Whitney Peak was walking home late at night, headphones on, when she saw the fight. A group of people were arguing loudly across the street, and things were getting physical. She ducked in and out of a bodega and was steps from her front door when somebody grabbed her arm.
It was one of the women who’d been shouting down the block, now yelling in Whitney’s face. Can I get a photo?” Everyone crowded into a group selfie, recounts Whitney now, smiling into a cup of coffee. Whitney, now 23, first broke out in HBO Max’s 2021 Gossip Girl reboot with a lead role as scholarship student Zoya Lott.
She went on to play the teenage Becca in Hocus Pocus 2 and has since starred alongside Sabrina Carpenter in the singer’s “Nonsense” video and started a partnership with Chanel. It’s a résumé that means sometimes people pause fistfights to speak to her, and sometimes packs of adolescents charge after her through airports. In the film, she plays Lenore Dove Baird, a fierce, musical girl whose great love is Haymitch Abernathy. (Fans know Haymitch as Katniss Everdeen’s weary mentor, but in this story, he’s a teenager who is separated from Lenore Dove when he’s forced into being a tribute for the 50th Hunger Games.) But despite all the excitement around the movie—and Whitney’s nearly half a million Instagram followers—she says she’s not super online, and she insists, “I don’t carry myself as a public figure.
I never think about my career as a whole—I feel like I just got here.” Even so, the fuss over this latest role will undoubtedly still shape her life in some way. Maybe that’s the strange bargain of playing characters people love: You can choose not to live online, but the work follows you into the world. No, I met her for the first time two months ago on the street.
We live in close neighborhoods. She was just walking by, and I was like, “Rachel??” She was like, “This is crazy how we’re meeting.” I asked, “How about lunch or something?” but she was running back home. When the casting announcement came out, she sent me a DM and put out a really sweet message.1 Her saying that on the internet was big, because obviously people love her movie and The Hunger Games.
It was very generous of her and speaks levels to her character. 1. Rachel tagged Whitney in a post where she wrote, “I know she’s gonna do the Baird name proud.” Rachel and I were sending texts back and forth about that. I was like, “It never occurred to me that we looked alike.” But seeing the side-by-side pictures, I was like, “Wow.
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