Chase Infiniti: The Indianapolis Kickboxing Instructor Who Became Hollywood’s Newest Leading Lady With Her First Film

 

Quick Facts	Details
Full Name	Chase Infiniti Payne
Screen Name	Chase Infiniti
Name origin	Named after Chase Meridian (Batman Forever, Nicole Kidman) AND Buzz Lightyear’s “To infinity and beyond” (Toy Story, 1995)
Date of Birth	May 5, 2000
Birthplace	Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
Age (2026)	25 years old (turns 26 May 5, 2026)
Height	5 ft 3 in (160 cm)
Nationality	American
Ethnicity	Biracial — African-American (paternal); mixed (maternal)
Father	Keith Irvin Payne — construction company owner; former jazz drummer; Indianapolis
Mother	Kim Able Payne (Kimberley Dawn Able) — country singer
Sister	Dolcé Payne (younger)
High School	International School of Indiana (French immersion, K–8); North Central High School — graduated 2018
College	Columbia College Chicago — B.F.A. Musical Theatre, 2022
Pre-career work	Kickboxing instructor, Chicago; co-founded Duple Dance Crew (K-pop cover group)
TV debut	Jaden Sabich — Presumed Innocent (Apple TV+, 2024, 8 episodes) — Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga’s daughter
Film debut / Breakout	Willa Ferguson — One Battle After Another (2025, Paul Thomas Anderson) — Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor’s daughter; first feature film
One Battle After Another	PTA; Pynchon’s Vineland; cast: DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall; $209.7M worldwide; 6 Oscars including Best Picture
Audition email subject line	“Untitled CK/PTA Studio Feature Film” — received in inbox while filming Presumed Innocent
PTA chemistry read	Month later: read with PTA, Regina Hall, and Leonardo DiCaprio in person
MMA training	Willa is a purple belt in karate; months of karate and MMA training before filming
Awards	Golden Globe nomination Best Actress; BAFTA nomination Best Actress; SAG nomination Outstanding Actress; Critics’ Choice nomination Best Actress; NAACP Image Award nomination; Gotham Breakthrough Performer nomination — all for One Battle
Oscar snub	Did not receive Oscar nomination despite above — sparked significant industry discussion
Breakthrough awards	IndieWire Breakthrough Award (December 4, 2025); BAFTA Breakthrough U.S. (December 2025); Variety 10 Actors to Watch (October 2025)
Essence honoree	2026 Essence Black Women in Hollywood Honoree
Fashion	Louis Vuitton ambassador since late 2025; Nicolas Ghesquière: “radiates an authenticity that is truly unforgettable”; lavender Oscar gown took 750 hours to construct; wore goddess braids at Oscars
Upcoming 1	Agnes MacKenzie (Hannah Bankole) — The Testaments (Hulu, April 8, 2026); Handmaid’s Tale sequel; Ann Dowd, Lucy Halliday, Rowan Blanchard; filmed Toronto April–August 2025
Upcoming 2	Julia — The Julia Set (post-production); Niki Byrne director; Christopher Briney, Gillian Anderson, Jason Isaacs, Nina Hoss, Chloe Bailey; filmed London 6 weeks
Tyler, the Creator	“Darling, I” music video (feat. Teezo Touchdown), August 2025; alongside Ayo Edibiri, Nia Long, Lauren London, Willow Smith
K-pop fan	Self-described ATEEZ stan; co-founded Duple K-pop cover dance crew; Testaments showrunner Bruce Miller cast her partly after watching her K-pop covers
Mentors on set	Regina Hall: “own her moment”; Teyana Taylor: “Do you know how much your life is about to change?”; shadowed crew on Presumed Innocent
First living alone	Age 23 — when moved to LA for Presumed Innocent production
Residence	Chicago, Illinois
Social media	Instagram @chaseinfiniti
Net worth (est. 2026)	$1–2 million

In March 2025, about a month into production on Presumed Innocent — her first professional screen role, the one she had moved to Los Angeles for, the first time she had ever lived alone at twenty-three — Chase Infiniti received an email in her inbox. The subject line read: “Untitled CK/PTA Studio Feature Film.”

She sent in a self-tape. She was not particularly familiar with Paul Thomas Anderson’s portfolio at the time. She had been obsessed with Catch Me If You Can in high school, which is a Spielberg film. The PTA self-tape went in anyway.

A month later, she was in a room with Paul Thomas Anderson, Regina Hall, and Leonardo DiCaprio, doing a chemistry read for the role of Willa Ferguson in what would eventually be called One Battle After Another — the PTA adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, the film that would gross $209.7 million worldwide, win six Academy Awards including Best Picture at the 98th Oscars on March 15, 2026, and make Chase Infiniti one of the most talked-about actresses on the planet for the better part of a year.

“Seeing him in real life,” she said of DiCaprio, “it was a crazy full-circle moment.”

She is twenty-five years old. She graduated from Columbia College Chicago in 2022. She was teaching kickboxing classes and co-leading a K-pop cover dance crew in Chicago before she was cast in her first television role. She has her first feature film, two more projects releasing in 2026, a Louis Vuitton ambassadorship, a lavender Oscar gown that reportedly took 750 hours to construct, and nominations from every major awards body except the Academy itself — a snub that generated more industry discussion than most nominations.

Her name is Chase Infiniti Payne. She was named after a Batman Forever character and Buzz Lightyear’s most famous line. Both, in retrospect, seem about right.

Indianapolis: The Jazz Drummer’s Daughter From the Batman Movie

Chase Infiniti Payne was born on May 5, 2000, in Indianapolis, Indiana — the Midwestern city whose specific character, shaped by the Indianapolis 500, the Big Ten university ecosystem, and the particular atmosphere of a large Midwestern city that is neither coastal nor provincial, gave her the formation of someone who grew up with genuine ambition without the specific pressure of a performance-industry town to channel it prematurely.

The name itself is a biographical statement. Her father Keith Irvin Payne — an African-American construction company owner and former jazz drummer — and her mother Kimberley Dawn Able Payne, a country singer who performs as Kimberley Dawn Able — named their daughter after two 1995 cultural phenomena that were apparently occupying the household simultaneously: Nicole Kidman’s character Chase Meridian in Batman Forever, and Buzz Lightyear’s catchphrase in Toy Story. The combination of a Gotham City psychologist played by Nicole Kidman and a space ranger’s existential declaration — “To infinity and beyond” — as the inspirations for a child’s name captures something specific about the household that produced her: creative, culturally engaged, with a particular appetite for the kind of reaching beyond that both references, in their different ways, embody.

Her mother’s music career and her father’s jazz drumming background gave the household the specific ambient culture of a family for whom artistic expression was not exotic but ordinary — the standard language through which the adults around her communicated with the world. Her younger sister Dolcé Payne grew up in the same environment. The family took Chase and Dolcé to musicals and plays as children — the specific educational investment of parents who understood that live performance was worth experiencing in person rather than only through screens.

She grew up on the edges of Indianapolis’s predominantly white and Black neighbourhoods — in a biracial household whose specific social geography gave her both the breadth of cultural reference and the particular experience of navigating multiple community identities simultaneously that biracial Americans in the American Midwest negotiate throughout their formation.

She attended the International School of Indiana — a language-immersive private school where she studied French — before transferring to North Central High School in Indianapolis, where she was involved in theatre productions including Shrek the Musical and Pippin. The first audition — for a school musical, at age ten — is the standard origin point of the performing career, but the specific detail of a ten-year-old auditioning for the school musical and then following that thread through high school, college, and into the professional world, is the thread whose consistency across fifteen years is the most complete available evidence that the original impulse was genuine rather than circumstantial.

She graduated from North Central in 2018.

Columbia College Chicago: The B.F.A. and the City That Made Her

From Indianapolis, Chase Infiniti moved to Chicago to attend Columbia College Chicago — the arts-focused private institution whose Bachelor of Fine Arts in Musical Theatre programme gave her the specific technical foundation in singing, dancing, acting, and the collaborative culture of musical theatre production that the subsequent career required.

The four Chicago years were the years of her formation as a professional performer — and also, alongside the academic work, the years of the specific extracurricular activities that the Testaments showrunner Bruce Miller would cite as a casting reason years later. She co-founded the Duple Dance Crew — a K-pop cover dance group that performed and competed in the specific Chicago K-pop community whose size and organisational sophistication reflects the genuine depth of K-pop’s American fanbase. She identifies as an ATEEZ stan — the K-pop group whose specific combination of powerful performance aesthetics and devoted international fandom gave her the musical community that the dance crew expressed.

She worked as a kickboxing instructor — the specific physical training that would subsequently prove useful when Paul Thomas Anderson required her to develop a purple belt in karate for the role of Willa Ferguson. The kickboxing background made the physical demands of the training programme something she was already partly equipped for, even if the specific martial arts system was different.

She graduated in 2022 with her B.F.A. Her plan was to move to New York and audition for theatre. Instead, a manager signed her and began submitting her for film and television work — the specific redirection from the path she had planned toward the path she actually took, which is the standard biographical mechanism through which most careers begin in the direction their possessor had not anticipated.

Within months of graduation, she was auditioning for Presumed Innocent.

Presumed Innocent: The First Screen Role, The First Time Living Alone, and the Email in the Inbox

Presumed Innocent (Apple TV+, 2024) — the eight-episode legal thriller adapted from Scott Turow’s 1987 novel, in which Jake Gyllenhaal plays a prosecutor accused of murdering his mistress and Ruth Negga plays his wife — cast Chase Infiniti as Jaden Sabich, their teenage daughter, in the secondary family role whose specific function in the narrative was to establish the emotional stakes of the trial for the family unit rather than to carry independent dramatic weight.

It was her first professional screen credit. It was also the first time she had lived alone — she moved to Los Angeles for the production at twenty-three, having previously lived in Indianapolis and then Chicago in student and shared housing. The specific experience of being twenty-three, alone in Los Angeles for the first time, on her first television production, working opposite Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga, was the specific professional formation that the One Battle After Another experience would build upon.

The mentorship she received on set was the foundation she credited publicly when accepting the IndieWire Breakthrough Award in December 2025: “I shadowed anyone who would let me watch.” The crew members who explained what they were doing and why — the camera operators, the sound technicians, the script supervisors — were the people whose willingness to teach a first-time actress about filmmaking from the inside gave her the specific technical understanding that the much larger PTA production would require her to arrive with.

The specific gift of the Presumed Innocent production was the relationship with Ruth Negga — who, like Chase Infiniti, is biracial, and whose specific warmth and understanding of that shared experience gave the two performers a connection that extended beyond the mother-daughter relationship they were playing onscreen. Chase has described what it meant to have a biracial actress playing her on-screen mother — the specific representation of seeing someone whose experience of navigating dual heritage matched hers.

She was about a month into Presumed Innocent production when the email arrived.

One Battle After Another: The Chemistry Read, the Karate, and the Career That Changed

The email’s subject line was “Untitled CK/PTA Studio Feature Film.” She sent a self-tape. She was not deeply familiar with Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography. The self-tape went in anyway, as self-tapes do when a manager tells you to send one and you trust the manager.

A month later, she was in a room with Paul Thomas Anderson, Regina Hall, and Leonardo DiCaprio, doing a chemistry read. The process had been building for months — a series of reads and tests — culminating in the chemistry read that produced the decision. Anderson and his casting team recognised something specific in what she was doing. Regina Hall recognised it too: “I could tell she had an innocence about her and a genuine likability. But I also noticed her work ethick and her ability to listen and take the subtlest direction.”

The role she was being considered for was Willa Ferguson — the daughter of Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a former radical activist couple whose history of revolutionary action has made their daughter a target. Willa is on the run from Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw, who seeks vengeance for her parents’ actions, while her father reunites with his former radical group to rescue her. She is also a purple belt in karate — a detail that required Chase Infiniti to spend months in intensive karate and MMA training before production began.

The training was consistent with her existing physical capabilities. The kickboxing instructor’s body was already equipped for it. But the specific discipline of martial arts training — the formal hierarchy, the belt system, the repetition of kata — was new, and the months of preparation reflect the specific work ethic that Regina Hall had identified in the chemistry read.

During the film’s press tour, Teyana Taylor and Regina Hall had been quietly preparing Chase for what was coming. “Do you know how much your life is about to change?” Taylor asked her one day during the press run. Hall encouraged her to “own her moment” — the specific advice of a working actress with decades of experience telling a twenty-five-year-old that the moment she was standing in was genuinely historic and that she was allowed to know it.

One Battle After Another was released on September 26, 2025. It grossed $209.7 million worldwide against a budget of approximately $130–175 million. It earned a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It received fourteen Academy Award nominations and won six, including Best Picture and Best Director for Paul Thomas Anderson at the 98th Oscars on March 15, 2026.

Chase Infiniti was not among the nominees in the Best Actress category. The omission — given the nominations she had received from every other major awards body — generated the specific industry conversation that Oscar snubs of genuinely acclaimed performances tend to generate when the nominations are otherwise comprehensive. She had been nominated for Best Actress at the Golden Globes, Best Actress at the BAFTA Awards, Outstanding Actress in a Leading Role at the SAG Awards, and Best Actress at the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards. She had received a Gotham Award nomination for Breakthrough Performer, recognition from the National Board of Review and the Chicago Film Critics Association, the IndieWire Breakthrough Award, and was named to Variety’s 10 Actors to Watch in October 2025.

The Academy did not nominate her. The Academy nominated other people. The industry discussion continued.

“It’s been the biggest gift I could have ever received,” she said of the nomination season and the experience. “I feel so lucky that I’ve gotten to travel to all these incredible places and meet these people who I’ve looked up to for so long.”

She presented at the 98th Oscars in March 2026 in a custom Louis Vuitton lavender gown that reportedly took 750 hours to construct. She wore her natural hair in goddess braids. Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton’s creative director, described her as someone who “radiates an authenticity that is truly unforgettable.” She had been named a Louis Vuitton brand ambassador in late 2025 — the specific fashion alliance that the awards season had generated and that reflected the industry’s recognition of her as a cultural presence whose moment extended beyond the film that had produced it.

She was also named a 2026 Essence Black Women in Hollywood Honoree — the specific recognition of a Black American actress whose year of work and public presence had made her one of the most significant figures in the industry’s ongoing conversation about representation and visibility.

The Testaments: Agnes MacKenzie and the Handmaid’s Tale

While doing press for One Battle After Another through the fall and winter of 2025, Chase Infiniti had already finished filming her next project — and it is, in terms of its narrative weight and cultural significance, the most demanding role she has yet undertaken.

The Testaments — Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize-winning novel, the direct sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale — premieres on April 8, 2026, casting Chase Infiniti as Agnes MacKenzie, who is also Hannah Bankole: the biological daughter of June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss’s character in the original series), who was kidnapped by Gilead as a child and renamed and raised within the regime’s system. Hannah and Agnes are the same person — raised without the memory of who she was, coming eventually to understand the specific horror of the identity that was taken from her.

The role required her to film in Toronto from April through August 2025 — the specific production window that ran between her One Battle After Another post-production and the September press launch, and that she compressed between major professional obligations with the specific efficiency of someone whose schedule had become suddenly very full.

Showrunner Bruce Miller — who created The Handmaid’s Tale adaptation and is returning for The Testaments — cast her after watching both Presumed Innocent and, notably, her K-pop dance covers from the Chicago years. The specific detail of a showrunner finding a casting choice through a combination of professional credits and K-pop cover videos is the most complete available illustration of how unexpected the pathways of a career can be — and how the specific wholeness of a person’s pursuits, rather than the linear progression of professional credits alone, can make the case for them.

The cast alongside her includes Ann Dowd reprising her role as Aunt Lydia, Lucy Halliday as Daisy, Rowan Blanchard as Shunammite, and Mattea Conforti as Becka. The trailer aired during the 98th Oscars in March 2026.

The Julia Set, Tyler the Creator, and the Full Picture

In the six weeks between the Testaments wrap and the beginning of the One Battle press tour, Chase Infiniti filmed The Julia Set in London — Niki Byrne’s drama about a gifted young mathematician named Julia who is recruited into an elite academic competition programme, opposite Christopher Briney, Gillian Anderson, Jason Isaacs, Nina Hoss, and Chloe Bailey. The film was in post-production as of the Deadline interview in December 2025.

In August 2025, she appeared in Tyler, the Creator’s music video for “Darling, I” (featuring Teezo Touchdown) — having been cast after Tyler saw her in the Presumed Innocent trailer. The video also features Ayo Edibiri, Nia Long, Lauren London, and Willow Smith — a roster that reflects the specific level at which Chase Infiniti’s visibility had placed her by mid-2025, when being cast in a Tyler video alongside that group was a natural rather than surprising professional development.

Chicago, Kickboxing, K-Pop, and Broadway

She lives in Chicago. She has maintained the city as her home base through everything — through Presumed Innocent production in Los Angeles, through One Battle filming, through Toronto and London. Chicago is where the Duple Dance Crew was, where the kickboxing students were, where the Columbia College community is. It is where the life she built before the career took off is still rooted.

Broadway, she has said, has been the goal since she was a child. The musical theatre degree from Columbia College Chicago is the clearest available expression of what she understood her career to be in 2022, before the email with the PTA subject line arrived and redirected everything. She has not stopped meaning it: the Broadway dream is the specific aspiration that the film career has not replaced but simply deferred.

She is twenty-five years old. She turns twenty-six on May 5, 2026. The film that she made her feature debut in won Best Picture at the 98th Oscars. The Handmaid’s Tale sequel premieres on April 8. The Julia Set is in post-production. The lavender gown took 750 hours to make. The goddess braids were her own hair.

Conclusion

Chase Infiniti Payne was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on May 5, 2000, named after Nicole Kidman’s character in a Batman movie and a Pixar toy’s most famous line. Her father was a jazz drummer and construction company owner. Her mother was a country singer. She attended a French-immersion school and then a public high school where she did musicals. She moved to Chicago, got a B.F.A. in Musical Theatre, taught kickboxing, co-founded a K-pop cover dance crew, graduated in 2022 with a plan to do Broadway, signed with a manager instead, auditioned for a Jake Gyllenhaal legal thriller as her first screen role, received an email about an untitled PTA film while filming it, sent a self-tape without knowing much about Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography, did a chemistry read with DiCaprio, spent months training in karate for a purple belt, filmed One Battle After Another, received nominations from every major awards body for her performance, presented at the Oscars in a gown that took 750 hours to make, wore goddess braids, won no Oscar, was named an Essence Black Women in Hollywood Honoree, filmed The Testaments in Toronto and The Julia Set in London, and is twenty-five years old.

Teyana Taylor told her: “Do you know how much your life is about to change?”

She is finding out.

FAQs

1. What is Chase Infiniti’s real name? Chase Infiniti’s real name is Chase Infiniti Payne. She uses her middle name professionally. She was named after Chase Meridian, Nicole Kidman’s character in Batman Forever (1995), and Buzz Lightyear’s catchphrase “To infinity and beyond” from Toy Story (1995).

2. What is Chase Infiniti’s breakout role? Chase Infiniti’s career-defining role is Willa Ferguson in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025) — opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor, in a film that won six Academy Awards including Best Picture. It was her first feature film. She received Golden Globe, BAFTA, SAG, and Critics’ Choice nominations for Best Actress for the role.

3. What is Chase Infiniti doing in 2026? She stars as Agnes MacKenzie (formerly Hannah Bankole) in Hulu’s The Testaments — the Handmaid’s Tale sequel based on Margaret Atwood’s novel — premiering April 8, 2026. She has also wrapped filming on The Julia Set in London, opposite Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.

4. Why was Chase Infiniti’s Oscar snub significant? Despite receiving Best Actress nominations from the Golden Globes, BAFTA, SAG Awards, Critics’ Choice, NAACP Image Awards, and Gotham Awards for One Battle After Another — which itself won Best Picture at the 98th Oscars — she did not receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. The snub generated significant industry discussion about the Academy’s recognition of young Black actresses in leading roles.

5. What did Chase Infiniti do before acting? Before her first screen role in 2024, Chase Infiniti worked as a kickboxing instructor in Chicago and co-founded Duple Dance Crew, a K-pop cover dance group. She holds a B.F.A. in Musical Theatre from Columbia College Chicago (2022). Her original post-graduation plan was to move to New York and pursue Broadway.

6. What is Chase Infiniti’s net worth? Chase Infiniti’s estimated net worth in 2026 is $1–2 million, based on her Presumed Innocent earnings (~$100,000+), her One Battle After Another lead role ($500,000+), her Louis Vuitton ambassadorship, and upcoming projects The Testaments and The Julia Set.