Hailey Benton Gates: Every Movie & Show Featuring The Drama's Breakout Star
The actor, director, model and journalist Hailey Benton Gates has only appeared in six movies in the last 11 years, but every single one is significant and almost all of them are certified bangers. The most recent of these is a standout turn opposite Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in The Drama, a new film from A24 that is fast becoming the most talked-about indie of the year.
As in all of her roles to date, Gates only appears for a handful of memorable scenes, but it marks another in a long line of impactful supporting turns from an actress who can now name Johnathan Demme, Luca Guadagnino, the Safdie brothers, Charlie XCX and David Lynch on the list of artists and filmmakers she has collaborated with so far.
With another movie with Charlie XCX already in the works, it feels like the right time to look at each of Gates’ screen projects to date, which I’ve listed below in chronological order. Read on to learn a bit more about her role in each of them and use the guide below to find out where to see them, either in cinemas or on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
From his 1980s breakout to his untimely death in 2017, Johnathan Demme was one of Hollywood’s great chameleon directors. He’s obviously still best known as the Oscar-winning director of The Silence of the Lambs, but his contributions to other genres — Stop Making Sense for the concert movie, Something Wild for the screwball comedy, Philadelphia for the Oscar movie, etc. — are no less significant
If there is a connective tissue between his movies, it’s a consistent appreciation for unusual music cues, which is one of the reasons why his swansong, Ricki and the Flash, is something of an underappreciated gem. The film stars Meryl Streep as a woman who leaves her family to become a rock star. In what was her first screen role, Gates only appears in a couple of scenes as the bride-to-be of Ricki’s son, Josh (a similarly green Sebastian Stan), but as debut collaborators go, they don’t come much better than Demme and Streep.
After graduating from NYU in 2012, the multihyphenate star went to work for The Paris Review while modelling for fashion houses like Miu Miu on the side. This all led to Gates hosting her own show, States of Undress, which explored various fashion industries around the world.
Running for two seasons on the short-lived but endlessly trendy Viceland, Undress followed Gates as she travelled to different countries to see how the clothing industry operated in different regions. Imagine shows like Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown or Richard Ayoade’s Travel Man, but with a fashion-centric focus, and you’ll have an idea of what to expect.
Around the time that Undress wrapped, Gates landed the kind of job that every hip young actor in Hollywood wanted in 2017: a role in what has since gone down as David Lynch’s final masterpiece, Twin Peaks: The Return.
Appearing over three episodes as a character credited only as “Drugged-Out Mother”, Gates gave a performance that was memorable enough, apparently, to catch the eye of some of the world’s most stylish and cutting-edge auteurs.
And back in 2019, they didn’t come more stylish and cutting edge than Josh and Benny Safdie, who, hot on the heels of Good Time, decided to add Gates to the cast of Uncut Gems — a typically anxiety-inducing film from the sibling directors about a gambling addicted diamond dealer played by Adam Sandler.
For this one, Gates played the snooty receptionist at the Adley auction house, where Sandler’s Howard Ratner comes to sell his precious stone.
Being an influential young person in the fashion world does have a way of getting you into the circle of Luca Guadagnino. Since his early mainstream breakouts (A Bigger Splash and Call Me By Your Name), fans of the Italian’s work have increasingly flocked to his movies as much for the clothes as for the simmering sexual tension.
Guadagnino’s 2024 movie Challengers — a deliciously raunchy film about a love triangle and tennis — has been particularly responsible for cementing that reputation. The leads are played by Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor, with Gates appearing briefly as the love interest of O’Connor’s chaotic tennis impresario, but its success had just as much to do with Loewe designer Johnathan Anderson’s outfits and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score.
Outside of her on-screen appearances, Gates has also tried her hand at several other film roles. In 2015, she co-wrote and produced a movie with the artist Tom Sachs and, in 2019, wrote and directed a short film for Miu Miu starring Arrested Development breakout Alia Shawkat.
When it came time to direct her first feature, the high-concept satire Atropia (which won the Jury Prize at Sundance in 2025), Gates turned to Shawkat again for the lead role of Fayruz, an aspiring actress working at a military role-play facility. Potential future James Bond Callum Turner is just as good in the supporting role.
In 2025, Gates reunited with one half of her Uncut Gem directors when she appeared amongst the eclectic ensemble cast of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, a fictional biopic of the table tennis star Marty Reisman that rips along (thanks to Timothee Chalamet’s lead performance) with all the energy of a Duracell bunny.
For this one, Gates’ role is kind of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it — just keep an eye out for her at the bowling alley where Marty and Wally go to hustle.
I suspect I’m not the only one who first sat up and took note of Gates after she saw her performance as Celeste — Charlie XCX’s loyal and long-suffering creative director — in Aiden Zamari’s The Moment earlier this year.
The film takes a unique approach to the mockumentary format, as unlike beloved spoof biopics like Spice World, it has some very real things to say about the price of cultural ubiquity — regardless of how effortlessly cool the artist responsible might be. If you were a fan of Brat Summer, you will have a very interesting time with this one.
For all the drama that has surrounded the release of The Drama, the most memorable scene in the film might be one of the few in which Zendaya (who gives an excellent performance throughout) doesn’t appear.
The sequence takes place near the final act, at which point Robert Pattinson’s museum curator, who is soon to be married, sits down to eat a salad across the table from his co-worker, Misha. If you’ve yet to see The Drama, it would be sacrilege to give anything away here, but let’s just say that Gates steals that pivotal moment and follows it up with a few lethally delivered lines later on. If I had to guess, I’d describe it as the kind of small performance that usually leads to much bigger things.
