For her high school yearbook, at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Ms. Hamilton chose a quote from the actor Zoë Tamerlis Lund, who’d been director Abel Ferrara’s muse and collaborator on the 1992 movie, “Bad Lieutenant.” According to Ms. Hamilton, Fieldston didn’t approve of the choice, “because Zoë was a raging heroin addict.” But the line (“That which is not yet, but ought to be, is more real than that which merely is”) captured something Ms. Hamilton still feels. “My dreams are more real to me than my life right now,” she said.
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Ms. Hamilton attended U.S.C.’s highly competitive BFA program in theater. Her first year out of U.S.C., she booked several small acting jobs, including “Dance Camp,” a YouTube Red movie, directed by Bert & Bertie, also known as Amber Templemore-Finlayson and Katie Ellwood. They also recently cast Ms. Hamilton opposite Florence Pugh in an upcoming episode of the Marvel series “Hawkeye.”
“There’s something about Annie that’s not of our time, like she is out of joint with the current culture in a really special way,” said the artist Aria Dean, who directed Ms. Hamilton in a play in Geneva, Switzerland.
“She’s like this 1940s kind of archetypal Hollywood broad, fire-crackery and fast-talking, with her sort of clipped speech, a quick-wittedness and brazenness that you don’t see onscreen these days. The one who’s like, ‘I’m not going to shut up, but I’m still onscreen to get the guy.’”
Aside from “Hawkeye,” Ms. Hamilton has minor roles in Shonda Rhimes’s upcoming Netflix series, “Inventing Anna,” in which she plays a movie star, and a scene with Diane Keaton in Kate Aselton’s comedy, “Mack & Rita.”
“Annie is one of the actors who can do more than one thing,” said Cassandra Kulukundis, Paul Thomas Anderson’s casting director on films such as “Magnolia,” “There Will Be Blood” and “Phantom Thread.”
