Photographs & interview by GREG WILLIAMS
As told to JANE CROWTHER

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Kaia Gerber invites Greg Williams to her theatre dressing room and discusses her voyage of discovery in her acting career.

Kaia Gerber’s nails tell the story of her life. When I meet her at her Hollywood Hills home on a sunny Saturday in February, I notice her perfect almond manicure with chipped black nail polish over the top. She invites me inside and explains they represent two very different jobs she’s juggling at the moment. ‘During the week I have perfectly manicured nails for season two of Palm Royale,’ she says of revisiting the role she has on the Apple+ TV show as Mitzi, the not-as-daffy-as-she-seems beautician. ‘Then I put black nail polish stickers on top during the weekends, and I chip it. By Monday they’re perfect again. But this is a representation of my life right now, because the black nail polish is very Jane Jr., who I play in [live theatre play] Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, and then the beautiful manicure is very Palm Royale…’

Gerber has received rave reviews for her performance at the Rogue Machine Theatre on Melrose, where she plays a fragile young woman wrestling with mental health issues five shows a week. She has invited me over to hang out as she gets ready before her Saturday matinee, filling her downtime from filming Palm Royale with an acting job that is helping her finesse her craft. That student’s approach to work is also evident in the self-confessed bookworm’s love of reading and learning – as she gets her things together in the kitchen, I notice a baseball cap and tote branded with her hugely successful online book club, Library Science. ‘It’s shameless self-promotion everywhere I turn!’ she laughs, admitting she’s even been specifically nerdy about the type of highlighter pen the site sells. ‘I think partially because I didn’t go to college, I don’t associate literature with studying. I have a friend who went to NYU, and now he is a librarian, and has the greatest library in London. He would take me to the bookstore and assign books to me. But it felt fun. That’s how I started reading. And now I can’t stop. Library Science started during the pandemic. I was just doing interviews with people on Instagram Live, because I always wanted to be in a book club, and none of my friends wanted to do that with me. It just grew from there. We curate libraries for hotels or private homes. It’s the dream job. Now I do the interviews pre-recorded, thankfully, because anything live is really scary.’

For someone who finds live events scary, Gerber has been facing her fears (twice a day on Saturdays) with her role in Evanston Salt Costs Climbing – playing a part that demands singing, dancing, tears and introspection in an intimate theatre environment where she can lock eyes with her audience. Though she is a successful model (and the child of one), the Malibu native grew up loving theatre and felt the pull back towards it after a film debut in Babylon and roles in Bottoms and Saturday Night, and TV roles in American Horror Story and Palm Royale. ‘That was my first love. And then I started doing film and TV. But I’d always wanted to go back to it,’ she says as she gets comfy on her sofa in a lounge with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the garden. ‘But it’s scary. There’s nowhere to hide, and in modelling I got quite used to hiding and being able to conceal. Theatre terrified me, which made me realise that I needed to do it again.’ The process of doing theatre has been revelatory for her. ‘There’s something kind of thrilling about knowing that you could go up there, and you could do whatever you wanted, and that will be what happens that day. When you’re doing television, you rehearse once right before you film it. Almost every single day that I leave a film set, or I’m driving home, or when I’m falling asleep, I’m like, “Oh, that’s how I should have done it.” And when you’re doing a play, you can wake up the next morning and then try that thing.’ 

Being part of a company, where she does her own stage make-up and organises her own costume and props, has also been a gift. ‘I had this awakening, realising how almost infantilised you can be on a film set. You get there, and they do your make-up, your hair, physically put you in clothes, they hand you your prop, and they tell you where to stand. It’s like you have a babysitter all the time. But doing theatre, no one’s telling me what time I have to be there. I choose. No one’s telling me how to get ready or how to prepare. You’re forced into this place of figuring it out.’ 

The tempestuousness of that experience has been twinned with the fast-paced filming of season two of Palm Royale during the week. ‘They couldn’t be more on opposite ends of the spectrum,’ she says of the two roles. ‘But I also appreciate that because I’m not able to stay in one too much. A lot of who Jane Jr. represents is the darker parts of myself, and these dark thoughts that I’ve had. So I actually get off the stage, and I’m like, “OK, I’ve acknowledged that dark energy for the day.”’ There was certainly dark energy when, during the rehearsal period, the LA fires started. Gerber grabbed her dog, Milo, and her first-edition books and evacuated, not knowing if the play would go ahead or even be something the LA community would want to see in the wake of such tragedy. ‘We were all of a sudden like, “Oh, we’re talking about the end of the world in this play, about climate change, about this existential feeling of dread. And now we’re looking at how this sky is on fire, and this is all really happening,” she recalls. The show was only delayed and Gerber has found audience reactions gratifying. ‘What has made me really love the experience of doing this, is that people come up after and they’re like, “Me too”. It’s devastating that everyone relates to it, but it’s also comforting, I think.’

We go outside to soak up a little sun before heading to the darkness of the theatre and I ask how modelling now fits into this performing life she is carving out for herself. ‘Modelling has a performative aspect to it that ties into acting,’ she says, rocking on her chair on the deck. ‘But modelling is so much the awareness of the camera and you’re trying to look appealing. In acting you have to forget all that. That’s something I’ve had to unlearn and that was the freeing part. I still model sometimes. But the greatest gift it’s given me is that it’s allowed me to do something like this play, where I’m just doing it because I love it. It’s allowed me this freedom, especially as I’m just starting, to just do the things that I love – not for any kind of financial gain.’

As Gerber gathers her matcha tea, smoothie and an energy drink with ‘a diabolical amount of caffeine in it’ to keep her going through her performance, we talk about turning fear into excitement. ‘They’re such close feelings. I don’t think you can hate someone unless you’ve loved them. If you shut down fear or anger or sadness, you can’t do that without shutting off excitement and happiness and love. I would rather feel. Some of the most painful moments of my life, I can look back and be like, “Pain is an indication of how much you cared and loved.”’

We hop in her monster pick-up truck (on loan from her dad) and wind our way down the canyon to the theatre. While stuck in LA traffic, she tries the ‘impossible task’ of narrowing down her five favourite books. ‘Maybe five most formative. Just Kids by Patti Smith. The Lover by Marguerite Duras. Clarice Lispector – all of her books; all of Joan Didion. And maybe Camus – The Stranger.  Right now, I’m revisiting Anaïs Nin. I’m rereading Frankenstein. And a lot of Linda Gregg and Jack Gilbert poetry.’ I ask if she’s tempted to write herself. ‘It’s the art form that I respect the most. I think my taste level is so much higher than what I could accomplish, and that’s a very difficult position to be in. But I’ve always written songs and poems. I would love to start adapting novels and books. And I would love to go back to school and actually get a degree in library science. I think that will happen, probably in the future.’ She does not, she says, simply want an easy life. ‘Who said that was a thing to achieve? Who put that as the ultimate sign of happiness? I don’t think that that’s the goal. The goal is contentment.’ 

Gerber gets to the theatre early to set out her things, walk the stage, get into hair and make-up and warm up. As we squash into her cosy dressing room (which is shared via a dividing wall with her co-star, Hugo Armstrong) she applies her pale make-up, gets changed and winds her hair on her head in readiness for the wig she cut herself. As she completes the transformation, she stares in the mirror at herself. ‘There she is, there’s Jane Jr.’. It’s approaching curtain up, and Gerber keeps an ear out for the music that denotes the audience arriving in the auditorium and sips Throat Coat tea to prep her voice as she does vocal warm-ups. When the show starts, she listens to the audience from the side of the stage, gauging the people she’ll perform for. ‘We’ll see what it is today.’ After the show, she likes to mingle with the audience in the lobby. ‘I’ve felt like I’ve been able to really get into really deep conversations with people after the play that I normally wouldn’t, just upon meeting someone.’  

I leave her to join the audience and watch the show. Personally, I thought she was incredible, her characterisation recalling something of the fragility of Shelley Duvall in The Shining. The Stage and Cinema review describes her as an actor ‘shedding her chrysalis…delivering the production’s most startling revelation’. After the show, I find backstage bustling with well wishers, one woman crying with the emotion of Gerber’s performance. She is tired but happy, and ready to do it all over again in the evening performance. What has this live experience taught her on-set? ‘It really got me comfortable with embarrassment. I felt much freer on set because I was just more comfortable with going through these really big feelings with an audience around me. Just learning that whether the audience is the crew on a film set, or an actual audience paying to sit and watch – not to try to ignore that, to be accepting of that and use it.’

I leave her to rest between shows and we catch up with her again the day after the Oscars, when Gerber attended the Vanity Fair party in ethereal 1997 couture Valentino. ‘I’m alive and ok!’ she jokes, post-celebrations, while driving her truck. She has only a few shows left at the theatre and is finishing up on Palm Royale where she teases that her character will have ‘quite an evolution’ in a way that she could be talking about herself as a growing artist. ‘Nobody really takes her seriously – even audiences. But how aware is she of the way that people perceive her, and how can she use that to her advantage?’ 

Gerber’s sharpened toolbelt of acting skills will be seen in a number of buzzy upcoming projects. She’ll appear in Outcome, a Hollywood-skewing comedy from Jonah Hill where she’ll play an actress opposite Keanu Reeves, movie star experiencing an epiphany. She also has a role in Shell, Max Minghella’s dark comedy about a wellness guru, and in David Lowry’s Mother Mary, starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel. She will also feature in TV show Overcompensating, following a student hiding his sexuality. ‘I feel lucky enough to have been able to focus on being a small part of these really incredible projects with filmmakers that I look up to so much. I love seeing the choices that actors make, and trying to connect those dots.’ Having nearly finished the run, what has she learned from doing the play? She pauses for a moment. ‘Doing the play was everything you are told not to do in front of people, that you know is opening yourself up for criticism – dance, sing, cry, scream. So it opened up my mind to: “Why have I limited myself from doing these things?”