Sunday Rose Kidman Urban, Ever Anderson, Havana Rose Liu & More on Finding Their Own Creative Paths

In 2024, Scarlett White turned 18, moved from Nashville to New York to study sculpture, and signed her first modeling contract. “It’s amazing, but what I’m most inspired by is doing things on my own time,” she says. “Listening to music, writing poetry that no one’s ever going to see, and fooling around with the guitar.” (In high school, she played bass in a band.) “I still have a lot to learn, and I want to make sure I’m seeing how the old masters did it, how my idols have done it.” Those idols include Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Charley Patton—plus mom, Karen Elson, the English model, who is also a singer-songwriter; and dad, Jack White, the musician and onetime guitarist and lead singer of the White Stripes. “They understand on a deeper level what it means to be an artist,” explains White. “What’s important is remembering the artistry.”

Growing up in Los Angeles, Betsy Gaghan—gorgeous, five feet ten—was often approached by modeling agents. Her mother, the former model Michael McCraine, made her wait until she turned 18 to work. “I would look at my mom’s photos when I was younger and just be like, whoa,” says Gaghan, who is now 23. “Seeing her as different characters really intrigued me. You’re selling clothes, but you’re also creating an idea and a fantasy.” Gaghan initially moved to New York to study photography at Parsons, but has since shelved school to focus on work. (She found she learned “a bit more on set than in school.”) For spring 2025, she walked in 29 shows—from Michael Kors and Hermès to McQueen, where she opened. “I have no expectations,” she says. “If you have none, then everything is just a little present.”

“I always wanted to be lots of different things,” says Havana Rose Liu. The 27-year-old grew up dancing, drawing, doing performance art “in the style of Yoko Ono,” designing costumes, and playing music. As an undergraduate at NYU, she was scouted by a modeling agent in Washington Square Park. Fashion editorials led to acting, including roles in the 2023 comedy Bottoms and an episode of American Horror Story. “Moving into film, I felt like it was everything I loved so much about all these different areas of study—just in one field.” This year, Liu has at least three projects premiering, plus she’ll make her stage debut in an Off Broadway play about college girls on Adderall. “I want variation all the time. I never try to limit what I love.”

As a teenager, Amaria Mcgee worked as a music photographer and videographer. She only ever sang “for fun, like maybe in the shower.” As she watched artists make music, she realized she could probably do it too. One day, when she was 19, she randomly decided to pull up GarageBand and make a beat. “I was just trying to take my skills from video editing and put them into music production,” she says. A friend liked the song, so Mcgee uploaded it to the Internet. People online loved it too, so she made more. In October, Mcgee, now 24, released her first album, Free Fallin’, made up of 12 atmospheric, neo-soul tracks. “My favorite artist is Tame Impala, but I grew up on classic R&B and soul,” she explains. In March, Mcgee—who was raised between Texas, Louisiana, Virginia, California, and Florida but now lives in Los Angeles—will embark on her first headlining tour. Until then, “I’m just going with the flow.”

“I love watching actors who have written their own scripts, who created something and didn’t wait for the phone to ring—they decided to make the phone themselves,” says Ever Anderson, who, at 17, has already been acting for a decade. Her debut was in the action movie Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, in which she played the younger version of the film’s star, Milla Jovovich, who just so happens to be her real-life mother. Anderson recently finished filming her “first adult project,” The Artist, in which she plays the ingenue Evelyn Nesbit, a Gilded Age singer, actor, and model. (Anderson models too—she has starred in two campaigns for Marc Jacobs’s Daisy perfumes, as well as ones for Celine and Miu Miu.) Although she graduated from high school early to focus on work, she’s currently taking college-level classes and thinking about formally enrolling. “I would love to be able to study something outside of the industry, like business,” she says. “I’m interested in the big picture.”

Lily Taïeb realized she actually likes acting after doing it for a decade. In 2022, she played a reincarnated daughter in the French miniseries Esprit d’Hiver. It “put me into catharsis,” says Taïeb. “I like being pushed—having my boundaries transcended.” The 25-year-old lives in Paris—she grew up shuttling between the French capital and New York—and works mostly in European productions. She also models, the unexpected outcome of her breakout at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, where she earned a César Award nomination for her performance in My Golden Days. “I was like, how the fuck do I dress for this?” she recalls thinking at the time. Her mother, the French actor Laure Marsac, had a friend who is a longtime Chanel ambassador and introduced Taïeb to the brand. Since her red carpet debut in Chanel, she’s walked the runway for Cecilie Bahnsen, Gucci, and Vaquera, but her main focus is still acting. Taïeb just wrapped a French TV show and a horror film about a tennis academy. “Being an actor is having to play with your ego like Play-Doh, bending it the best you can to not get insanely hurt,” she says about the constant rejection actors tolerate. So far, her ego has proved pliable. “Maybe if I do get more successful and famous, I’m going to lose my shit—I can’t promise you!”

“I always wanted to model, but my mom told me I couldn’t do it until I was 16,” says Sunday Rose Kidman Urban. (“Mom” is Nicole Kidman, who started her own career at that age.) Last October, a mere 12 weeks after turning 16, Kidman Urban made her modeling debut by opening Miu Miu’s spring 2025 runway show. “I just wanted to do it again when I got off the runway!” she says. Most of the time, Kidman Urban is at home in Nashville, where she picked up her sweet Southern twang (“Keeed-man”). In Tennessee, she’s a 10th-grader with homework—her favorite subject is English—and extracurriculars like dance team. While she’s focused on modeling—her first campaign, for Miu Miu, dropped in January—she’s also intent on studying psychology at NYU. Ultimately, the dream is to become a director. “I really, really like Greta Gerwig,” says Kidman Urban. Her favorite of Gerwig’s movies is, “obviously, Barbie.”

“I like characters you can’t put your finger on,” says Eliot Sumner, 34. “I was born with quite a malevolent face, so I tend to fit into that genre of character.” Although Sumner’s parents are pop culture royalty—his dad is the rock star Sting; his mom is the actor and director Trudie Styler—he grew up in Salisbury, a small English city. (As Sumner explains, it’s famous only for a botched assassination attempt on a former Russian double agent.) A musician as well as an actor, Sumner released his debut album at 20 and then “accidentally” became a DJ; “fiddling around with synthesizers” led him to a record label contract, and he DJed for nearly a decade. These days, Sumner’s music is “quite introspective, very Radiohead-inspired,” he explains. “I’m more interested in songs that feel scary to write than songs that end up being anthems.” Acting was accidental too. Around 2016, Sumner moved into a London flat with his best friend, who is an acting agent. She sent him on auditions, and roles in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentleman and the James Bond film No Time to Die quickly followed. Sumner’s latest project, the Swedish TV drama Cry Wolf, premiered in December. “I’m fascinated by characters who will deceive you.”

“I’ve always been obsessed with music,” says the 21-year-old singer Sateen Besson. Influenced by musicians such as The Weeknd, her “favorite artist of all time,” Besson has been releasing moody pop songs—all of which she writes—since the fall of 2021. “The concept comes first, something I really want to express,” she says. Besson also directs her whimsical music videos, featuring everything from a love story between a cowboy and a princess to a girl in a gown living alone in a forest. Her penchant for filmmaking is only natural—her dad is Luc Besson, the French action movie writer and director, and her mother, Virginie Besson-Silla, is a producer. For now, Besson, who grew up between Paris, Los Angeles, and Bangkok, has landed in Manhattan to study psychology and music at NYU. She has a few singles to release this year, which she thinks might cohere into her first album.