Sasha Lane was 19, on spring break from Texas State University and partying in Florida when she was spotted by Andrea Arnold. The director, then 53, had just lost her lead actor for a film that was due to start shooting within weeks. Among the tens of thousands of students getting trashed and showing off on Panama City beach, the dreadlocked and tattooed Lane stood out. Arnold convinced her to perform an impromptu audition and, one month later, the teenager dropped out of college to shoot American Honey.
“I’m really impulsive,” Lane explains, quietly sipping from a Starbucks cup, thumbs curled inside the sleeves of her black hoodie. “I literally put my suitcases in Andrea’s car when my friends left and I stayed in a different state for a week. We connected. I can relate to her but at the same I was all: ‘I really hope you don’t fuck me over, I’m really trying to see you as a human, don’t fuck with me.’ I warned her.”
On screen, Lane’s energy is visceral and compelling: she plays Star (“named after deathstars”), a vulnerable teenage runaway sucked in by a charming stranger (Shia LaBeouf) with the promise of adventure and escape from a difficult homelife peppered with Arnold motifs: grinding poverty, squalor, an abusive stepfather. Could she relate? “I see a lot of myself in Star. I connected pre-tt-y hard with that one,” she says, eyerolling. It was her first experience of acting and Lane was thrown into a 54-day shoot, spent on the road, travelling 1,200 miles from Oklahoma to North Dakota. “My gosh, it took a lot of reevaluating things, time and conversation and being really exhausted, to find a boundary [between Star and Sasha].”
Almost a dozen characters, the vast majority of them street-cast following the Arnold method, make up the travelling “mag crew” Star joins to hustle and sell print subscriptions door-to-door. American Honey took the jury prize at Cannes this year – Arnold’s third. It’s a beautifully shot, coming-of-age road movie; a paean to the country’s underclass but also a dagger to the myth of the American dream – a bit Walker Evans meets Harmony Korine. But Lane dominates every frame she’s in. Arnold has said she ended up rewriting much of the script to capture Lane’s raw, wild performance on which the film hangs. And so there’s a juddering incongruity when I meet Lane: now 21, the confident, magnetic force of nature I had expected is shrinkwrapped. Swathed in regulatory goth black, her braids looped into two topknots, she is dialled down to a timid-but-sweet awkwardness.
“I come from a place where I didn’t have a lot of opportunities. A lot of people would say: ‘You can’t do this or you can’t do that.’ So meeting Andrea … I literally said: ‘I have nothing left to lose, I have to put my trust in you. She made me feel like I could.” The sense of hope, she says, is the biggest change in her life since it changed for ever. “There are opportunities and it feels like I can do things now. I just wanted a chance.”
Lane has no plans to finish her degree. “I’m pissed that I’m paying back student loans when all I know is that a lobster is a mollusc [sic]. I don’t care. I learn differently, I don’t want to take classes I’m not interested in, I don’t live like that. I can read books, watch documentaries, take personal classes.”
High school, she says, was “awful”. Lane’s parents divorced when she was young and her older brother, to whom she’s now “super close”, went to live with her father, while she “moved around a lot near Dallas” before her mother, who is from New Zealand, settled in Frisco, a bland, prosperous, conservative, new-build city on the edge of downtown Dallas. “I was not a part of it, I didn’t look like everyone else, I didn’t care about the things they cared about. It’s very white and uniform, you wear the same things, do the same things. It has this weird thing where you can just get stuck there. Everyone in Frisco gets trapped there in that mentality.”
Lane hints at a difficult upbringing several times but is reluctant to go into details. “I don’t know how to speak on it yet.” When I ask questions about her growing up – what was she into, what posters were on her wall, for instance – she fidgets and gets nervous. “I didn’t have that type of upbringing. I read books in my closet, I didn’t have a personalised room. Tattoos were probably the most open way to express what I’m into and about. I waited until I was 18, and it went downhill from there.” She has 17 tattoos now. “They’re my posters on the wall.”
Last year, when they finished filming, tabloid reports claimed that Lane and LaBeouf were in an off-screen relationship. (Days after we meet, it is reported that LaBeouf had just married his on-off girlfriend Mia Goth, whom he met while filming Nymphomaniac.) Lane and LaBeouf share the most natural-looking sex scenes in the film, which must have been daunting. “I don’t really like to talk about that,” she says, her face scrunching. “Because it’s like in real life ... Andrea creates this moment. I just trusted her. I had no hand on the wheel at that point. I was open to anything and letting it happen.”
I mention an Instagram she posted around that time, in which she talks about surviving through pain and struggle her whole life and being clear: “I did not make it to LA bc of a relationship, nor did I by conforming, I was chosen because of ME, and I worked long hard hours and months to uphold the beauty Andrea saw in me … I have been through too much for too long to let anyone diminish my character. I am not a destitute, or a Cinderella or lucky, I am fucking resilient.” It’s an airpunch statement, but Lane’s shoulders drop and she looks painfully sad, her head low, on hearing it again.
“That was nothing to do with … it was just a bunch of everything,” she says. She makes eye-contact again. “No one expects a girl from Texas who looks like me or acts like me to achieve anything. Luck is nothing to me, everything I’ve gone through, everything I’ve done has been because of who I was.” For all that seems to be bubbling under the surface, Lane still wants to seem accommodating. “I’m an anxious, uncomfortable person, but I also love pleasing people, which really sucks.”
Is she happy?
She kisses her teeth and ums seven times. “I feel like there’s too much in my mind to ever be like: ‘Yeah, I’m happy.’ Like I’m scared to say it, because maybe that means I’m about to get dropped in on my ass.”
We chat about the complications of sex and relationships. “I want to be alone so bad,” she insists. “I’m truly exhausted by people and all of that and I’ve never had a chance to look out for myself and I really like to spend a lot of time alone.” She says that the attention she gets makes her deeply uncomfortable. “It’s a hard mix. I want people to feel open around me but I’ve also had a lot of shit happen to me. I could just really take time out from that.”
Generationally, Lane says she feels out of step: “Like an old tree.” Her peers, she thinks, always seemed more strait-laced and judgmental. “I think that’s why I felt very odd. A lot of people [disapproved] of me. I like to embrace everything, every part of my mind, sexuality, feelings, all of that. I don’t have a conformist, materialistic attitude. I crave freedom more than anything. I crave passion and light and dark and all of that, I just need a hint of stability in my life.” She smiles. “That’s all I ever want.”
And is she getting that now? There’s a non-committal “Mmm, yeah”, so I ask what stable life represents for her. “I just want my own home. That’s enough. Or, you know, a single: ‘Every Tuesday, I do this.’ I need a little peace and a little rest and I’m good to go.” So where does she live in LA?
“Whoever’s couch is available.”
What, you don’t even have a room in a shared rental apartment?
“No, it’s freaking me out. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. A little space of my own.”
Lane has sat on the front row at Paris fashion week, been dressed for the red carpets by Nicolas Ghesquiere at Vuitton, graced the covers of Dazed and Confused and Wonderland magazines and been written up as “an actress everyone will be talking about this fall” by the New York Times, even before American Honey was released. It’s safe to say the style press have established her as a future star. You wouldn’t expect her to have to sleep on sofas at this point. How much did American Honey pay her?
Five more ums. “Enough ... that I can make things last! Like I said, I’m not materialistic, I don’t hold on to possessions.” There’s an awkward silence and I apologise, partly because it’s an awful question, but mostly because Lane, for all her tough pride, seems as if she could just do with being looked after. “It’s cool. I’m not uncomfortable with silence. You asked, you did your job.” She shrugs.
As light relief, she talks to me about the US election. “Well, I’m definitely going to vote. I’m not super 100% sold on anyone but fuck Trump, so clearly I’m not choosing him and there’s your answer.” The Republican candidate has, of course, made heavy weather of claiming to be the voice of America’s forgotten, the marginalised and underrepresented – the demographic portrayed in American Honey. Lane and the cast spent hours on the road crossing the wide open plains of Bible-belt America, listening to trap music, getting high and blurring the reality between what was real and what was for the film. Did Trump’s popularity ring true in the small towns they landed on and the motels they crashed in?
“Could be, I don’t know, but people like him is why this film needs to be shared. The lack of empathy, of being unwilling to open your eyes and recognise these class differences and lack of opportunities exist. Blaming immigrants? It gets me so frustrated when people don’t get it. When they are not open and compassionate.
“Growing up, kids would always say to me: ‘You’re not black enough for this.’ Or: ‘You have black in you, so you can’t be into this.’ I was called an abomination as a kid, so that registered real quick.”
Lane, I would suggest, thrives on confounding expectations. It must be exciting to be breaking out of the small-town mentality she felt suffocated by. “Everyone has their own way to go about things, I’ve found my manoeuvre. That’s them and this is me.”
American Honey opens in the UK on 14 October.
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