Lukita Maxwell Biography, Career, Family, Movies, Net Worth

Not many actors under 25 can say they spent the same year sparring with Harrison Ford on prestige television and appearing in the biggest film A24 has ever released. Lukita Maxwell got there by way of Jakarta, Bali, a small town in Utah, a Shakespeare monologue competition and an architecture degree she never finished. Indonesian and American, born in Jakarta and raised largely in Utah, she’s the actress behind Alice Laird in Apple TV’s Shrinking and Kat Taylor in the horror phenomenon Backrooms.

Biography

Maxwell was born on 27 October 2001 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to a Chinese-Indonesian mother and an American father from Salt Lake City, Utah. Her childhood was nomadic rather than a single move, taking in Bali, then Massachusetts, before the family settled in St. George, a small city in southern Utah that sits about as far from Hollywood culturally as it does geographically. St. George is the answer she gives now when strangers ask where she’s from.

Acting wasn’t her first art form, or even her second. Her mother put her in ballet at three and then found her a studio in every place they landed, from barefoot classes in Bali at five to Massachusetts at eight to Utah at ten. She played violin at school, and her father handed her her first camera, a small Olympus point-and-shoot, in the garage of her grandfather’s home in St. George.

Ballet is also where she learned what performing actually is. In a first-person essay written for Byrdie in January 2026, she described studying in St. George under Bené Arnold, a teacher in her late seventies whose energy wasn’t dimmed by age or by the conservatism of the town. Until then Maxwell had equated being the best with technical perfection, and she was hard on herself about it. Arnold taught her when to respect the rulebook and when to make a movement her own, and once she started playing with emotion through variations like Giselle’s Myrtha and the Bluebird from The Sleeping Beauty, she realized she was telling stories rather than executing steps.

She was homeschooled, and her route into acting came through books rather than auditions. Speaking to AwardsRadar, she recalled being a stubborn kid who read through the entire children’s section of her hometown library, then went looking for the biggest book on the shelf, which turned out to be the complete works of William Shakespeare. She was about nine and understood almost none of it, but learning that people performed those words planted the seed.

Winning the Utah Shakespeare Festival at 11

That seed grew into the Utah Shakespeare Festival, and the scene she paints of it is worth the detail. It was October 2013 at Southern Utah University, she was 11, and she’d only ended up there because Miss Colleen, a mother from her homeschooling group, noticed her interest in Shakespeare and suggested she perform a monologue. Maxwell wanted to do Puck, having seen Emma Watson perform it in the 2007 film Ballet Shoes, and was told to pick something with more meat on it.

So she performed Queen Margaret from Henry VI, Part 3, a mother cradling her murdered son and screaming “O traitors! Murderers!” at the men who killed him. She did it in thrifted cargo pants and sneakers while the older kids around her wore crunchy red velvet Elizabethan collars and carried skulls and swords, and her hands shook so badly she had to clasp them behind her back. She won her category, which she says was the first time she’d ever won first place at anything.

Growing Up Between Cultures

Her family remains scattered across continents, with her parents in Utah, relatives in Singapore and close friends still in Bali. She has spoken about her mother being her biggest role model, and about the two of them speaking on the phone daily even when she’s working across the country.

Growing up in southern Utah as the child of an Indonesian mother made her conspicuous, and she seems to have enjoyed it. She told Vogue that at ten years old she was the only child in her library class born outside the United States, and that far from feeling awkward, it gave her a sense of “main character energy” and made her feel individual. She credits her mother for that, describing a woman with no interest whatsoever in being conventional.

Career

Maxwell’s first credit came in 2016, at 14, with a four-episode run as Jillian on the ABC sitcom Speechless. She kept working in short films through her teens, including Where the End Begins, Wake and Lucky Fish, while planning a life that had nothing to do with acting. In a Hollywood Reporter profile, she explained why she’d written the career off entirely, having assumed actors were all “nepotism babies” born into the industry rather than admitted to it.

Pratt Institute and the Generation Gamble

By 2019 she’d enrolled at Pratt Institute in New York to study architecture, a discipline she still talks about with real affection. The full story of how she got there and how quickly she left is one she told her Backrooms costar Finn Bennett, who interviewed her for Interview magazine in June 2026. She’d been sending out audition tapes unsuccessfully all through high school, then won a scholarship to Pratt and picked architecture off a course dropdown list because it looked interesting. New York, as she put it, was her ticket out of Utah.

Two months into the program, one of those last audition tapes came good. She got a callback and booked Generation, the HBO Max teen drama produced by Lena Dunham, and had to choose between the city she’d just fallen for and a career she’d assumed was closed to her. She was alone in a new city and calling her mother every half hour in a panic, but she dropped out, then had to beg the school for her money back. She got it, she says, because the admissions officer happened to be a former theater kid. Asked what her life would look like had she stayed, her answer was that she’d have graduated, become an architect, and “built the Backrooms.”

The show premiered in 2021 with Maxwell playing Delilah Faye, the group’s sharp-tongued Gen Z activist, and although HBO Max cancelled it after a single season, the role put her firmly on casting directors’ lists.

Joining Shrinking as Alice Laird

The payoff came fast. In April 2022 she was cast in Shrinking, the Apple TV comedy created by Bill Lawrence, Brett Goldstein and Jason Segel, playing Alice Laird, the teenage daughter of Segel’s grieving therapist Jimmy. Alice is the emotional center of the series in a way few supporting characters get to be, and the father-daughter thread running through the show has been one of the most praised parts of it.

She was 17 when she started on Generation and barely into her twenties when Shrinking began, which meant learning on the job next to some of the most decorated people in the business. She told AwardsRadar about first meeting Harrison Ford at the table read, where he walked across the room afterwards, put a hand on her shoulder, gave her a silent nod of approval and walked away without saying a word. She also credits Segel with looking out for her the way someone who went through Hollywood young tends to look out for the next person, describing him as the kind of scene partner who texts to say he’s thinking of her.

Studying Shakespeare at RADA

Rather than coast on the show’s success, she went back to school for it, though the trip was about more than technique. She applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art’s Shakespeare program in what she has called a reaching attempt to reconnect with a childhood love, and after season two wrapped she left for London for the summer to study, to grieve the end of a relationship, and to work out who she was again. She spent the time largely alone, walking, writing and reading Shakespeare, and came home more secure in her own opinions and better able to answer questions about herself without softening them for whoever was asking. She has been steadily working her way through live theater in New York since, from Kenneth Branagh’s King Lear to Cole Escola’s Oh, Mary! on Broadway.

How She Approaches a Performance

She has a name for the state she works in. Writing for Byrdie, she described a fog that settles around her ears when she performs, first felt at 11 in that classroom at Southern Utah University, which acts as medicine for her anxieties as long as she’s prepared. It thickens with the weight of a scene and only thins when she’s unsure of a line or when a scene partner makes her laugh. Segel once told her he feels most comfortable between action and cut, and she recognized the feeling exactly.

Comedy, notably, wasn’t the plan. She was drawn to dramatic parts early on, the kind of vulnerable characters you get to watch think, and comedy essentially found her through Generation and Shrinking. Her approach is to ignore the funny entirely and play the circumstances honestly through the character’s eyes, which is a large part of why Alice lands the way she does. As she puts it, she isn’t convinced the mask of comedy is any different from the mask of tragedy.

Shrinking Season 3 and Alice’s New Chapter

Shrinking premiered in 2023 and has run for three seasons, with Maxwell appearing in every episode. Season three ran from 28 January to 8 April 2026 with an 11-episode order, adding Michael J. Fox, Jeff Daniels and Candice Bergen to a cast that already included Ford, Jessica Williams, Michael Urie, Christa Miller, Luke Tennie and Ted McGinley. Apple renewed the show for a fourth season in January 2026, a day before season three even premiered, which tells you how much the streamer values it.

Season three sends Alice off to college while she’s still quietly worrying about whether her father will cope without her, an arc Maxwell described to the Steve Varley Show as the character finally being given permission to go and find her independence. She also revealed a small ritual from the Warner Bros. lot on the same show, where she walks up the staircase off Jimmy and Alice’s kitchen before scenes, even ones not shot in that room, calling it her “Alice portal” for getting into character.

Speaking to Lady Geeks Media in February 2026, she described the energy Alice carries through the season as relentlessly forward-facing, a “fake it till you make it energy” in which the character is already picturing herself in the future in order to will it into being. There’s a levity to Alice this time around, she said, and it comes from her finally being unstuck from the past rather than from anything having been neatly resolved.

The one weight she still carries is her father. Maxwell has been consistent across interviews that Alice’s hesitation about leaving has nothing to do with college nerves, and everything to do with needing to know Jimmy will be okay and has a solid foundation under him before she goes. What eventually lets her leave is the community built up around her across three seasons, which Maxwell describes as the scaffolding of family and support that makes it possible for Alice to head out into the world on her own.

The Season 3 Haircut and a Post-Wrap Ritual

Alice’s new bob in season three was Maxwell’s own doing. She told Vogue she’d spent the back half of season two quietly lobbying producers whenever they walked onto set, floating the idea that it would be interesting if Alice turned up with a haircut, then went straight to the hair and makeup trailer on the day they wrapped and had it chopped. The producers agreed it suited a character growing up and changing her look. She pushed her luck a little further after season three wrapped, cutting bangs before deciding they weren’t right for Alice and hoping they’d grow out before season four starts shooting. The bleached brows that came with them weren’t a whim, though. She’s been bleaching her eyebrows after every wrap since Generation, driving straight from set to a beauty store for bleach and developer. It’s a small way of taking back control of her own face after months of wearing someone else’s, and she wakes up the next morning with sore skin and an itch to find the next project.

What Shrinking Means to Her

Three seasons in, the job has turned into something closer to a family calendar. She told HeyUGuys that the show has become “a scaffolding” to her life, with set months of the year when the cast reconvenes to work together and, in her words, make some magic. It’s the same image she reaches for when describing what holds Alice up, which says something about how thoroughly the two have blurred.

She suspects the full weight of it will only land later. Maxwell told Lady Geeks Media that she expects to look back on these years and understand more clearly how much they changed her, pointing out that season one already feels far bigger in hindsight than it did while she was living through it.

She’s also clear about what Shrinking is for beyond the laughs. Speaking to HeyUGuys around the season three launch, she said normalizing therapy and opening up mental health conversation is one of the most important things the show does, and that her favorite reactions come from real therapists and mental health professionals who love the show and tell her Jimmy is going completely off the rails.

Early Film Roles

On film, she appeared in Tayarisha Poe’s The Young Wife in 2023, then took the role of Iris Pike in Chris Weitz’s Blumhouse horror feature Afraid in 2024. The same year brought An Autumn Summer, an independent romance in which she played Cody, and which earned her a festival award for best actress in a feature film.

Backrooms and the A24 Breakout

In July 2025, Deadline reported that Maxwell had joined the cast of Backrooms, the A24 and Chernin Entertainment horror film adapted from Kane Parsons’ viral YouTube series. She plays Kathrine “Kat” Taylor alongside Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Avan Jogia, with Parsons directing at just 20 years old.

Inside the 30,000 Square Foot Set

The production built roughly 30,000 square feet of Backrooms to shoot in, a scale Maxwell said she hadn’t even realized until Bennett mentioned it during their Interview conversation. She described walking into that space for the first time as stepping into a vacuum, the perfect runway for frightening things to happen.

She also arrived with homework from her Shrinking co-star. Segel had advised her to list out every emotion her character would go through, then stand in front of a mirror running ten different versions of each one across her face and keep building from there. It’s a useful trick in a genre where so much of the performance is reaction, though as she pointed out, most of the cast’s peak-terror moments in Backrooms end up filtered through a camcorder anyway.

This isn’t even her first film about technology turning on people, since Afraid dealt with an AI taking over a household, which prompted her to joke that she’d rather not get typecast into the AI horror niche. She’s happy working in the genre regardless, finding it intimidating going in but the same day-by-day process once she’s on set.

Nigerian audiences have an extra reason to pay attention here, since Ejiofor, the film’s lead, is British-Nigerian and one of the most decorated actors of Igbo descent working today. Watching him anchor a $10 million horror film that outgrossed several major studio releases has been one of the more satisfying storylines of the 2026 box office.

Backrooms Box Office Records

And what a run it’s been. Backrooms opened on 29 May 2026 to $81 million domestically, the largest debut in A24’s history, and passed $350 million worldwide by early July, making it the studio’s highest-grossing release ever both at home and abroad. Maxwell told DiscussingFilm that she deliberately avoided binge-watching the source material, explaining that she wanted her character to keep a fresh perspective and that she stayed away from the fan lore about the mold and the number eight while filming.

Lukita Maxwell Movies and TV Shows

Her full screen record is shorter than her profile suggests, which is what happens when three of your credits are a hit series, a horror phenomenon and a cult teen drama. On television she’s had four roles: Jillian in four episodes of the ABC sitcom Speechless in 2016, Delilah Faye across all 16 episodes of Generation in 2021, and Alice Laird in every episode of Shrinking since 2023, which is now more than 30 episodes and counting.

On film, she started in shorts, including Where the End Begins in 2016, The Beginning & The Middle, and both Wake and Lucky Fish in 2022. Her features are The Young Wife in 2023, in which she played Fern for director Tayarisha Poe, the Blumhouse thriller Afraid in 2024 as Iris Pike, the independent romance An Autumn Summer the same year as Cody, and Backrooms in 2026 as Kathrine Taylor.

Where to Watch Her Work

If you’re catching up, all three seasons of Shrinking stream on Apple TV, with season four confirmed but not yet dated and most likely landing in 2027. Backrooms finished its theatrical run, including the extended Everything Must Go edition that arrived in cinemas on 3 July 2026, and became available to rent or buy on digital platforms from 14 July 2026.

Awards and Recognition

Her awards shelf is still young but growing. She shared in the 2025 Screen Actors Guild ensemble nomination for outstanding performance in a comedy series alongside the rest of the Shrinking cast, and picked up a rising star award for Asian American and Pacific Islander cinema and television the same year.

Her win for best actress in a feature film for An Autumn Summer remains her only individual acting trophy so far. Given that Shrinking has been nominated for best comedy series at the Emmys and that four of her castmates have picked up individual nominations, an eventual nod of her own doesn’t seem far-fetched.

Personal Life

Identity and Relationships

Maxwell identifies as queer and has spoken openly about it since her Generation days, framing the show as the kind of representation she wishes she’d had growing up. Speaking to Vogue Singapore in 2023, she described the pressure she felt to know exactly who she was as a young Asian-American queer woman in the public eye. She’s also a practicing Buddhist.

Beyond that she keeps things quiet, though she confirmed to Vogue in January 2026 that she’s currently in a relationship, telling a story about posting a dreamy mood board on her 23rd birthday while single and considering the result a small act of manifestation. She still doesn’t name partners in press.

An Analog Life and analog.diary

Photography, art and design are serious pursuits rather than side hustles. She’s kept an Instagram account called analog.diary since high school, filling it with film photographs of friends, lovers and favorite places for close to a decade, and her main account, under the handle @lukita, has roughly 195,000 followers. Her life is deliberately analog in general: a stick shift 1985 BMW, an analog watch, paper notebooks, film cameras, and a wooden writing desk at her Los Angeles home where she makes collages and writes personal essays.

That practice went quiet for a while. She admitted to Vogue that once she started auditioning seriously she became fixated on how the industry wanted her to be an actor, and on the idea that being one clearly defined thing would make her easier to cast. Letting go of that brought the art back, and she now describes a daily making practice whether or not any of it is published, with a small zine of Polaroids and diary notes planned for release at some point. Part of what drives it is a line she once overheard, that nobody is more insufferable than an artist who never puts their art into the world. She’s also become a fixture on the fashion circuit, attending a Kenzo dinner at the label’s founder’s former Paris home for the fall 2026 menswear collection, and fronting the Next-Gen Issue cover for beauty title Byrdie in January 2026. She was reportedly hands-on with that shoot too, asking for a call with makeup artist Jo Baker beforehand to work through the creative direction, which produced a set of looks drawing on ballerinas, clowns and Shakespearean portraiture. It’s hard to imagine a reference list better suited to her.

Press, Overthinking and Comfort Watching

She’s candid about being an overthinker, and about the fact that press itself is its own kind of performance, an ill-fitting mask somewhere between herself and whichever character she’s promoting. She’s since made peace with wearing it, and with taking it off.

Her own comfort viewing runs against type. She told HeyUGuys that she’s rewatched Zoe Kravitz’s one-season adaptation of High Fidelity three or four times, admitting it’s a strange choice of warm hug given it’s a show about a brutal breakup, but she loves how completely of New York it feels.

Directing Her First Short Film

That visual instinct has already taken her behind the camera. She told the Steve Varley Show that there’s a voice in her head on every set with an opinion about how a shot should be framed, and that directing is something she’d love to do one day. By mid-2026 that had stopped being hypothetical. She revealed to Interview that she’s working on her first short film as a director, fitting it around Shrinking and Backrooms press, and described the work as taking up every spare moment in a way she finds deeply fulfilling.

She’s candid about the flip side of that. When a project ends and the diary empties, she says the silence opens the door to self-doubt and the fear that she’ll never work again, which is part of why she prefers having far too much on her plate.

Lukita Maxwell’s Net Worth

Her main income stream is Shrinking. A young series regular on a premium streaming comedy typically starts somewhere in the low tens of thousands per episode and climbs with each renewal, which across roughly 33 episodes over three seasons puts her television earnings in the region of $1 million to $1.2 million gross. Add four film roles, including a supporting part in a modestly budgeted A24 feature, and the gross figure climbs to perhaps $1.3 million to $1.6 million.

That’s before agents and managers take their standard 10 percent each, before legal and publicist fees, and before California and federal taxes. Working backwards from that, her accumulated net worth is believed to be somewhere between $800,000 and $1.5 million as of 2026. The number should move sharply upward from here, since a fourth season of Shrinking is confirmed and a role in the highest-grossing film in A24’s history is exactly the kind of credit that resets an actor’s quote for everything that follows.