Annabelle Dexter-Jones Is Finding Her Niche

Annabelle Dexter-Jones has just set a bowl of ice-cold cherries between us and is in the process of describing what makes New York so superior to Los Angeles (“godless place”) when a couple sauntering past her Greenwich Village window distracts her: “Oh! Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.” We both stare at them, and Dexter-Jones does not resume conversation until the pair has moved up the block and out of the literal frame. She flushes with pleasure. I have to smile. The perennial cool girl — rendered starstruck.

Like most sentient millennial women, Dexter-Jones is hot with anticipation for the imminent Barbie movie, which Gerwig directed (on her own) and wrote (with Baumbach). Her half brother, Mark Ronson, served as its music supervisor, but Dexter-Jones swears she knows no more than the rest of us about the fuchsia-steeped fever dream.

So it goes for Dexter-Jones: Somehow, she has spent decades at the center of it all — near the most molten core of cultural cool, but she also likes to keep an arch distance.

Dexter-Jones has invited me to her apartment — bunches of peonies wilting lustily, art framed and leaning nonchalantly against the walls — to talk about the end of her star turn on Succession as Pierce scioness and (sometimes) Kendall enabler Naomi Pierce and about what comes after a role so persuasive and electric that it inspired entire internet expositions on the nature of the “billionaire-chic mullet.”

One step ahead as ever, she has moved on from the chop. When she greets me at the door in a white Lacoste tennis dress sized for a middle schooler and no shoes, I find her channeling a Sliding Doors–era pixie.

Let’s start here: The part was a dream. And Dexter-Jones is the first to admit that she was able to inhabit it with relative ease. She, too, grew up around wealth and privilege. Her mother is the designer Ann Dexter-Jones. Her father, Mick Jones, is the guitarist for Foreigner. She has had her own experiences with addiction and got sober in her 20s. Her Naomi Pierce — introduced in season two of Succession — was destined to sparkle, but it was Dexter-Jones who imbued her with diamond-like facets. Pierce was droll and charming, smart but combative, and an addict and a princess. She wore Proenza Schouler and ribbed knits with the unstudied casualness of a woman who has never wanted for cashmere. Over three seasons, Dexter-Jones plucked from her own past for the show. We are making quick work of the cherries when I ask her: Now what?

Dexter-Jones grew up in New York, the last in a pack of brothers and sisters. In addition to Mark, the brood includes twins DJ Samantha Ronson and fashion designer Charlotte Ronson, as well as the musician and artist Alexander Dexter-Jones. Following them, Annabelle spent much of her adolescence looking to carve out a particular niche. She did not find one at The Chapin School — the all-girls school on the Upper East Side. She hated it.

“I was kicked out in 10th grade,” she tells me. She transferred to a coed private school. It’s a chapter of her personal lore that her mother — whom she saw for bagels the morning of our interview — still tries to rewrite. The last time Dexter-Jones told a friend about the ordeal, Ann interrupted: “You weren’t asked to leave Chapin! You wanted to go to Dwight!”

Dexter-Jones grins. “I was like, ‘... said no one ever.’”

Dexter-Jones dabbled in various forms of contraband, but she remained conscientious enough to get into Bard, where she at first majored in theater and then switched to literature to devour the works of writers like D. H. Lawrence. Still, she had her extracurricular activities. “I thought drugs were cool,” she says, with a shrug. “I think I still do. I just don’t do them now.” 

She graduated in 2010 and moved to Paris. She started working as an actor. Save for some teenage angst–fueled songwriting experiments in high school, she never considered another career. She took classes at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting and The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute (where instructors schooled students in the kind of method acting that her frequent Succession scene partner Jeremy Strong prizes). But the allure of the practice was more instinctual than intellectual.

“I felt like I needed acting,” she says. “I don’t think I was conscious of it, but I felt like there was a real pull. When I first started, I needed a safe place to feel feelings under its scaffolding.” That kind of sublimation is less urgent now, but that’s the delight of her chosen craft. It’s evolved with her.

About 16 hours before our interview, Dexter-Jones attends the premiere of Bad Things at the Tribeca Film Festival. The horror movie about a weekend vacation gone murderously wrong also stars the model and actor Hari Nef. Dexter-Jones — a noted Bravo enthusiast — describes it as Winter House meets Dateline. (“I do Housewives — Beverly Hills, New York. I do Summer House and Winter House.” Will Southern Charm’s Craig and Summer House’s Paige make it? “I don’t know if that’s sustainable.” Where does Vanderpump Rules go from here? “Whoever was interviewing Raquel for that explosive interview — we should send him to the Middle East. See if he can solve that.”)

In photos from the red carpet, Dexter-Jones looks at ease in mesh and minimal makeup. But she swears premieres still make her nervous. “I love the experience of making something and then never revisiting it. Working as an actor, that’s the part that’s fun — the making. Then there’s a real freedom in being able to be like, ‘I did the job! Have fun with the rest of it.’”

It’s not that she has a laissez-faire attitude toward her work. The opposite. She is, in fact, such a self-described control freak that she would rather be able to make no decisions if she can’t make all of them. The tantalizing prospect of the latter is what has led her to explore directing. She took the short Cecile on the Phone, in which she also starred, to Sundance in 2017. The 11-minute featurette centers on an obsessive, post-breakup woman who calls a series of friends on her landline. The plot device is not an affectation. Dexter-Jones has a landline too. Her mother calls her on it about an hour into our interview.

In the short, which featured a cameo from Art Garfunkel, whom Dexter-Jones had cold emailed, the titular Cecile wears cashmere socks and a lace-trimmed tee. Dexter-Jones blessed each book and blanket on set with her personal stamp of approval.

So when she started working on Succession, of course, she had opinions about wardrobe. She has long made mood boards to refine the visual language of her characters. But Succession costume designer Michelle Matland was the first person to take a real interest in her approach — a relationship that she has said Strong encouraged.

“When I first started, I don’t think I had the confidence to insist on being part of those conversations,” she says. “And I didn’t realize that not everybody has an opinion on those things. A lot of other actors — who may be better actors than me! — don’t care what the character is wearing.”

Dexter-Jones did and does. So much so that in season three she brought a pair of her own jeans to set because she didn’t feel Naomi Pierce would deign to wear brand-new denim. (Gauche!) It seemed so obvious to her: Naomi would have a favored broken-in pair. Dexter-Jones hand-selected “the perfect jeans” from The Feel Studio — swiped from her closet.

Being so empowered on set is not normal, she hastens to add: The hard thing about the end of Succession is that the experience — “such a rare thing to be part of” — is over. The better thing is that it happened at all, with Dexter-Jones in the choice position of getting to savor it without having to be too mired in the particularities of such an intense show.

“It’s kind of like the plot of the character,” she says, “getting to enjoy all of the familiar feelings and qualities of a dysfunctional family that’s not mine. And that goes for the production too. There definitely was some psychological psychodrama happening! It was very Darwinian.” And she has only praise for the experience of working with Strong, whose reputation for meticulousness launched one profile in The New Yorker and at least 10,000 reaction tweets. “Again, not my family! Not my monkey; not my circus. Well, my sometimes monkey,” she says affectionately. “He gave me a lot of space, and I just thought it was fun.” The two shot dozens of scenes that never made it into the show, exploring each other’s characters and their relationship. He was consummately professional but, yes, obsessive. Later, she adds, eyes twinkling, “I also have a very high threshold for insanity. I like it.”

After Succession wrapped, Dexter-Jones shot a quick arc on the new Peacock show Based on a True Story, which stars Kaley Cuoco and Chris Messina and satirizes America’s true-crime obsession. Dexter-Jones describes her character, Serena, as “a fashion victim,” the ultimate tonic to Naomi Pierce’s cool refinement. In addition to Bad Things, she has a top-secret part in the upcoming season of Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story. And she’s developing a feature that she wrote and hopes to direct. She just needs to stop talking herself out of it. Acting means “working within the guardrails of someone else’s creative world and schedule and structure,” as she puts it. Directing is scarier and more exhilarating. So she knows she has to do it.

“Whatever I have to work on in acting or writing — these are the same obstacles that I have in life,” she says. Scenes turn out better when she’s not directing herself in her head and can listen to her partner. Relationships deepen like that too. “I think, ‘Listen. That’s all you have to do.’ And in life, it’s like, ‘Yes, that’s all you have to do.’”

It is slow work. She’s 36 and in constant pursuit of self-improvement. She’s tried all the things — “and by things, I mean different kinds of therapy,” she says, laughing. She has done a Vipassana meditation retreat. She likes the idea of observing the Jewish Sabbath, which ritualizes rest and requires abstaining from work for 24 hours.

She is a seeker — not of “wellness” but of meaning.

“It’s different to do something that’s rooted in religion, as opposed to this more modern thing, which is about self-actualization,” she says. “One is in service of the self, and the other is in service of God, whatever that means to you. I wish we had a little more of that. It’s different when it’s sacred.”  

It’s hard to imagine Naomi Pierce longing for respite and a connection to the divine, but then Annabelle Dexter-Jones was always destined to be more than some TV show’s idea of a poor little rich girl.