Quintessa Swindell grew up in a Virginia Beach car dealership. While their father worked long hours out front, Swindell, who identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, watched movies starring Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman on a portable television in the back office. Their mother passed away when they were young. “My childhood wasn’t the best,” they tell me. “It wasn’t really a typical situation.”
Swindell, 27, remembers one bright moment, though. Their father had been asked to supply cars for the production of Steven Spielberg’s 2012 biopic, Lincoln, and on the last day of filming, the star, Daniel Day-Lewis, gave Swindell a signed note wishing them good luck with their studies.
The theater was another reprieve for Swindell. A local acting coach recommended they start taking one-on-one classes. “She was the one who probably saved my life.”
Swindell split school days between public high school, where they were bullied mercilessly, and the nearby Governor’s School for the Arts, which doubled as a “kind of therapy.” Eventually, the bullying became so severe that Swindell started skipping class at the public school altogether. “It was a very difficult time, figuring out where I belonged,” they say. “Plus, it’s the South,” adds Swindell, who is bi-racial, “so it’s a very racial experience as well.”
It wasn’t until Swindell moved to New York, in 2015, to attend Marymount Manhattan College that they began to feel comfortable in their own skin. “It was the place where I discovered that there’s a term for being non-binary, and that trans people existed,” says Swindell. “I felt so seen.”
After a semester studying abroad their sophomore year of college—at a theater school in Arezzo, Italy—Swindell decided to drop out of school and move to Los Angeles to pursue acting full-time. With the help of their former acting coach, who put them in touch with a talent agent at the Gersh Agency, they landed a role in the 2018 film Granada Nights, followed by a one-episode feature in the hit show Euphoria, in 2019. A slew of projects followed, including starring roles in the HBO show In Treatment, the Dwayne Johnson–led superhero film Black Adam, and the crime thriller Master Gardener, acting alongside Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton.
Now Swindell returns to the thriller genre with Ridley Scott’s new Apple TV+ series, Prime Target. They star as Taylah Sanders, an N.S.A. agent tasked with monitoring the world’s top mathematicians. Leo Woodall, who is best known for his performances in The White Lotus and One Day, co-stars as Edward Brooks, a Cambridge mathematics student who finds himself at the center of a dangerous conspiracy. Taylah and Edward go on the run across Europe, dodging government agencies and private mercenaries who want them dead.
Over the show’s eight episodes, Swindell dives off docks while bullets rain down, hijacks a car, stops a train, and fights off bad guys in hand-to-hand combat. It was the promise of daring stunts and fight scenes that drew Swindell to the project in the first place. “I love anything action-oriented,” they say, explaining their interest in “skill-based acting, where the actor can’t fake anything. They have to be as genuinely excellent as they can possibly be.” Prime Target afforded Swindell a chance to prove that they could hold their own on such a physically demanding set.
Swindell’s interest in action also inspired them to create the short film “The Lily,” which premiered yesterday at the Sundance Film Festival, earning a nomination for best short film. Swindell directed, wrote, produced, and co-starred in “The Lily,” which tells the story of an emotional final match between two female Muay Thai fighters.
“I was watching all these films about females in sports, and I just got so frustrated because there’s such an imbalance,” says Swindell. “Everything has to do with a guy, or it’s super-hyper-sexualized, or it has to do with drugs or some addiction. It can’t just be about the sport, about a friendship.”
Swindell had begun training in U.F.C. fighting in preparation for a different project, but when that fell through, they decided to make a boxing project of their own. Inspired by Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and the brutality of similar boxing films, Swindell recalls thinking, “I would love to see two women do that.”
They believe boxing and acting have a great deal in common. “People reveal a lot about themselves when they’re scared or on guard,” they say. In that same vein, Swindell says their greatest dream is to become the next Tom Cruise and “jump off a building or a mountain with a motorcycle.”
Prime Target is available for streaming now on Apple TV +
Paulina Prosnitz is an Associate Editor at Air Mail
