Photo: William Callan
Origins
“My mom actually forced me into acting,” says Blu Hunt, calling, in fact, from said mother’s house in Sacramento, where she has been holed up during California’s lockdown. “I had a lot of energy, and she thought theater would be good for me.” Mom was right. Hunt spent high school on stage, playing Abigail in The Crucible and the vertically challenged Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (“I’m only 5-foot, and I used to have a T-shirt that said, ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce,’ which is pretty embarrassing.”) She even directed an all-female production of Waiting for Godot. “Doing that play,” she says, “was what made me want to do acting professionally one day.”
Blu Hunt’s Star Turn
At 18, Hunt moved to Los Angeles for acting school, soon landing her first TV role on the CW vampire drama The Originals. The month that wrapped, she auditioned for the X-Men spin-off The New Mutants and got the starring role, Dani Moonstar, aka Mirage, a young hero with the power to manifest people’s biggest fears. The film was initially slated to be released in 2018, but the Fox-Disney merger delayed it, and then the pandemic delayed it further. “I’m excited for it to come out, finally,” Hunt says. “It’s a fun ride: thrilling and scary but also really emotional and romantic, too. But it’s definitely weird, because for me, that was three years ago, and I think a lot changes when you’re in your early 20s.”
Deep Roots
As a Native American superhero, Dani Moonstar is a comic book rarity. Hunt’s great-grandfather was Apache, and her grandmother lived on the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and the actress says she’s “honored” to bring that representation to the big screen. “I consider myself Lakota, and it was a big part of my life growing up,” she says. “When my grandma would come visit, she would show me videos of powwows and talk to me in the language. But it wasn’t until I got a lot older and started acting—when managers or casting agents would wonder what I was—that I really started delving deeper into what being Native American meant.”
Time Is on Her Side
Initially, The New Mutants was planned as a trilogy, but with everything going on in the world, Hunt says that’s up in the air—although she thinks the break between films would benefit the story. “You don’t really get that opportunity very often for your actors to actually age four years in between the first movie and the second movie,” she says. Her first priority for when productions can restart, however, is to direct a short film she wrote. “I’ve become so introspective during the quarantine, and I’ve found out so much about myself and what I want from this life,” she says. “The silver lining is definitely having time to think.”
