The breakout star of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (the Guardian’s No 1 film of 2025) on learning karate, her love of car chases – and how she got her name

You could hardly ask for a better movie debut than Chase Infiniti’s in One Battle After Another, even if the 24-year-old actor was very much thrown in at the deep end. As Willa, the teenage daughter of former revolutionaries, she was called on to do shoot-outs, car chases, karate, and to hold her own against heavyweights like Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and Regina Hall. “My whole life has literally changed in the last six months,” she says.

Tell us how you got this role? Was there a giant karate tournament where you had to defeat all your rivals?
No, thank God. I did six months of auditioning for the film while I was working on my first project, Presumed Innocent. So I was in California when I sent in my first self-tape. And about a month after that, the casting director called me and was like: “Hey, Paul Thomas Anderson would love to do an in-person callback, and it’s going to be a chemistry read with Leonardo DiCaprio and Regina Hall.” And so after that, I had in-person auditioning, callbacks, chemistry reads and camera tests, and then I had four days of intensive karate training, private lessons and group classes. Paul came to watch the final one, and then after that, he told me I’d got the part.

The woman Quentin Tarantino called ‘the goddess of go-go’ is one of the most connected and accomplished in Hollywood. At 82, she recalls working with Tina Turner, Bette Midler, Frank Sinatra, David Byrne, Margot Robbie, Leonardo DiCaprio – the list goes on – and the time Bing Crosby made a pass at her

If your knowledge of Toni Basil begins and ends with her cheerleader-chanting smash hit Mickey, that’s just the tip of a very deep iceberg. By the time Mickey topped the US charts 43 years ago this week, in 1982, Basil had already spent four decades in the entertainment industry. The deeper you go, the more places you realise she was. When Elvis Presley sings “See the girl with the red dress on” in his 1964 movie Viva Las Vegas, and points across the dancefloor, the gyrating girl in the red dress is Basil. When Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper take LSD at the end of Easy Rider with two sex workers, one of them is Basil. When dance troupe the Lockers show​case their pre-hip-hop street dance moves on Soul Train in 1976, it’s six guys and … Basil. By the time of Mickey she had already worked with everyone from David Bowie to Tina Turner to Talking Heads, with more to come.

Basil has been-there-done-that in so many places, for so long, and over the course of our two-hour conversation she’ll casually drop asides such as “… so I went to see Devo with Iggy Pop and Dean Stockwell” or “… me and Bowie had just come from dinner with Bob Geldof, Paula Yates and Freddie Mercury” or “I was just at Bette Midler’s 80th birthday party, what a bash!” She’s now 82 years old but on Zoom, from her dance studio in Los Angeles, she doesn’t look much older than she did in the video for Mickey – and she looked like a teenager in that, even though she was 38 at the time. Her memory is perfectly sharp, too, and her energy levels are as high as ever, as she shares her packed life story with animated diction. If she has a secret to eternal youth, it’s that she has danced her whole life, and she still does, she says. “Dance is my drug of choice. You get high from it, and it gives you community.”