When Kaia first moved to New York, another model introduced her to Jonah Freud, who was attending college in the city. He’s British and came from a background of artists and intellectuals, and was obsessed with books. Jonah became one of her best friends and a kind of “college professor,” she said. He would share his syllabi with her. He took her to McNally Jackson and helped her pick titles. She told him, “I can’t read Camus, and he was like, ‘Why not?’ ” So they would read and discuss everything from Plato to Rimbaud to Renata Adler. Jonah now runs one of her favorite places, Reference Point, a rare-book library and bar in London. It partly inspired Library Science, she told me, with its vision of making books accessible to young people. “It doesn’t have to feel pretentious,” she told me. “It’s pretentious if you make it pretentious. And in fact, talking and connecting through books is the opposite of pretentious.” When I spoke to Jonah, he was effusive about Kaia. “She is a voracious reader,” he told me. “Wildly astute and observant.” Jonah has a cinematic charisma: He pinched some tobacco in a rolling paper as he spoke and rolled it into a perfect cigarette that he lit and smoked. It was a refreshingly old-school analog gesture in this day of vapes and Zyn pouches. He, like Kaia, reveres physical books. Partly it is their appealing tactile qualities, but also there’s the desire to focus amid so much endless digital information. “Overexposure to the totality of human knowledge all at once” makes it “hard to dig in,” he said. Jonah, Kaia, and Alyssa all spoke of the need for curation, and of the longing for communal experiences, of the human touch. Jonah told me that “algorithms, which are there to try and help us filter through some of the stuff that interests us, end up becoming a very narrow type of curation…. We end up going from an infinitely large place to an infinitely small place.” Kaia, he added, “cuts through some of that noise” with her book club. “Contemporary curation is about deep reading and deep focus.”
It was late when the car dropped Kaia and me at the Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca, and we sat on a couch in the quiet, private back garden lit by candlelight. After the experience of watching the play together, after expelling our mutual anxiety about the impending presidential election, we returned to the subject of acting. She had wanted to be an actor since she was a small child, and she became serious about pursuing it about six years ago. She told me that she first studied at the Terry Knickerbocker conservatory in Brooklyn and now works with Julia Crockett, her movement instructor, whom she met through Sarah Paulson. “Acting is a way for me to be an eternal student,” she said, adding that she’s grateful that modeling allows her the “luxury” of studying with multiple coaches. She’s aware that many actors are not in that position. “So it is such a privileged thing, but I have fallen back in love with modeling because of it.” Also, because she has been modeling long enough, she gets to work with people she loves. She has roles coming in interesting-sounding projects—the film Mother Mary directed by David Lowery, and a comedy series from Benito Skinner called Overcompensating—and she spoke excitedly about her first professional theatrical role, a lead part in a production of Evanston Salt Costs Climbing, a play by Will Arbery, which will open in January at a small theater in LA. When she read it, she thought, “No one would ever cast me in this. They would never. But I feel so connected to her”—her role, Jane Jr.—“and it’s sad to me that no one would ever see me as this girl I have so much in common with.”
“What is she like?”
“A Midwestern girl struggling with so much anxiety and so many dark thoughts…. She’s an obsessive personality, obsessed with natural disasters, with numbers, with the correct pronunciation of things.” When I read the play, I could easily imagine Kaia playing this smart, sensitive girl who wants to figure out the world. Over Zoom, Arbery said this about Kaia: “For someone whose job is to be looked at, she’s actually looking back much more than anybody realizes.” I too had noticed that Kaia listens carefully, and during our time together asked me almost as many questions as I asked her. She’s genuinely curious, but I also think it is a strategy to deflect attention. And she does get a lot of attention. She has mixed feelings about living a public and private life. And about social media, which she often removes from her phone. Most of us have some ambivalence about social media, but few of us, like Kaia, have 10 million followers on Instagram. I mentioned to her that I thought she handled her account very well (more of that curation). It was a mix of self-promotion (modeling campaigns and movie roles) and Library Science: books on shelves, books being read, and clips of her interviewing authors. She is good at Instagram wit. There is a recent post that consisted of two consecutive photos: the first was Kaia in a black string bikini sunbathing on a dock. Her face is obscured by the book she is reading: Dear Dickhead. The next photo is a page from the book with this section highlighted: “At this point, your sheer dumbfuckery commands a certain respect. But it doesn’t change the basics: I don’t give a shit about you. All my love to your sister, she was a wonderful friend.” Her comment under the photos is “a book for someone I used to know.”