When the artist Elizabeth Peyton first encountered Taylor Russell, the 28-year-old Canadian actress was smeared with blood, her teeth ripping into human flesh. As Maren Yearly, a love-struck misfit in the director Luca Guadagnino’s 2022 coming-of-age cannibal movie, “Bones and All,” Russell made eating people look somehow romantic. Hoping she’d agree to paint the film’s poster, Guadagnino had sent Peyton an early cut — the artist had made a piece based on an earlier work of his, 2018’s “Elio, Oliver (Call Me by Your Name),” which depicts a scene from his 2017 movie, “Call Me by Your Name.” Through all the gore, Peyton found “Bones and All” beautiful and was inspired to make a series of works. “It was clear that it was a love story,” says Peyton, “and that love was very hard but totally worth it.” The image that ended up on the poster portrays Russell and her co-star Timothée Chalamet in meaty pinks and bruised purples, zoomed in on to the point of semiabstraction. At first glance, it almost resembles bloody fingerprints.

While attending the movie’s world premiere at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival in September, Peyton met Russell in person, and the two felt an immediate kinship. Peyton, who is 57, was raised in small-town Connecticut, the youngest of five. She moved to New York City to attend the School of Visual Arts and first attracted attention with an exhibition of portraits organized by Gavin Brown at the Chelsea Hotel in 1993. At the time, figurative painting was deeply unfashionable, but Peyton’s lush, unabashedly adoring renderings of friends, historical figures and, most famously, pop idols — Kurt Cobain was an early and enduring inspiration — brought her both critical acclaim and commercial success.

Peyton’s “Kiss (Bones and All)” (2022) was commissioned for Luca Guadagnino’s film starring Russell and Timothée Chalamet.Credit...© MGM, via Everett Collection

Russell, who was born in Vancouver, B.C., the second of three kids, lived a semi-itinerant existence, moving 16 times over the course of her childhood as her father pursued an acting career. After giving up on her dream of becoming a ballet dancer, Russell eventually sought out acting as well. She booked a few supporting roles and then a recurring one on the 2018 Netflix reboot of “Lost in Space.” Her breakthrough performance came the following year, in the writer-director Trey Edward Shults’s “Waves,” which charts the tragic unraveling of a Black suburban family. It was her portrayal of Emily, the resilient little sister, that caught Guadagnino’s attention.

Despite their disparate biographies, both women, Peyton points out, are, in a sense, portraitists: artists whose work is about capturing and interpreting the essence of other people. As Russell says, between the two of them, “there’s some sort of familiarity that exists.” This past December, they met at Peyton’s house in Manhattan’s West Village for a photo shoot, which they followed up with a discussion about dreams, discipline and the endless appeal of Elvis Presley.

T: Are you a film buff, Elizabeth? And, Taylor, is it true you were thinking of being a painter at one point?

Elizabeth Peyton: I love movies, and I totally get lost in them. I don’t think about how they’re made or the structure.

Taylor Russell: What are some of your favorite movies? Or cozy comfort movies?

E.P.: You mean, like, “The Proposal” (2009)? Or “Zoolander” (2001)? I was going to say something a lot smarter, though, Taylor.

T.R.: “Zoolander” is a smart answer!

E.P.: In another context, I’d say “Ludwig” (1973) by [Luchino] Visconti is one of my favorite movies. Taylor, I didn’t know you were thinking about painting.

T.R.: I watched my dad sketch a lot as a child, and I’m fascinated by hands. I feel like they’re one of my most expressive tools, and I’ve been aware of them from a young age. I really like having messy hands, so I’d finger paint a lot as a child. I’d have loved to be a painter, but I’m very mercurial, so it wouldn’t have worked. I have a feeling that you were always a painter. Did you paint as a little girl?

E.P.: I was always drawing, and it was a big deal when I made my first oil painting. I was probably 11 years old, and it seemed like a rite of passage. I was constantly making pictures of people I loved — skaters and gymnasts and that kind of thing. My first oil painting taught me the very humbling lesson that a fantastic idea isn’t the same as a fantastic execution. I’d fantasize about how wonderful my painting was going to be, but the colors, as I remember them, were very murky.

T.R.: Are you always art directing the world around you?

E.P.: When I’m painting, there’s a lot of judging: “What’s the right thing? What would feel right?” Sometimes after I paint, I can’t stop doing that to everything I’m looking at. What about you? When you’re not acting, do you use those skills in your day-to-day life? Do you ever feel like, “Well, I’m not this kind of person but I could act like I am”? Or the opposite question would be: When you’re acting, how much of you is in it?

T.R.: I have a lot of guilt around lying. Even small things. Since I was little, I’ve felt that if I don’t hold up that standard, something’s going to come apart in me that’s valuable to keep intact. And how I think about acting within that framework is that it must feel real. Not that the role is me as a person, but that there’s some connective tissue that I understand and that feels truthful. It’s similar for you, too, right? All of your work comes from you.

E.P.: It’s hard to describe, exactly, but when I put a mark down while I’m painting, I can feel when it’s not true. There’s a lot of painting that’s just reacting to mistakes, like, “How did that blob get over there?” I have a lot of paintings that aren’t successful, and they just sit around and I look at them and see if it’s possible to get back into them. But when you’re acting, if it’s not working for you that day, you can’t say, “I need three months to go figure this out.” So where do you pull it from?

T.R.: It’s a constant anxiety. But I believe that everything that arises while filming — what’s happened in your personal life that day, if somebody said something that set you off or if you’re in a head space that you don’t think is right for the character — is ultimately right because it presented itself. We have all these ideas of how a day should go, but if you were to force something that isn’t there, it could never be true.

Russell and Chalamet in “Bones and All” (2022).Credit...© MGM/ Yannis Drakoulidis, via Everett Collection

E.P.: That’s why your acting has so much freshness to it. It takes strength to be transparent and vulnerable. Do you do anything — or even have a ritual — to protect yourself?

T.R.: I’m working on it. The hard thing for me is finding the balance between remaining open to everything around me while also guarding myself. I haven’t found the right concoction yet. I’m such an introverted person and I’m sensitive to people, like I can feel what they’re feeling. I end up spending a lot of time alone. But meeting someone like you feels great. I know where I’m safe.

E.P.: Like you, I end up spending a lot of time by myself because I also feel a lot of what other people are feeling, and I need to be thoughtful about the kind of energy I’m around. There are certain visualizations that can be protective when I remember them. But I think being around people who make me feel very safe is, of course, the best, most beautiful thing. Then you can expand infinitely; you don’t have to put yourself in a box or rein it in. It’s just crossing my mind that we’re both portraitists, in a way. Do you feel when you take on a character that you’re holding their feelings?

T.R.: [There’s this] responsibility to make sure that whatever I’m saying is everything that the character could possibly want to say. I suppose it is portrait work, but it feels kind of crazy to say that next to what you do.

T: Elizabeth, do you also feel a responsibility to do right by the people you’re painting, especially since some of them are friends?

E.P.: Oh, absolutely. That’s a sacred relationship. I never want to fail the people I’m making pictures of, because to me they’re vehicles to look at all the most beautiful things in life.

T.R.: In your paintings, too, there’s so much of you.

E.P.: Well, it comes out of my hands — literally filtering through my body — so I’m not surprised when people say it feels like me.

T.R.: Do you remember the first person you painted?

E.P.: I made some pictures of my family in fantasy scenes, like my brother and me holding hands, floating magically in the air over a cliff. That was my first painting. But the first school paintings I did, I was reading Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” (1913-27) and I painted some of my friends as my favorite characters. That novel, the way that it looked at art and time, became a map of everything to come for me.

T.R.: Do you dream about your paintings?

E.P.: I sometimes dream about other artists. I’d been reading about David Hockney, and then I had dreams about him for a while. But yeah, I do have dreams about painting, and sometimes they’re real anxiety dreams — that I can’t finish a painting; or, after I’ve finished a show in real life, I’ll have dreams for a week that I haven’t. Those aren’t fun. I had a dream the other night that Elvis [Presley] was singing at the World Cup preshow. He was young and gorgeous, and it was great. Do you dream about the characters you’re playing?

Peyton’s “E.P. (Elvis)” (2022).Credit...© Elizabeth Peyton, courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andrea Rossetti

T.R.: Yeah, I do. My best friend and I somehow have the same dreams. Weirdly, shooting “Bones and All,” I was having dreams about Maren’s past, but not about her present. My best friend called me probably three times and said, “I had a Maren dream last night.” I do believe that messages can come to you through somebody you love. Is there anything in the film world that you would do? I could totally see you writing or directing something.

E.P.: I often think about what’s missing. I would love to see a film about Venice somewhere around 1506, when all these fantastic artists were either living there or passed through: Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Giorgione, [Albrecht] Dürer. Isn’t that amazing? I imagine they were all making each other better, that they saw each other’s work. But I always admire that anybody can make films. Like Luca [Guadagnino] — how can he work with so many people to make this single-vision thing that’s got his imprint all over it? That’s magical to me. You say you’re an introvert, but you have to be able to be around people to make a film, right?

T.R.: I think I’ve learned the balance. I’m alone so much that when I do end up working on a project, I can handle the social aspects because I’ve been in a drought for, like, months. And [on a set] there’s something restless in all of us. We’re all on the road, and it’s where we want to be. It takes a specific type of person to be comfortable not having stability. There’s a place that we all meet — in the weirdo, traveler, nomad.

E.P.: It’s not a coincidence that you find yourselves in the same place at the same time, which is lovely.

T.R.: I think so. I’ve seen some sketches in your studio of things you’re working on, but what’s the most interesting thing to you right now in terms of your taste and what you’re drawn to?

E.P.: Elvis. I’ve been thinking about Elvis and listening to his music so much. The last year or so I was just painting people I knew very well, and now — I’m sure it’s because we’re more out in the world — my interests are much wider. I’m making pictures of people I don’t even know very well, new people I’ve met.

T.R.: People you meet on the street in New York?

E.P.: Not exactly on the street, but maybe on the mountaintops of Nepal. I really want to go back there.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/t-magazine/elizabeth-peyton-taylor-russell.html