birkin, Charlotte Rampling—and indeed, Jacqueline Bisset—before her. She’s already getting into the advanced stuff. “I really liked _Mauvais Sang_ with Juliette Binoche. I wanted to cut my hair like hers, but my modeling agent was like, ‘Don’t you dare.’” She’s pleased to hear the reclusive director Leos Carax has a new film coming out in 2021, _Annette,_ shot in LA and starring Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver. “That’s so cool.”
Now that we’re on the subject of film, Silvers becomes loquacious. She tells me how auteur Mia Hansen-Løve’s semi-autobiographical _Goodbye First Love_ spoke directly to her heart. “I _really_ loved that movie,” she says passionately. “It is so good. Everything about it, including the soundtrack. It was funny, because it’s about this guy who is an architecture student, and at the time I had just been just dumped by an architecture student in New York… He definitely wasn’t ‘The One,’ and I was totally just being dramatic, but I’d never really ‘dated’ someone like that before. I was like, ‘I have a boyfriend, this is so cool,’ and then when he dumped me, I was beside myself.” The sensitive portrayal of lost-and-found love triggered something deep. “I remember watching the movie in my friend’s apartment in the Lower East side… I felt so ‘seen.’ I was crying like a baby, and then I said to myself, ‘I’m going to smoke a cigarette.’” Silvers smiles and declares defiantly, “I don’t even really smoke, but I’d just watched a foreign film, and I was feeling so emotional, and so it just felt right.”
**LOEWE** dress and **ANA KHOURI** earrings.
There actually is a Diana Silvers Film List up on her ‘gram. It seems Hollywood has found not only a new muse, but a cineaste too. Along with _Goodbye First Love_, the following appear: _20th Century Women,_ the fondly nostalgic West Coast ensemble piece and _Mulholland Drive,_ that hypnotic swirl of duality and desire. “David Lynch is also someone I really want to work with,” she shares. “He’s beyond. He’s the dream.” _Midnight Cowboy. Goodbye Lenin_. _Little Miss Sunshine_. Wes Anderson’s _The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou_. _Big Fish—_small town surrealism from Tim Burton. The epic _Man Who Fell to Earth_ by Nicolas Roeg. Disney’s _Fantasia_. She’s also well-known for loving _Almost Famous_ and having quite the Penny Lane fixation.
You can also find Silver’s own forays into photography and Super 8 footage published on her personal website. Silvers’ intrepid, curious nature drove her to the medium. “I’ve always been a bit of a wanderer,” she remarks, “and when you’re a wanderer and a bit of a nomad, photography is the perfect thing to do, because you can just do it by yourself.” And like attracts like. “I met one of my best friends because she’s a photographer, and a mutual friend proposed we shoot together. She takes all my favorite photos of me, and we go on adventures, we go to new places together, and we see new things. It’s something that has bonded us and will continue to bond us for life.” Photographer Alexandra Hainer’s Instagram does reveal many shots of her friend, along with cute captions such as ‘She got her Crocs on relaxed mode’ with a Crocs-and-socks wearing Silvers chilling on a rooftop gable.
In turn, Silvers’ close group is immortalized in soft, real-film snapshots with a vintage aura, in which the intimacy is palpable. “I feel like I’m lucky that my friends let me take their photos,” she shares, “because when you spend a lot of time with someone, you start to see them in a different way; when you take their photo, it’s already going to be different than if a stranger took it, because their guard is already down.” And that’s the way she likes it to be.“As cliché as the ‘eyes are the windows to the soul’ thing is, it really is true. I’ve even seen it in photos of myself when I’ve worked with different photographers. I can tell when I was guarded, and it shows.”
I ask whether the constant media speculation about the dating lives and sexuality of Silvers and her friends annoys her? “Oh I don’t care,” she says resolutely. “No, that doesn’t annoy me at all. I mean, at the end of the day, everyone is free to do and be whatever they want. I don’t think who you’re dating actually reflects your sexuality. It’s really not fair to base someone’s sexuality off of who they are dating. Because sexuality is fluid and ever-changing, and we’re always evolving. So is our sexuality.”
I note that her generation is fortunate to have the tools to present themselves unmediated, to demand to be called by the pronouns they decide upon. “It’s just about respect,” she affirms. “If someone says ‘these are my pronouns’ and another person chooses not to respect that, then that person is an asshole. We’re all just here to live as we please and hope that we get respect of our peers around us.”
**SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO** dress, belt, and earrings.
With all the attitude and allure, Silvers has also gained fans in the high-fashion cliques. She floats around her garden in printed silks for Hedi Slimane’s latest Celine collection. Dons blue jeans and an artist collab T-shirt to deliver a message on sustainability for Stella McCartney. Head-to-platform-booted-toes in Chanel at the brand’s show at the Grand Palais in Paris. At Ralph Lauren in New York, she stood out from the frosted blondes at her table in a black and white tux, slicked hair, panda-black eyes, vamp lipstick and spike heels that would have Sally Bowles high-kicking chairs in delight.
When you’re a rising star, rather than a model-among-many, the fashion world opens up like a flower in the garden, and becomes a glamorous playground dipped in the magical. For example, Silvers took her mother Christina with her to the Miu Miu female filmmaker focussed ‘Women’s Tales’ jamboree during the Venice Film Festival of 2019, where they zipped around piazzas and palazzos with Hunter Schafer, Tessa Thompson, and other bright young film sprites. “Venice!” She gushes. “That was one of my favorite experiences I have had so far, being in this industry. That was so special. I met so many wonderful people that I genuinely think the world of and look forward to seeing. We actually all really bonded, which I wasn’t expecting.” Then she sighs, “It’s crazy, because that was kinda like the last ‘event’ I did… before Covid.”
It’s inevitable here not to look back at the past year and inquire what Silvers took from the experience. “Necessary pause … and reflection,” she shares. “There’s no other way to put it. It’s uncomfortable to be forced to reflect, essentially. But it was necessary, in many different levels, from personal, city, world… So many different layers of community, it was necessary for everyone to just stop, and reflect.”
**ACNE STUDIOS** top and skirt, **SKIMS** bra, **PARIS TEXAS** shoes, **ANA KHOURI** rings.
In 2020, the historic Biden vs Trump Presidential Election prizefight fell on the day of Silvers’ 23rd birthday. Rather than celebrating her birth, a concerned Silvers urged her followers to vote. Other notable 3rd November kids include Colin Kaepernick, Anna Wintour, Dolph Lundgren, and Kendall Jenner. I run down the list to her. And for full disclosure, I add myself, as I too share this rather auspicious born day. _Scorpio Power._ She gets it, and chuckles. “Legends only. Literal legends only. We’re all going to change the world!’ And I do not doubt she will. She’s rather adroitly using her platform to expose her over 750,000 followers to positivity, activism, and social justice flash points—Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, BLM, Amanda Gorman’s speech at the Biden inauguration—as well as upping the ante by recommending books like incisive renegade feminist Jia Tolentino’s _Trick Mirror: Essays on Self-Delusion_.
Not only is Silvers politically aware, she is somehow simultaneously natural, goofy and gorgeous, a slice of a quirky wholesomeness. There’s no bronzer-dusted cleavage, over-filled lip puckering, OnlyFans teasers or airhead pseudo-spiritual quotes. Silvers doesn’t need to cut-and-paste anodyne affirmations—she’s very much able to write her own story. I imagine the results if Patti Smith, now 74 years old, (who Silvers notes as one of her inspirations), had had an instantly communicable photo-poem machine in her pocket while she was finding her voice as young woman. I think that retro-active imaginary feed would probably have been much like Silvers’ in spirit, even if perhaps not in color palette. This is content that emanates from someone who’s independent, strong in her convictions, and not afraid to be an outsider. “I feel like people expect you to follow everyone else, and when you don’t, it’s scary, and people think you’re weird, or they think you’re this or that or the other thing, _because_ you’re ok with going off and doing something different from everyone else. I don’t know—I live in my own world… it’s the best place to live.”
Much of this compassion and ambition stems from a long-standing inner drive. “When I was in college,” she recalls, “everyone was going out, and I was like, ‘I can’t go out, I have to study, I have a job—there are things I need to do!’ I’ve been living my life that way from a very young age.” Keeping herself to herself, was she ever a target for rivalry or jealousy? “I met really good people early on, people who were a little bit older, so I felt alleviated from the pressure of having to fit in my with ‘peers.’”
**SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO** dress, belt, and earrings.
Working with supportive, all-female teams like she did on _Booksmart_ put stellar role-models right in front of her, which has had a significant impact. “Olivia Wilde \[_Booksmart_ director\] saying, ‘I have bigger dreams than just being an actress. I also want to write and direct—there’s a world that lives in my head that I want to see out there, too’—that meant a lot.” She describes something similar in her recent _Birds of Paradise_ collaborator. “Sarah Adina Smith has _such_ an interesting mind—she very much has a whole world in there. It takes a lot of courage to say, ‘I’m ok with being vulnerable’ and putting it out there for other people to see. It’s about entrusting this vision that lives inside you to other creatives, like actors, to help externalize it. It takes a village to make a movie.”
Musically, Silvers’ references are eclectic and inter-generational. David Bowie to Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen to Jimi Hendrix and Joni Mitchell share airtime with Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey. She valiantly covered LDR’s _Norman Fucking Rockwell_ on acoustic guitar, crooning acapella, “Head in your hands as you color me blue.” One day soon she wants to bring an explosive rock diva to life onscreen. “My fantasy is to play some really cool 60s or 70s musician,” she enthuses. “If anyone wants to make the Linda Ronstadt, or the Stevie Nicks-slash-Fleetwood Mac biopic, I am available! And I’m classically trained, technically, if it helps—I studied cello for 10 years.”
We’ve amassed some serious momentum as it concerns acting goals. It turns out that underneath it all, Silvers has a longing for corsets and crinolines. “I really want to do a period piece,” she says. “I mean, I was a History nerd; I’d love to just travel through time as an actor.” Personally, I can see her in the 1960s—with her emotive brown eyes that wear winged eyeliner so well, she’s like a young Sophia Loren. Crossed with Bambi. I tell her that (without the Bambi part) and add that she should be working with today’s equivalents of Fellini, Pasolini, Bertolucci. She politely says thank you and, nary a second later, enthuses over the pasta-loving Italian icon. “Did you see the latest Sophia Loren movie?” This is _The Life Ahead_, the drama based on Romain Gary’s moving French novel, directed by the actress’ own son, Eduardo Ponti. She starts to look up the Oscar’s listings. “Was she nominated? I’m googling. No. It’s a shame—she didn’t get nominated. That sucks. That makes me sad. She was so good in it. I wept my little eyes out.”
I realize that Silvers and I could talk about movies forever. Instead, it’s time to wrap things up, and to relinquish her company to Canadian solitude. What’s planned for the rest of the day? “You know what I’m gonna do after this? I’m going to watch _Best in Show._ My boyfriend and I are going to watch the same movie at the same time—he’s in LA and I’m here. So we can talk about it. It’s with Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, and Fred Willard who plays my grandpa in _Space Force_.”
Signing out with a European “Ciao,” Silvers disappears from my computer screen. Later in the weekend, via the ever all-seeing two-way mirror eye of Instagram, she throws up a few seconds watching the Oscars on TV, congratulating Chloé Zhao, and reposting Anthony Hopkins’ acceptance speech. Red carpet gold-Croc-rocking Questlove’s new movie, _Summer of Soul_, gets her thumbs up as well.
This is one 21st Century Woman who’s got her eyes wide open, her heart in the right place, and her priorities in ethical working order. She alloys a true passion for the medium with innate old school class and an endearing effervescence to forge the kind of fresh viewpoint that’s much needed in The New Hollywood. Sharing is caring, and by gifting us little parts of her world, Silvers is powering and being powered by the tide in her own way. And the crest she’s riding? Well, it might have started small, but this November child’s got that Scorpio Super Moon energy backing her up, and it’s well evident her wave won’t be breaking anytime soon.
* * *
Photographed by [Ryan Pfluger](https://ryan-pfluger.format.com/)
Styled by [Chloe Hartstein](http://www.chloehartstein.com/)
Hair: [Gregory Russell](https://www.instagram.com/gregoryrussellhair/?hl=en)
Makeup: [Mai Quynh](http://maiquynh.com/)
Videographer: [Jonah Wallach](https://www.instagram.com/jonah_of_arc/?hl=en)
