Halsey Moves Behind the Camera: Inside Her Hollywood Chapter and 'Our Hero, Balthazar'

Halsey has spent more than a decade building one of pop's most restless catalogs. Now, she's taking that restlessness behind the camera.

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the singer — born Ashley Nicolette Frangipane — opened up about a deliberate career shift toward filmmaking, anchored by her work as a producer on the indie feature Our Hero, Balthazar. It's a move she frames not as an escape from music, but as its natural extension.

A Decade of Badlands and Beyond

It has been 11 years since Halsey's debut studio album, Badlands, arrived and rewired the trajectory of a generation of alternative pop. The record went three-times platinum, peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and has accumulated more than 9 billion on-demand streams globally. Five studio albums and three Grammy nominations later, the 32-year-old says she found herself at a crossroads.

"I've done a lot in my music career," she told THR, recalling the moment she asked herself: "What's left? What do I want to do? What's next?"

The answer, it turns out, had been hiding in plain sight for years. "Most of my music is more often influenced by film than it is by other musicians," she explained — a point she backed up with receipts. She once called Baz Luhrmann while working on her second album to ask about using his material as inspiration. Gia Coppola directed a video for her most recent album. "I'm always finding ways to use music as a vehicle to explore and execute my love for cinema," she said.

From MaXXXine to Executive Producing

The on-camera side of that love has been building steadily. Halsey appeared in Ti West's MaXXXine (2024) alongside Mia Goth, and in last year's Americana, opposite Sydney Sweeney. But it's the producing chair that has become her real focus.

She executive produced her own hour-long concept musical film, If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power, in 2021 — writing it as well. She also executive produced Charlie Kaufman's short film How to Shoot a Ghost. Our Hero, Balthazar, however, marks her official entry into producing a feature-length narrative film, and she says the material grabbed her immediately after a friend mentioned it in passing.

"Tonally, it was just immediately evident," she recalled. "Despite it being a pretty difficult tone to nail."

A Pitch-Black Satire That Studios Wouldn't Touch

That difficulty is written into the premise. Our Hero, Balthazar follows Balthazar (Jaeden Martell), a wealthy New York City teenager who, hoping to impress his activist crush Eleanor (Pippa Knowles), travels to Texas to befriend a would-be mass shooter named Solomon (Asa Butterfield). Halsey describes it as something that "evolves into a homoerotic odyssey of his own self-interested journey to stopping this from happening," and says the film is intended to be experienced collectively.

"Just feeling everybody gasp at the same time, and then the stillness as everyone goes quiet," she said, describing the theatrical experience. "You set people off on a journey where they're laughing in shock, and almost mortified... with the really poignant ending that the film has, the air in the room gets sucked away."

The film was directed by indie filmmaker Oscar Boyson, who also produced and co-wrote the script with screenwriter Ricky Camilleri. It holds a 94 percent critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes and landed on critics' best-films-of-2026-so-far lists. But getting there was anything but smooth: the movie was rejected by Sundance and SXSW and struggled to secure traditional studio distribution because of its controversial, blackly satirical take on school shootings and social media. It eventually premiered at Tribeca Festival and found release through Picturehouse and WG Pictures.

Halsey reads that resistance as diagnostic rather than discouraging. "I think you could really tell a lot about where a person stands in this moment in history of the industry based on how they responded to the material," she said — whether executives treated it as "radioactive material" or recognized what she sees as its generational potential.

Betting on Gen Z Filmmakers

Her enthusiasm for the project is inseparable from her belief in the audience it's courting. THR, which attended a summer screening in New York's SoHo neighborhood, noted that most of the audience appeared to be Gen Z — a detail that lands in a summer when younger moviegoers helped films like Obsession and Backrooms break box office expectations.

For an artist who has spent a decade speaking directly to that generation through albums, the pivot makes strategic sense. Halsey built a career on emotional extremity and aesthetic ambition; producing provocative, difficult films lets her channel those instincts into a slower-burning medium where the payoff is a room full of strangers reacting together. It's a different kind of tour — and, judging by Our Hero, Balthazar, one she intends to headline for a while.