As a child, Lux Pascal would slip her Father's watch onto her wrist, only to watch it slide straight back down again. Years later, when he finally gifted it to her, it still didn't quite fit, but somehow, that made it feel even more perfect. She wears it not just because it tells the time, but because it points toward something harder to pinpoint entirely: home.

Few people spend as much time living in borrowed worlds as actors do. For Pascal, whose own life has unfolded across California, Chile and now New York, her idea of home has felt increasingly borderless. She's spent her career inhabiting lives that exist somewhere between history and imagination: an exiled Trojan prophetess for a Chilean theatre production; one of Shakespeare's queens at Juilliard; the real-life radical Carlita Rodríguez in Miss Carbón; and soon she’ll be occupying the lush, gothic world of Anne Rice's Cry to Heaven. Every role asks her to disappear into somewhere else – leaving the path back to herself less easily defined.

"I think of home, rather than a place, as like a state of mind," she tells me. "When I travel to Chile and visit the places where I grew up as a child, there is inevitably a connection that sparks up inside me and makes me feel nostalgic. We kind of never let go of that child that liked to dream and misses home, don't we? And that child always tries to make home of wherever they go.”

"But,” she counters, “I like to carry that sense of connection with me. There are people and feelings and art that usually make me feel at home too."

It’s funny how memory has a habit of settling into the smallest things. A meal. A melody. A watch. A ring. The familiar weight of something worn often enough to become part of the body; a way to reorient back to what anchors us. For Pascal, the pieces she holds dear are those that hold the story of someone she loves.

"[My Father] recently gifted me the watch that he used to wear all the time and, since I am not around him that often, I like to wear it and feel like I am with family," she says. "His watch always brings me back home. It also feels like I have my Dad close to me."

That same dialogue between memory and adornment is echoed through her RUSSH Digital Cover shoot, where she wears CHANEL COCO CRUSH fine jewellery and PREMIÈRE timepieces. Pascal has forged a close relationship to the House under Matthieu Blazy, since his appointment as creative director last year. She even made her Paris Fashion Week debut walking for the House’s first collection under Blazy last September, crossing a black resin runway beneath suspended planets inside the Grand Palais. It was a scene fittingly cinematic and otherworldly for the rising star.

Pascal tells me she grew up on a steady diet of films well beyond her years. Movie nights in her house didn't come with a PG rating. "I remember as a kid watching really adult movies and kind of having to deal with topics that weren't necessarily appropriate for a child. But it definitely helped me strengthen my imagination. And therefore my capacity to play as a kid grew with all the filmic references I was being fed."

Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon remains foundational. "That movie almost defined the person I would become," she says. Zhang Ziyi she still counts as "probably my favourite female character ever."

Then came Donnie Darko, Requiem for a Dream and the performances of Nicole Kidman, whose ability to disappear into radically different worlds expanded Pascal's understanding of what an actor could be. "Her versatility and level of magnetism in each film she was in opened my eyes to really incredible films and filmmakers."

It's a Lynchian film, however, that she returns to above all others. "Of course, later on the masterpiece that is Mulholland Drive. I don't think there is any movie out there that has been able to achieve what that movie did. You can watch it an infinite amount of times and still find more doors that open up. It is pure cinematic brilliance. And magic, so magical."

The language Pascal uses is revealing. Films do not simply entertain; they open doors. They enlarge possibility. They ask to be revisited. And that philosophy extends naturally into her own practice as an actor. Pascal trained first in Santiago’s Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile before continuing on to Juilliard in New York. They are experiences she credits with giving shape to the instincts she’d forged in childhood.

"When I trained in Chile I was so green and scared," she recalls. "I knew early on, however, that I was following my passion. But I had no idea how to do it; how to be in dialogue with other people."

Dialogue, she insists, begins with listening. "Listening should always come first and it is somehow counterintuitive for us human beings. We have noisy minds and we live in a noisy world. For me, particularly, it was very difficult to shut off all the noise. It takes great stamina and training."

By the time she arrived at Juilliard, Pascal’s growing confidence made room for refinement. "I could continue developing other skills,” she says, “Particularly language dexterity and also industry skills – like how to behave professionally as an actor, which is also very important. It's not all about intuition, there is a business side to everything."

But there is still room for romanticism in the way Pascal speaks about acting. Inspiration matters, but discipline matters equally. So too does craft. Asked what draws her towards a role today, she points first to the writing.

"Lately, it has to do with scripts and teams of creators that I would highly aspire to work with," she admits. "I have been surprised by scripts that before reading I wasn't sure I wanted to be a part of, and after I was absolutely sold on doing."

Still, she refuses to over-intellectualise instinct. "In this regard I remain quite intuitive. And actors in the end don't get to be choosers. We are almost always beggars."

Whether performing Shakespeare or portraying real-life women, Pascal begins with deep respect for what already exists before searching for the emotional space that belongs uniquely to her interpretation. "In Shakespeare it's quite simple," she says. "It is all in the text. All of it. The history, the nature of the relationships – even the silence in some characters that are still present in the scene."

One particular discovery stayed with her during her time at Juilliard, while playing “a Shakespearean queen” she does not name. "I was always intrigued as to why she was present in so many of the scenes of the play but also so quiet,” she muses. “And I discovered that therein was the nature and power of a queen… what remains unsaid.” (A little digging later, I discover she played Hamlet's Queen Gertrude – the Danish royal whose motivations have been debated for centuries, largely because Shakespeare gives her so little to say.)

With Miss Carbón – Agustina Macri’s 2025 biopic about trans woman "Carlita" Rodríguez, who became the first female coal miner in Río Turbio, Argentina – the challenge became something different altogether. "I tried to capture some of the essence of Carlita," Pascal says.

"But with her, we also spoke about making an inspiration off of her. I was trying to resemble a cinematic version of her character. Not a replica. It's far from being a documentary type of film. Miss Carbon is very much a fairytale based on the life of Carlita Rodriguez."

That attraction to ambitious storytelling is also what made Cry to Heaven an immediate yes. I ask what her first reaction was to the project coming across her desk: "Immediately yes and yes," she says, laughing. "To put it in simple words; Tom. Ford."

"The script is also something else. It is probably one of the most powerful screenplays I've ever read. When I finished reading it I was electrified; astonished by the language and operatic story."

Reading Anne Rice's original text produced a similar reaction. Pascal describes its world of eighteenth-century Italian opera as "bewitching and human and alive", fascinated by the way it captured a historical moment "where things didn't exist in labels so much. A time where senses screamed and passions rode high."

For all the fantasy worlds Pascal now inhabits, it is perhaps the little girl who first fell in love with movies that still quietly guides her. When I ask what her younger self would make of the life she's built, Pascal says there are “countless things” her younger self wouldn’t believe.

"But it almost always has to do with how included I feel in some places that little Lux could only dream of being included. It's always humbling and it never ceases to impress me. It is also a good reminder to younger selves to keep dreaming – because dreams are the ones that will carry you to the places where you belong."

In partnership with CHANEL

PHOTOGRAPHY Marco Lombardi

FASHION Teanne Vickers

TALENT Lux Pascal

HAIR Malin Wallin @ Blend Management

MAKEUP Gianluca Venerdini

NAILS Marie Rosa

STYLIST’S ASSISTANT Cléo Ghysels

PRODUCTION Katie Binfield

PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Maëva Azria

Feature image (left): CHANEL dress; CHANEL COCO CRUSH earring, necklace, bracelets and rings; CHANEL PREMIÈRE Iconic Chain Golden Brown watch. Feature image (right): Stylist’s own top; CHANEL trousers; CHANEL COCO CRUSH necklaces, bracelets and rings; CHANEL PREMIÈRE Ribbon watch.