Everybody who picks up the puzzle box in a Hellraiser film is making the worst decision of their life. In 2022, the hands on the box belonged to Riley McKendry — a young woman in addiction recovery who solves the thing in an empty park and spends the rest of the movie trying to outrun what answers. The career that walked out of that film belonged to the actress playing her, and it has not slowed down since.
Odessa A’zion is the American actress who carried Hellraiser (2022) as Riley McKendry and broke out on television in Fam and Grand Army. She was 22 when the film hit Hulu. Four years on, she has a second horror lead, a seat in one of the most talked-about films of 2025, and a pair of major award nominations — all before turning 27.
Quick Specs
- Born: June 17, 2000, in California (raised in Los Angeles)
- Birth name: Odessa Adlon
- Occupation: Actress
- Years active: 2011–present
- Known for: Hellraiser (2022), Grand Army (2020), Until Dawn (2025), Marty Supreme (2025)
Born Adlon
She was born Odessa Adlon, and that is the name on her early work. Her Fam credit reads “Shannon: Odessa Adlon,” and her March 2019 magazine profiles are both under Adlon. By the Grand Army casting announcement of October 21, 2019, the trades were billing her as Odessa A’zion, and A’zion is the name she has worked under ever since.
Where the name comes from is a shorter story than the internet wants it to be. She takes her stage name from her middle name, Zion — that is the whole of it.
Even her birthplace comes with an argument attached. Some sources say Sacramento, others Los Angeles, where she was raised. The family itself is not in dispute: she is the daughter of actress Pamela Adlon and German director Felix O. Adlon, and the younger sister of actress Gideon Adlon. The wider tree her encyclopedia coverage draws adds a paternal grandfather, Percy Adlon of Bagdad Café fame, and a maternal grandfather, television writer-producer Don Segall. That is the family — career context, one paragraph, done.
First credits
Her first film role came at ten, turning eleven: a small part as an “Interview Kid” in the 2011 ensemble comedy Conception, which starred her mother. (Profiles that say she landed the role “at the age of 12” have not done the arithmetic on her own birth date.) At fifteen and sixteen she was turning up in her mother’s world again, in an episode of Better Things, and in 2017 she recurred across five episodes of Nashville as Liv — her first sustained television work, at sixteen.
The last of the early credits worth naming is Ladyworld (2018), an all-female, Lord of the Flies–styled feature in which she played Blake. It is an odd, airless little film, and she is already the kind of performer the camera keeps checking on. The résumé was about to get much louder.
Fam and Grand Army
Fam, the CBS sitcom that premiered in January 2019, was her first main role: Shannon, the younger half-sister who shows up on Nina Dobrev’s doorstep and detonates her tidy engaged life. Contemporary coverage called Shannon an “edgy 16-year-old” — that was the character. A’zion herself, still billed as Odessa Adlon, was 18. The show ran one season of 13 episodes, but it put her at the center of a network cast and it made the next call possible.
The next call was Grand Army. Netflix’s Brooklyn school drama, released October 16, 2020, put her at the head of the cast as Joey Del Marco, the character carried over from Katie Cappiello’s play Slut: The Play, on which the series is based. She was 20, carrying the show’s heaviest storyline, and the notices noticed — Alan Sepinwall was among the critics who praised the performance. Between the horror films, she also kept a recurring guest spot warm as Stephanie in the CBS comedy Ghosts, across four episodes between 2022 and 2025.
Hellraiser: the box, the lead, the line in the sand
Here is the line, drawn early and in ink: Odessa A’zion is the lead of Hellraiser (2022). She is not in the 1987 Hellraiser — that one is Clive Barker’s own film, led by Ashley Laurence as Kirsty Cotton, with Doug Bradley as Pinhead, and A’zion has no connection to it. Her film is David Bruckner’s reboot: the eleventh entry in the Hellraiser franchise, a fresh adaptation of Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart with a new story and new characters, not a remake of the 1987 plot. Barker himself is a producer on it.
Riley McKendry is deep in addiction recovery when she comes into possession of the puzzle box — and Bruckner has described the cruel logic of that pairing himself: Riley is so deep into addiction that the box reads as “a perversion of a recovery tool.” Her brother Matt is among those the box’s summoning puts in danger, and the film becomes Riley trying to claw back a situation that only ever moves in one direction. The screenplay is by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, from a story by David S. Goyer with Collins and Piotrowski. The Cenobites, when they come, are led by Jamie Clayton’s Priest — this film’s Pinhead, a role A’zion does not play, whatever the lazier corners of the internet have told you.
She was cast in June 2021 and was 22 when the film premiered at Fantastic Fest on September 28, 2022, ahead of its exclusive Hulu release on October 7, 2022. The consensus line recorded for the film called it “a gift for long-suffering fans after numerous subpar sequels” — after a long run of direct-to-video diminishing returns, the franchise had a pulse again, and the pulse was largely her performance: raw, funny in the wrong moments, and completely unwilling to play Riley as a victim waiting to be rescued.
Until Dawn: the other Riley problem
Her second horror lead arrived with David F. Sandberg’s Until Dawn, released April 25, 2025, when she was 24. Note the director — Sandberg, not Bruckner; her two horror films have different men behind the camera. Ella Rubin leads the film as Clover; A’zion plays Nina, Clover’s best friend, as a principal member of the five-friend ensemble trapped in a time loop in Glore Valley, murdered nightly by shifting threats and reset by an hourglass until they can survive until dawn.
And yes, about the name: some listings give her character the surname Riley — the same name as her Hellraiser character’s first name, because the universe has a sense of humor. Other listings credit her simply as Nina. What Nina is not is a character from the 2015 video game: the film tells a standalone story with new characters, and the only performer carried over from the game is Peter Stormare as Dr. Hill. Written by Blair Butler and Gary Dauberman, produced by Screen Gems and PlayStation Productions — a game-adjacent film, not a game adaptation, and she is an original creation inside it.
Marty Supreme and the awards board
Then came the leap. In Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme — A24’s Christmas 2025 release, with Timothée Chalamet as table-tennis hustler Marty Mauser — A’zion plays Rachel Mizler, Marty’s married childhood friend and lifelong situationship, a part she was cast in back in September 2024. She was 25 when the film opened wide on December 25, 2025, and the performance was hailed as a star-making turn and brought her her first major acting nominations.
The nominations, precisely, because precision is the whole job here: for Marty Supreme she was nominated at the 2026 BAFTA Film Awards for Best Actress in a Supporting Role (the ceremony was held February 22, 2026; she did not win), and at the 2026 Actor Awards — the renamed Screen Actors Guild Awards — for both Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role and Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. Nominated, twice over, at two of the biggest tables in the business. What she was not was an Academy Award nominee: Marty Supreme collected nine Oscar nominations, and supporting actress was not among the categories with her name in it. Anyone who upgrades her to “Oscar-nominated” is selling you something.
I Love LA, and a January headline
On television she currently headlines HBO’s I Love LA, which premiered in November 2025 with a second season renewed. She plays Tallulah — an influencer opposite series creator Rachel Sennott as Maia, the aspiring talent manager who used to manage her. She was 25 at the premiere, playing the chaos agent in somebody else’s carefully managed life, which by now qualifies as typecasting she has earned.
One brief news note belongs in the record. In January 2026 she was announced as Zoe Gutierrez in Sean Durkin’s A24 adaptation of Holly Brickley’s novel Deep Cuts. Two days later she had exited the film; She said she had not read the novel and had been unaware the character is Mexican and Latina, and that she would not take a role from an actress for whom it is right.
The rest of the work
The filmography around the pillars is busier than the pillars suggest. In horror alone there is Let’s Scare Julie (2020), the single-take film in which she played Madison, and The Inhabitant (2022), where she took the teenage lead as Tara Haldon in a thriller about a descendant of Lizzie Borden, opposite Dermot Mulroney and Leslie Bibb. Beyond horror: Good Girl Jane (2022) as Bailey; Fresh Kills as Connie, a credit dated by its 2023 festival premiere; Sitting in Bars with Cake (2023) as Corinne, best friend to Yara Shahidi’s lead; She Rides Shotgun (2025) as Charlotte; and Pools (2025) as Kennedy. The credit lines also carry Lana in Mark, Mary & Some Other People (2021), Jaclyn in Supercool (2021) and Sky in Am I OK? (2022), plus television work as Anna in the TV film What About Barb? (2017) and Trish in two episodes of Wayne (2019), and voice work headed by Olly, a main role in The Tiny Chef Show, alongside a voice credit in Milo Murphy’s Law.
And by April 2026 she was in the Stranger Things universe as well: the animated Stranger Things: Tales from ’85 was released that month, with A’zion voicing Nikki Baxter — not announced, not upcoming, out in the world and on the record.
Where she stands
Draw the arc and it is almost rude in its efficiency: bit parts on her mother’s shows at ten and fifteen, a network sitcom at 18, a Netflix lead at 20, a Hellraiser film carried at 22, a second horror ensemble at 24, and BAFTA and Actor Awards nominations at 25 — with an HBO headline role running alongside. Most performers get one of those doors to open. She has been walking through them in sequence.
For horror, the anchor stays Hellraiser (2022): Riley McKendry is the role that proved she could hold a franchise’s weight on her own face, and Until Dawn proved it was not a one-off. Whatever comes next — and with I Love LA’s second season ahead, plenty is coming — the box has already been opened, and she is the one still standing next to it.