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By the end of her 20s, Halsey knew she wanted a career shift.
“I’ve done a lot in my music career,” Halsey, now 32, tells The Hollywood Reporter. And yes, she has. It’s been 11 years since her debut studio album, Badlands, was released; it went three-times platinum, hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart and accumulated more than 9 billion on-demand streams globally. The artist, whose real name is Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, has gone on to make five studio albums total and received three Grammy nominations.
Still, she reflects on a pivotal moment, thinking: “What’s left? What do I want to do? What’s next?”
The natural transition was to work in movies. “Most of my music is more often influenced by film than it is by other musicians,” she says.
“I called Baz Luhrmann for my second album and was like, ‘Hey, can I use this material and do a record about this?’ We had Gia Coppola direct a video on the last album,” she adds. “I’m always finding ways to use music as a vehicle to explore and execute my love for cinema.”
And over the past several years, Halsey has appeared in front of the camera, with acting roles in Ti West’s MaXXXine (2024) with Mia Goth and last year’s Americana, opposite Sydney Sweeney.
But she began tackling executive producing with her own hour-long concept musical film, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power (2021), which also wrote. In addition, she exec produced Charlie Kaufman’s short film, How to Shoot a Ghost (2025). But her official entry into producing a feature-length film was the indie Our Hero, Balthazar.
After hearing about it in passing from a friend, she read the script and was compelled right away. “Tonally, it was just immediately evident,” she recalls. “Despite it being a pretty difficult tone to nail.”
Our Hero, Balthazar follows Balthazar (Jaeden Martell), a wealthy New York City teenager who, in order to impress his activist crush Eleanor (Pippa Knowles), travels to Texas to try and befriend a would-be mass shooter, Solomon (Asa Butterfield).
The film stays true to its black-comedy genre, given the heavy subject matter, and explores the performative nature of internet culture and male loneliness.
“It evolves into a homoerotic odyssey of his own self-interested journey to stopping this from happening,” she says with a laugh.
Halsey also emphasized the film is meant to be seen with others. “Just feeling everybody gasp at the same time, and then the stillness as everyone goes quiet,” she says.
“Also, you set people off on a journey where they’re laughing in shock, and almost mortified,” she continues. “They’re laughing. They may feel bad that they’re laughing. They’re not sure if they’re supposed to laugh. They’re checking to see if other people are laughing too. And obviously, with the really poignant ending that the film has, the air in the room gets sucked away — we’ve taken you on this journey that’s full of humor, but you do have to have this moment of sobering reality.”
THR attended a screening of the film over the summer in New York’s SoHo neighborhood and can confirm the awkward and uncertain laughter at times due to its tone. Most of the audience appeared to be Gen Z.
Amid a summer that broke box office rules with films like Obsession and Backrooms from Gen Z filmmakers, there was a surge in moviegoers among younger audiences. Our Hero, Balthazar was directed by indie filmmaker Oscar Boyson (producer of the Safdie brothers features Good Time and Uncut Gems). He also produced and co-wrote the script, alongside HuffPost journalist-turned-screenwriter Ricky Camilleri. It has earned a 94 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes and nabbed a spot on critics’ best films of 2026 so far lists.
However, the film faced rejection from film festivals like Sundance and SXSW, and struggled to secure traditional studio distribution because of its controversial, pitch-black satirical premise about school shootings and social media. It ended up premiering at Tribeca Festival in 2025, bypassing traditional studios and finding release through Picturehouse and WG Pictures.
“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 or responded to the concept or even without having seen the film,” Halsey says of the resistance. “Whether they were too nervous and they felt like it was radioactive material, or if they were excited that a story like this was having the opportunity to be told, and they could see kind of like the generational potential in a story like this. There were definitely some split opinions.”
Still, certain feedback didn’t sway her involvement or her belief in the story.
“I knew what I was betting on, and I knew that it was an important and singular story,” she says.
In fact, she says there was a thrill in being involved in something provocative: “It is a little bit of an anarchist feeling making something that or being a part of something that is subversive and provocative in that way.”
That is true regarding Halsey’s fiancé and actor Avan Jogia — who makes a brief appearance in the film.
Like Halsey, Jogia rose to fame as a teenager, starring on Nickelodeon’s Victorious alongside Ariana Grande, Leon Thomas, Victoria Justice and Elizabeth Gillies. The couple could therefore relate to each other’s shared experiences growing up in the industry — including the “sense of glee that comes from breaking the rules.”
“Knowing that you have this rule-breaking thing that’s about to come to fruition, There’s a childlike sense of excitement about that,” she says. “It’s fun to share that with people that you love collaborating with and love.”
Getting the film seen by audiences was also a big word-of-mouth effort from the team. Halsey contributed by moderating Q&As after screenings, sharing “a big fat opinion about a lot of the artwork,” such as posters, and championing Boyson by reminding him, “You’ve played a really important role in some people’s favorite films of all time.”
On social media, the team approached promotion by creating an in-character Instagram account for the main character, @bboymalone212, and posting content like a real Gen Z teen, including fan-edit videos of the characters Balthazar and Solomon. The account quickly grew and surpassed 117,000 followers.
Halsey says she initially held off on posting about it to give the project “a chance to grow and get legs on its own.” After all, she does have 29.3 million followers on Instagram alone. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before star Noah Centineo, who will play John Rambo in the upcoming prequel to Sylvester Stallone’s films, appears in Balthazar and took a similar approach.
Halsey says the film was made with “a lot of labor from people that were passionate about the story and passionate about working with Oscar.”
One of the passionate members of the film’s production team was Peter Gold, a 26-year-old producer who launched his own distribution company, WG Pictures, financed through outside investors, with film producer Brad Wyman to ensure Our Hero, Balthazar would see a theatrical release.
Of the rising Hollywood producer, “He’s so passionate and so energized, and it’s really intoxicating to be around. It’s very contagious,” she says before adding with a laugh, “There are some times where he’s in his suit and he’s announcing the movie, and I’m like, ‘You look like a kid who made a wish to become a high industry power player!’”
Having a Gen Z producer on the film, she says, highlights a larger issue: young people need to be involved in decision-making.
“I think that can be as effective as having Zohran Mamdani in office in New York, and it can be as effective as having Peter Gold making movies,” she says. “To save industries, to save ourselves, I think we do need to get a fresh perspective that is representative of the people that are serving in positions of power.”
As Halsey appears to continue taking a break from music following her public comments last year, she is set to work with Jogia again on Replacer, a psycho-sexual horror film she stars in and co-wrote, with Jogia directing.
But she hopes she’s not done with producing, saying, “The way that I could best be supportive at this time, like until you know I’m ready to story tell in my own regard, was on the producing side.”
“I’ve been lucky enough to get this far as an artist. I find that I have a responsibility to make sure that good art gets made and that people get to tell their stories,” she concludes. “It feels like the least I can do.”
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Our Hero, Balthazar is streaming digitally.
English (US) ·