Until she was about 12 years old, the actress Tati Gabrielle thought she was an alien. Growing up in Northern California’s Bay Area, the now 26-year-old says she experienced a distinct misunderstanding of people’s motivations and actions. “The negative aspects of human nature especially didn’t make sense to me,” she says on a recent afternoon in New York City. “I couldn’t see why people got angry and irrational, or why someone would inflict pain or hurt or hatred on another person.” From her vantage point in a stroller, or sitting in the basket of a grocery store shopping cart, she’d stare blankly at people passing by, trying to figure it all out.
But her first time participating in a school play at nine changed all that. Acting became “my teacher, my way of understanding how people ticked,” she says. “Reading tons and tons of scripts helped me learn to communicate and understand social cues. Characters were never two-dimensional. It was never just what’s on the page—there’s always something underneath, a hidden message.” It is with this sensitivity to nuance that Gabrielle has approached her acting career—and it has taken her into a range of roles that run the gamut from fantastical to hyper-real. Among her latest projects: season four, part two of the Netflix smash hit You, in which Gabrielle plays Marienne. Although her character makes a whisper of an appearance in part one, she becomes the subject of Joe’s (Penn Badgley) obsession in the show’s second half, where her presence is much more felt. She’s also starred in the choose-your-own-adventure heist series Kaleidoscope and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Below, Gabrielle discusses filming season four with Badgley, using acting as a window into the world (and the world’s window into her, too), and how her beauty choices reflect her inner self. “My mom calls me her Bohemian child, because I was a hippie, spacey kid,” she says. “Still am, I guess.”
In season…
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