Actress Micaela Wittman wearing total looks by EMPORIO ARMANI.  Available at selected Emporio Armani boutiques nationwide.

Originating from the scenic landscapes of Fountain Hills, Arizona, Micaela's foray into acting started within the walls of a community theater, laying the foundation for a fervent lifelong passion. Micaela’s journey is a story of courage, determination, and profound passion for acting. She was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness in a strict family where traditional paths to success were narrowly defined and thus was prohibited from venturing into a career in acting. When the rebellious actress became of age, she broke free of the familial restrictions and didn’t think twice to jump in her car and drive to Hollywood. The home of the stars is not exactly known for being welcoming to newcomers. Resilience became her companion, and when traditional castings proved elusive, Micaela decided to take matters into her own hands. If she was not going to be given a chance, she would create one and show Hollywood her star power. Enter director Arthur De Larroche, Micaela's creative ally. Together, they co-produced and directed the comedy Clairevoyant and the critically acclaimed drama Remy and Arletta. Operating on tight budgets was inconsequential; what mattered was Micaela's ability to finally breathe life into stories that held profound meaning for her. The turning point arrived this year when Remy and Arletta premiered at the Marché du Film Cannes, catapulting Micaela into the spotlight and compelling Hollywood to take notice.

David Gargiulo __ When you reflect on your journey, can you share when you first realized your passion for acting? 

Micaela Wittman __ I realized my passion for acting the first time I stepped foot into a community theater in my hometown, Fountain Hills [Arizona]. I didn't even know what acting was, but I just walked into the theater, and this feeling took over me. I just felt so warm and fuzzy, and I didn't know what that was. I couldn't explain it, but all I knew was that I wanted more of that feeling. I was raised as a Jehovah's Witness, so I wasn't allowed to pursue acting, but it was all I wanted. So I kept asking and asking. I think that gave me momentum when I became older and could follow my dreams. I had all these pent-up feelings of wanting to be a performer for so long, so when I could do it, I put everything into it. I have this drive to accomplish my dreams. My dreams are all I've ever known or cared about. So, it comes from a very real place in me.

DG __ How was growing up in Arizona and what made you decide to move to Los Angeles?

MW __ There really wasn't anything for me in Arizona. This may be a cliché story with actors, but I was not good in school, I really didn't get good grades, didn't care about homework, or wanted to go to college. Of course, everyone was saying: “You should go to college as no one makes it as an actor. You're crazy!” But I just felt in my heart that Arizona was not the place for me to be, as beautiful as it may be. So, I dropped out of high school early and came to Hollywood because it just felt like the right thing to do.

DG __ It takes a lot of courage. I am drawing a parallel with my life as I left Italy and came to the United States. I did it all by myself. I landed in New York and tried to create a life. How was it for you when you went to Los Angeles? 

MW __ It was really confusing, to be honest. I made friends, or so I thought, but they were the worst possible friends. It was a phase, and those so-called friends made me comfortable at the time because I felt like I had a support system. Then, eventually, I made better friends. As soon as I got to Hollywood, I got myself on set right away. I started doing background work as an extra, which was good for me because I could be on set in an environment where I could focus on my goals, even if I wasn't doing exactly what I wanted to. You know, just like you, it wasn't easy in the beginning, I didn't know what I was going to do at first. I was just trying to figure it out. Did you have friends when you moved to New York?

“Right now my life lesson is to silence that noise and focus on what I love and the people I love. ”

— Micaela Wittman

DG __ I did not. That was actually my next question. I didn't have any support system when I came here so it was really hard. How was your support system when you moved to Los Angeles? 

MW __ Well, if this says anything, my friend-roommate was stealing money from me, like siphoning money out of the monthly water bill. This was my best friend at the time! 

DG __ Damn, are you still friends?

MW __ No, of course not! It was really heartbreaking. I had to end my friendship with them. I was crying and I got on the phone with them and it was really dramatic. I was like: “we can't be friends anymore, you stole money from me! I can't believe I even have to say this, but we can't be friends anymore!” So yeah LA was very scary at first. 

DG __ That experience must have been very disappointing for you. I am sorry you had to go through that. Now that you are active in the entertainment industry, how does it feel to be a young woman in entertainment?

MW __ That's a loaded question. It's a lot to navigate. I would really like to say that the stereotypes aren't true, but I feel I'm running into the stereotypes a lot. I present as a nice person, and people find that to be something they can take advantage of. So I'm navigating that. I'm even wondering if I need to get more aggressive. Do I need to do that to prove that I'm serious about what I'm doing? Because I feel like people see that I'm young and friendly and they think that I don't know what I'm doing. I am aware that I am learning but I know very clearly what I want. I know what I want to say and how I want my art to be.

DG __ I think you know what you're doing really well. The experience you have accumulated in four years in the industry would take others ten years, if ever, to achieve. You are indeed a force of nature and an inspiration for all young people. Staying on that topic, you not only act but have already written and directed two movies, Clairevoyant and Remy and Arletta, in which you also act as the protagonists. What made you decide to take on these two massive projects?

MW __ Clairevoyant was actually co-directed by Arthur De Larroche and me. He's a great director and helped inspire Clairevoyant. The reason why I decided to take the project is that I was auditioning, and I wasn't booking the types of roles I wanted.

I just wanted to act and needed an opportunity to get in front of the camera and do what I love. It came from this place of just needing to create something. I performed this impression of this pseudo-spiritual girl in Los Angeles, and Arthur heard it, and he was like “This is a really great impression. We need to rent a camera and let's make this into a movie.” So, I credit him for sowing that seed and nurturing it. Arthur directed Remy and Arletta as well. I just wanted to do something different because Clairevoyant was a comedy. And Remy and Arletta is a drama. So I thought that I needed to prove myself. I wanted to show everyone that I could do different things and not get pigeonholed because, after Clairevoyant, people were saying “You should really just stick to comedy”. I don't want to be told to stick with one thing. I want to do everything that calls out to me, you know? 

DG __ Yeah, I think it's really smart. I see actors who end up being boxed into specific roles and get booked repeatedly for the same type of roles. The flexibility you seek is only for the best.

MW __ Exactly! That's why I love writing as well. If I ever feel like I'm put in a box, I can write the craziest role for myself that no one else would see me as, that I would never get cast as, and then I can go play it. So there's so much flexibility there and it's wonderful!

DG __ You have done a little bit of everything in these two movies, from acting to editing. How does that even work?

MW __ I don't know. When you have no budget and have the desire to do it, you have to find a way to fill in the blanks. The only answer is passion and love for what I do. If I didn't love what I do, I wouldn't have been able to do it because I had to acquire so many skills that I had no idea how to do at first. But I cared so much about the final product. I cared about the story. I cared about the movies. When you care about something so much, that's all it takes to give you that momentum to push through. I learned how to edit, and it was so much fun. It just felt like a puzzle. You're just putting together all the pieces you already established. You're putting together the image here, and you're using a different audio there. It's like a long puzzle. The puzzle lasts about a month, but you have a movie at the end.

DG __ Was there ever a moment when you thought, “Oh God, this is too hard. I can't do it”?

MW __ There are definitely moments when it gets tough, especially at the end. It's harder at the end when you just want to be done with it and something goes wrong. And you're like, why am I still doing this? For example, we did reshoots for Remy and Arletta. And the footage came back with a purple filter on it. All of the footage was colored purple! None of it was a normal color. And I was like, I have no idea how to handle this. I started doing a bunch of posts on Instagram saying, if anyone is an editor and knows how to take the color purple off of my movie, please help. And someone helped. They advised me to go into the file and remove a specific setting. So, you know, it's good to reach out and ask people questions. People want to help; all we have to do is simply ask!

DG __  Remy and Arletta first came out as a book and it is based on a true story. Yours! Can you tell us about the story and why you felt it was important to share? 

MW __ Before I undertake any new project, it needs to be something that I'm willing to lose a lot of sleep over because it is not easy to make a movie. You're going to be stressed out. You'll be trying to pull all these disparate elements together and hope that some magic happens. And that takes a lot of energy. So I want to make sure that it's a topic I care about and means something to me. And at the time, this was the only big story I had in me that I felt I needed to share.

DG __ Do you want to talk about the story? 

MW __ Remy and Arletta is a story about two girls who are best friends in their senior year of high school. They have feelings for each other but are young and inexperienced, so they need to learn how to navigate these emotions. Ultimately, it is a story about love. Yes, their relationship is complicated, and some things get in the way, but it's just this selfless story of loving another human. There are some difficult scenes, especially for Remy and what she goes through with her mom. But I think it was good to come out on the other side of that experience and tell people that if I found a way, so can you. It is very emotional for me.

DG __ Since this story is based on your life, was there any dramatization, or did you stick with your life experiences?  

MW __ Honestly, some parts could have been more dramatized. [laughs] Some of it had to be cut because it was just too cartoonish. And we were afraid that it wouldn’t feel like it really happened. So we toned some of it down. Some things were changed to make the story condensed. It was a look at a few months of my life, the last couple of months of high school, but the story with my mom and my relationship with her spanned over years and it evolved in so many ways. So, we had to condense years of events into a smaller time frame. 

DG __ The movie has received thumbs up from both critics and viewers. How does it feel that your life story is forging emotional connections with the audience? What do you believe is driving this connection?

MW __ I'm so happy that people like it because when you make something this vulnerable, you fear people won't [like it]. It's scary, and you have to accept the possibility that you could put yourself out there, and everyone says this is stupid. So, the fact that people understand the film and my intention behind it means everything to me and gives me hope. It makes me want to continue being an artist and know that the right people will resonate with my vision. Even if just a handful of people understand me, that already means a lot to me.

DG __ That's a beautiful message. So do you prefer to write, act, direct? Which one do you prefer?

MW __ My main dream has always been acting, but I will say I love how limitless writing feels. You don't have to think about anything other than the story when you're writing. You're in control of everything as you are in your head. You're not thinking about budget constraints. You're not thinking about whether you have a location. You're in control of everything as you are in your head. The whole world lives in there. So I love that, especially coming from acting where you have to wait for people to give you an opportunity. And it just feels so out of your hands. But at the end of the day, my heart's always with acting. And if I had to choose, acting will always win.

DG __ Besides the unexpected issue with the purple filter, is there anything else that happened on set that you want to share with us? Like accidents, happy surprises, or anything else you feel like sharing.

MW __ I love that. That's a fun question. Most of my props were ordered online and sometimes they didn’t arrive on time. And when that happens, you have to improvise. I ordered these little fake clips for the belly button piercing scene, and of course, we didn't get them on time. Riley [Quinn Scott], who plays Arletta, doesn't have her belly button pierced, and mine's pierced, but it closed up because I haven't been putting jewelry in it. So Arthur [De Larroche], the director, took a bolt cutter and cut two of my old belly button rings. Then, our sound technician, Dana, skin-taped the half-cut rings to our belly buttons. It was so well done that you can’t tell at all in the final product that it was taped. [laughs] It was a memorable moment because we were already behind schedule, so everyone had to work together to make the scene happen.

DG __ You recently went to Paris to present your movie. How was the experience? 

MW __ I loved it. Like many Americans who go to Paris, they leave wanting to live there. 

DG __ Oh, it was your first time?

MW __ It wasn't my first time. I went a couple of years ago, but it was better this time. I think being involved in all the events just made it so exciting. I was glamorizing it, so I went home and downloaded a language learning app called Pimsleur and started to try to learn French. I was like, this is my new life now. I'm a French girl. [laughs] When I went to the film festival in Cannes, I was so scared that I wouldn’t be accepted as it is a very exclusive environment, so I was afraid I wasn’t cool enough to fit in. I was wrong; the energy was so welcoming. I spent a lot of time in the lower level of the Palais selling the film, walking around, and talking to everyone, and it was so much fun! It opened my eyes to how important it is to make connections in the real world because everything I was doing was online before that. It was all over email or social media. Going to Cannes and Paris showed me that you can do business while making friends and having real relationships face to face goes so much farther.

DG __ How about Fashion Week? It looks like you are getting good support.

MW __ I'm impressed by how open the fashion community has been to me. Many of my connections in the fashion world have come from emailing and reaching out on my own, but many others were connected through my publicist, Mia [Hansen], for which I'm grateful.

DG __  Looking forward to the future, is there a particular genre? Or type of character that you're eager to explore? Can you envision your dream role and share what it would look like? 

MW __  It's funny because I just made a TikTok video about this topic. I was saying that people ask me what my dream role is and I never have any idea how to answer that question because there's just so many dream roles out there that I would want to play. That's why I wanted to be an actor. I don't like just being myself. I like pretending to be a bunch of other people. So it's hard to pin down one or two dream roles. All I know is that I wouldn’t like to do something depressing. I want to veer away from sadness and do something exciting, fun, and action oriented. For example, a dream role would be Katniss from The Hunger Games. 

DG __What are some of the most valuable life lessons you have learned, and how have these lessons shaped you personally and professionally?

MW __ I don't know if this is the most valuable life lesson, but something that I'm going through currently is that I'm learning how to care less about what people think about me. I'm always so concerned with how I come across; if I seem nice and this and that, it gets exhausting! Right now, I'm just focusing on doing what I love rather than caring whether or not people agree with me. Especially online as there are a lot of haters online, and that stuff gets in my head. Right now my life lesson is to silence that noise and focus on what I love and the people I love. However, the life lesson will change next week because that's life, right? You're always getting lessons.

DG __ I can tell you it’ll get better with age. You'll start caring less about what people say or think. But tell me more about TikTok and social media in general. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it doing society a disservice? What's going on? 

MW __ Okay, well, I know I opened it up in a way that's negative by saying I get haters and criticism online, but I actually think all in all social media is helpful. Generally, it's a positive space. I have made so many friends on the internet, people who watch my videos and then come up to me in real life and say “I like what you're saying; let's be friends.” I've made real life friends that way, and I think it's a place where people can have discourse. I feel it is a net positive because it fosters free speech, and people are getting more knowledgeable because of the internet.

DG __ As you continue to evolve in your career, are there any artists or fellow creatives you would like to collaborate with?

MW __ Oh, so many! I have an extensive list of directors that I want to work with. I would love to work with Emma Seligman because she's a young female director, and I'm just so impressed by what she does. There's something about her work when I'm watching it; it's like she made it for herself, but also for the people watching it. I don’t know how to verbalize it. It just feels authentic. Other great names that come to mind are The Safdie Brothers, Shawn Levy, Mike White, Daniels, Lorene Scafaria, Gene Stupnitsky, and Greta Gerwig.

DG __ Looking ahead, what personal goals have you set for yourself? Are there any specific areas you're eager to explore further and develop?

MW __ That is a big question because my life has been so formed around my career in film. That's been my goal: make movies that I care about, movies that have something to say. I want to do a studio film, because all my films have been independent. That's definitely my next goal. 

“I am aware that I am learning but I know very clearly what I want. I know what I want to say and how I want my art to be.”

Photography Kevin Sinclair, Fashion Editor Oretta Corbelli, Hair Andre Gunn (Art Department) using T-Micro 3, Makeup Elayna Bachman (Art Department) using ILIA Beauty, Director DP Ryan Wermich, Production David Gargiulo, Photo Assistant Sabra Binder, Talent Micaela Wittman (Portrait PR)