Iris Apatow Is A People Person

You wouldn’t know it from the Manhattan-chic layers she shows up in for our interview — a red-lined trenchcoat and oversized beige turtleneck sweater — but Iris Apatow is relatively new here. We’re at Cafe Cluny in New York’s West Village on a day that’s technically spring but still feels like winter. After eventually doffing all those layers, she reveals a simple cropped white button-down, hair pushed back in a very Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy-esque headband. Yes, she’s as into Bessette-Kennedy as all of us, but chose the look more for function than form: “The reason I’m wearing this is just because I have a chemical haircut from dying my hair in the front,” she says, joking. “It looks like horns.”

She confesses that her first year and change in the city, where she moved at the tail end of 2024, has been rocky — the ambient disorientation that comes with moving 3,000 miles away from your hometown and your family of origin. “I was really happy to just move in with my boyfriend,” she says of White Lotus breakout Sam Nivola, a longtime New Yorker. “I was super happy, but I also felt lost: ‘I don’t know what’s happening and I don’t know how to use the train yet. I am just confused.’ But I settled in. I’m still getting used to it.” It’s a common experience, one shared by thousands of 20-somethings each year.

But of course Apatow’s situation is also quite singular, starting with the fact that she hails from — and bears the surname of — the first family of a certain slice of Hollywood: Her filmmaker dad, Judd, is perhaps his generation’s biggest heavy-hitter in comedy; her mom, Leslie Mann, has acted in some of the funniest movies of the last 20 years; her big sis, Euphoria actor Maude, has become a writer and director, too. Now, Iris, at 23, is carving her own path in the family business with acting roles both big and small, on both streaming and the silver screen: a killer ballerina in Amazon Prime Video’s recent thriller, Pretty Lethal; a college freshman with secrets in the final season of deranged Hulu soap Tell Me Lies; and soon, Proserpina Trinket in the hotly anticipated prequel Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping.

While her acting momentum is revving up like never before, Apatow is no stranger to a Hollywood set. She took small film and TV roles as a child — most of them in her father’s movies — and growing up in the eye of the entertainment storm, she couldn’t help internalize what she observed. “I really value my personal life,” she says. “I live a quieter life. It’s just more important to me to have that than to have work. Because I’ve met a lot of people who sacrifice their personal lives for work and it’s gone.”

“I literally watch a horror movie every night. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

What Apatow seems to have cracked with aplomb is how to make work work for her, turning the professional into the personal through the relationships she forges with each job. In the case of Pretty Lethal, which premiered at SXSW last month, she bonded with co-stars Lana Condor, Maddie Ziegler, Avantika, and Millicent Simmonds — all of whom play ballerinas fighting for their lives when they get stranded at a mysterious inn run by a former dancer (Uma Thurman). Apatow describes their time together “like summer camp,” though a particularly hardcore one. Training for the film, which shot in Budapest, required five hours of ballet training in the morning followed by five hours of fight training.

“I feel really proud of the movie,” she says. “People fought so hard for it to be a group of women, and that is what I found most inspiring: that a group of women worked their asses off, and it went down how we wanted it to.”

“I’m finding reasons in my brain why it’s not real. Even when I got the part, I thought they would come back and say, ‘No, that was an accident.’”

One moment during filming really cemented the group’s friendship. “We were all called to work to do some pre-production paperwork, and I was feeling so sick. They all noticed, and I started tearing up,” she says. “They all were walking me to a pharmacy, figuring out how to get me to feel better. It’s scary being on your own in a different country. To have people be like, ‘I got you,’ is the most valuable thing,” she adds, noting that it was especially cool to work with other girls her age who showed her “how to be a real professional young actress.”

As she looks at me from across the table at Cafe Cluny, over zucchini fries and Buffalo chicken dumplings, Apatow radiates warmth — it’s no wonder she makes friends easily. Like on the final season of Tell Me Lies, which ended in February. It had been Apatow’s favorite show for years, and she says that she was willing to play any role whatsoever in order to be part of it. The real highlight, however, was the chance to connect with her peers while shooting in Toronto. She got to hang out with Grace Van Patten, a longtime friend of her and Nivola, and work closely with Cat Missal on an intense storyline: Apatow played Amanda, a freshman at the show’s fictional Baird college, whom Missal’s character suspects is involved with the same professor she had a disastrous affair with the season prior.

“Working with Cat was incredible. I spent all my time with them and we just had a lot of fun and it was such a supportive environment,” she says. “Weirdly I had such a real fear [of being on the show] given that it existed already. You don’t want to mess it up, but I felt wonderful.” (She does lament that after the events of the show, she’s afraid “poor Amanda” is still with the evil professor.)

“I’m auditioning all the time. Every blue moon, it works out, and that is the most exciting thing in the world. But carving my own path has been messy and confusing.”

Friendship also bloomed on the Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, which hits theaters in November. Edvin Ryding, the Swedish actor best known for Netflix’s Young Royals, “became one of my best friends,” Apatow says sincerely. “Me and my boyfriend, Sam, and him and his girlfriend all went on a trip to the countryside in Germany.” And playing the younger sister of Elle Fanning’s young Effie Trinket was its own treat: “She’s always somebody I’ve looked up to, so I was very excited to get to watch her work and learn from her.” These connections were especially anchoring in the whirl of such a massive franchise.

“I think I’m finding reasons in my brain why it’s not real,” she says of her casting. “Even when I got the part, I thought they would come back and say, ‘No, that was an accident.’ I don’t want to get excited because I don’t know if people will like me. I think it’s definitely the craziest thing that’s happened to me. Even if it’s in a small way, it was just amazing to be there. I’m sure as it will get closer, it will feel more real. It felt real when I was filming and then I was like, ‘Let’s just shut it off.’”

Sipping on her iced oat mocha, she muses about shaping what kind of career she wants to have. “I have been lucky enough to be very, very privileged as a child: to have been in movies as a baby and worked with my family — that was very safe,” she says. “It’s been an amazing experience and has helped give me a lot of things in my life.” But coming from a famous family brings its own pressures. “It sets the tone that affects how people see me,” says Apatow, who in person is the spitting image of both her mom, Leslie, and sister, Maude.

“But that’s why I’m really trying to have a mindset of, ‘If I’m a nice person, work hard, have a good relationship with the people I work with and my family, that will help me.’ I’ve experienced a lot of opinions about me and that can hurt your heart,” she continues. “I want to enjoy my life and enjoy my work and my cat, and be a good person — and then hopefully positivity follows, and you feel welcomed by the community you're in. And I do feel that. But I also want to be as wonderful as my family too.”

That’s not to say she’s not ambitious. “I’m auditioning all the time. Every blue moon, it works out and the stars align and you get something. And that is the most exciting thing in the world. But carving my own path has just been messy and confusing,” she says. “I just hope that one day I am able to prove myself and show that I have worked hard and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve done and believed in what I’ve done. And, that I didn’t sacrifice any morals to be in something.” What kind of work would she like to do in the future? A period piece, for starters. She grew up watching Pride & Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility with her mom describes herself as a “hopeless romantic.”

“I live a quieter life. It’s more important to me to have that than to have work. I’ve met a lot of people who sacrifice their personal lives for work and it’s gone.”

Perhaps more surprising: She really wants to be in a horror movie. Over the course of our lunch, Apatow proves herself to be a serious horror film buff, explaining that she started dabbling in the scary stuff as a kid seeking an “adrenaline rush.” Since then, it’s become an obsession — it’s her favorite genre and, for the record, Creep is her favorite in the bunch. (At one point, she even shows me her Letterboxd: She rated Trap higher than Saving Private Ryan but refuses to give anything less than three stars.)

“I watch everything. I literally watch a horror movie every night. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I think that it’s just because ... I find it fascinating. Everything that goes into it is so complex,” she says of the genre.

While Hunger Games flashes on the horizon, Apatow’s biggest project right now is nesting in the new West Village apartment she and Nivola just moved into — quickly. “I had to abruptly move out of my apartment, which is a very old apartment and has a lot of quirks. Very New York experience,” she tells me. “Everybody’s apartment gets flooded once. Mine was all my suitcases floating around the basement. I was like, ‘Great,’” she says with a good-natured laugh.

The press is, of course, enamored of Apatow and Nivola’s relationship as young Hollywood royals. (Nivola’s parents are actors Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola.) But it’s another guy she can’t stop showing me photos of on her phone: Kumo, her ragdoll cat, whom she adopted during a particularly lonely period while in college at USC. After driving to the Valley to meet the cat, “I was like, ‘This is the love of my life,’” she recalls. “I was going through such a hard time. It really gave me a sense of a reason to get up in the morning and play with him. And it made me start taking care of myself better. It really does make me emotional because it was so vital to bringing me back to a place of responsibility.”

She shows me more pictures of Kumo and the other cats in her family, including her sister’s in a birthday hat with a grumpy face. “I just wanted to give you a little joy,” she says, giggling. Joy is something that Apatow seems to take seriously in all aspects of her life. Once her new apartment is together, she’ll be ready to go back to work. “I actually have a very good feeling about the next stage of my life and I think, or at least I hope, I am able to make progress into settling in somewhere,” she says. But in the meantime? She’s off to the tailor, maybe a walk if the weather stays nice — the kind of perfect New York day she’ll have many, many more of.

Top image credit: McQueen clothing.