Alexis Ren is about to debut her biggest role to date. The lifelong model stars opposite Sasha Luss (Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets) in Latency, a new feature film from Lionsgate that centers around gaming equipment and the dangers that come after experimenting with it. Ren plays Jen, the best friend to Luss’s Hana, a professional gamer who battles agoraphobia, a type of anxiety that instills a fear of leaving familiar environments. Hana is asked to trial that aforementioned gaming equipment, a system called The Omnia, which utilizes artificial intelligence to interpret the player’s brain’s electrical activity. Hana’s risky usage on The Omnia paired with her agoraphobia leaves her experiencing a blurry line between her reality and subconscious.
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“This is why I wanted to do this movie,” Ren told ComicBook. “It’s such a relevant conversation today with how technology is going to evolve. We already are seeing it with things like Neuralink and so many others. It’s going to start to affect us in a much deeper way than I think we even realize. I hope that the audience can just ask themselves, ‘Is the technology I’m using, am I using it or is it using me? Am I using it just because it’s convenient or does it align with my values in life?’”
While Ren is no stranger to the acting world, having worked on The Enforcer alongside Antonio Banderas and starred in Ed Sheeran’s “South of the Border” music video, Latency represents the first time that she is leading a major motion-picture. Beyond that, Latency‘s ensemble starts and ends with herself and Luss, as the James Croke-directed project is essentially a two-woman show.
“I think leading a moving by yourself is terrifying, but being able to lead it with someone else felt very sturdy,” Ren added. “I could lean on Sasha when I was feeling not confident or nervous in some scenes. It felt very collaborative.”
Ren and Luss are cut from a similar cloth. Both began their careers as models before gaining early acting experience in high-profile music videos that led them to eventually joining the acting world full-time.
“I looked up to her and still do,” Ren said of her co-star. “Sometimes it’s hard to break into acting coming from modeling. I think for some reason our brains think it’s a super connected industry, but it’s actually completely different. You’re using a completely different set of skills.
“I looked for her for advice and she’s just incredible in that way. I felt like we understood each other really nicely. I think this was the first time for both of us where we weren’t necessarily playing the pretty girl archetype. We weren’t thinking about makeup or what we looked like. Our characters didn’t care at all what was going on with the physical features. It felt like a release in some ways.”
That newfound territory within her Latency character is something the former Dancing With The Stars competitor has become used to whenever movie roles come calling.
“I think every project you have to come in as a newborn, just ready to soak up whatever this experience is asking from me,” Ren noted. “I do think every single acting job I’ve had has prepared me for this. I almost feel like it’s been a divine path because each character has gotten slightly more complex and slightly more interesting or slightly more different. It’s been a perfect lead up for it.”
Ren’s pursuit of acting runs parallel to her work as an entrepreneur and mental health activist. Those two roles materialized tangibly into We Are Warriors, a virtual wellness community Ren founded at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I feel like when something is meant to be created, you almost serve it like a child. You’re not necessarily hand feeding it, you just let it grow, and when it needs something, you give it what it needs,” Ren detailed. “With We Are Warriors, it started out as a workout program during COVID because I knew all of the girls that were following me, they were stuck in their home and they weren’t able to work out or go to classes. The nuance part of this was I paired the workout program with live calls every Friday to just talk to them, keep them updated, keep them motivated, and it went amazingly.
“It’s a 365 degrees wellness community: physical health, wellness, mental health, even career decisions, taxes and financial education. For me, it’s everything that I think school is not teaching. I was homeschooled and I saw kind of from the outside in what school wasn’t giving my friends. That’s kind of what I wish for it, to just bridge the gap of the traditional school.”
Latency premieres in select theaters on Friday, June 14th.
