Maddie Ziegler isn’t used to fitting in. From a very young age, she was pegged as the standout: a beautiful, enigmatic star, expected to lead at the ripe old age of seven. For years, we watched her on Lifetime’s reality show Dance Moms as the tightly spun perfectionist who upheld her dance studio's competitive edge. Then we watched her as the Sia-discovered young talent who seemed to be everywhere: music videos, award show performances, movies.

Now, at age 21, Ziegler is having a metamorphosis. She's forging a new path where she’s still very much front and center, but in a different way. After her breakout role in The Fallout, a film directed by Megan Park where Ziegler starred alongside scream queen Jenna Ortega, Ziegler is getting her own leading role, in the film Fitting In.

The night before our formal interview, I meet Ziegler at the Regal Union Square cinema for the movie’s premiere. She arrives by car, alone. As we walk in together, she stops, taking in the movie posters featuring her face that line the walls. Her bright blue eyes light up; the surreality sets in.

We spend 30 minutes talking about Ziegler now being in a leading role while her audience giggles and records as many snippets of the young actor as they can. After the event I see Ziegler laughing as she chats with costar Djouliet Amara. Ziegler’s fans cling to the theater’s front doors, wading between the crisp New York winter air and the faintly air conditioned ticketing floor, whispering, wondering if they should be brave and ask for a photo. By chance, people at the theater stop and say, “Hey, that’s Maddie.”

There’s a level of parasocial relation that comes as a result of Ziegler’s past; a lot of people are on a first-name basis with her. “Acting gives me the creative freedom to jump into different things, but it also helps me protect my own being,” the 2024 Teen Vogue New Hollywood inductee tells me the next day over Zoom, referencing the distance she can create by playing a character instead of being herself onscreen. “It is scary to have people have such strong opinions on you and to feel like they know you. But there is something so beautiful about that too.”

Ziegler’s appearances on Dance Moms spanned six seasons, from 2011 to 2016. The series followed Ziegler and her childhood friends as they competed at weekly dance competitions, all the while enduring an unnerving amount of being berated and judged by adults. Ziegler was, notably, the favorite on the show, always at the top of the pyramid.

Fans of the show might suggest that Ziegler had it easier because she was the star student, but everyone wants to root for the underdog, not the consistent winner. When you are the standard and people are waiting to see you fail, how do you gracefully fall off the pedestal you’ve been glued to all your life? The access the world gained to Maddie during her adolescence — she was just eight years old in season one — still follows her. You can feel it when she talks about her past, with self-preservation consistently sitting at the forefront.

“I’m growing up, and it is liberating to know that I can speak up for myself,” Ziegler says. Talking back wasn’t customary in the dance world, nor was calling out double standards or teaching malpractices. The level of owning her own point of view that Ziegler now gets as an adult is apparent in her decisive stance against her years of hierarchy. “When I was younger and teachers would say, ‘You need to be more like Maddie,’ I felt myself trying to dumb myself down because I hated it. I don’t want anyone else to feel less than.”

You can also tell how those years of being separated from the group are etched into Ziegler's current existence. She tends to generalize after sharing a specific perspective. She doesn’t want to exclude anyone, so she’s careful with her words. She doesn’t want to imply that her view is better than anyone else’s. It’s a tightrope she still walks after years of being singled out for her dancing.

But even if Ziegler doesn’t want to say so herself, she is special, which is exciting and daunting at the same time. She was the best in her dance class, and she has used that success to propel her creative career forward — landing her here, now, in front of me on Zoom, as the star of a new film.

Ziegler's calm demeanor is comforting, but there’s a mystery about her that lingers even as she answers my questions. That mystery seems to be rooted in the tension between who we think she is, based on her televised childhood, and who she is growing up to be.

“I’m not always going to be that little girl,” she says. “I’m still that same goofy, loving, hard-working girl, but I’m also changing and growing. It’s scary when people are like, ‘But you’re not who you were when you were younger.’ And I have to explain, ‘Yeah, because that’s just not realistic.’”

In Fitting In, a fervent coming of age story, Ziegler’s character, Lindy, battles through her diagnosis of MRKH syndrome, a rare reproductive disorder, and the emotional turmoil that goes with being different in high school — those pivotal years when it feels earth-shattering to diverge from the norm. The film is a dramatization of director Molly McGlynn’s real-life experience with the diagnosis, and Ziegler doesn’t take that lightly.

“This film, this story, and Molly — I was so emotional the whole time,” Ziegler says. “I also felt so angry for [Molly]. I think it's hard enough to be a woman and to feel confident within yourself, and then to have men observing and staring at you like you're an object is such a scary thing. I'm so angry that that happened to her. She's so brave for telling this story.”

Fitting In was Ziegler’s first time leading a production and being number one on the call sheet. It required long, strenuous days, but she didn’t mind — in fact, she hopes it will become the norm in her career. Her competitive nature favors challenge, which made Fitting In feel all the more special. “If I were tired or stressed [on set], I’d say, ‘No worries, no worries,’ and our makeup artist would say, ‘Worries, worries,’” she recalls with a laugh. “When you’re in those moments, sometimes you have to make light of it. I think I sarcastically approach stress with, ‘Oh, I’m not worried at all,’ and it actually does help me through it.”

And those long days were worth it. Whether it was how held she felt filming the more intimate parts of this movie or how, after its release, she was able to google showtimes at her favorite theater in Los Angeles, Fitting In felt like the beginning of a new chapter in Ziegler's life. “Lindy will live with me through my life and through the other roles that I take on,” she says. “I am a very harsh critic toward myself, and it's hard to be proud, but the first time I watched [Fitting In], I was like, Wow! I did things that I didn't know I was capable of, and I'm proud, which is rare. I don't usually say that.”

As with the character of Lindy, dance will never leave Ziegler. She admits it’s still such a huge part of her world, something she never wants to stop pursuing. But she’s mindful of not falling into the dancer-typecasting trap; sure Ziegler can dance, but that doesn’t mean she needs to dance to tell an impactful story.

Now with a second feature film under her belt and a third on the way, Ziegler is focused on building longevity. She’s also focused on separating the girl we once knew from the woman she has become. Still, she’d be doing herself a disservice if she disregarded how having her youth on display played a role in bringing her here today.

“Obviously, I have my feelings about that [show], but if I didn't do it, I would not be where I am right now at all,” Ziegler says. “I wouldn't have been found by Sia. I wouldn't have found my love for acting through music videos, and I wouldn't be where I am, literally, right now talking to you.”

There are days when an air of malaise surrounds Ziegler, reminding her of the harm a child went through on national television. There are days when everything and nothing at all feels worth defending. It goes with the territory of being a child-star-turned-adult-actor. What is for show and what isn’t? Do emotions still feel sacred after you’ve had your fears, anxieties, and breakdowns hyper-edited into weekly 42-minute episodes?

Acting has been a way for Ziegler to take her power back. When thinking about her career aspirations, she is open to everything. “I look at Margot Robbie and at Reese Witherspoon's production company,” she says. “They're so incredible, and I'm very inspired by that, to have my own production company one day.”

Women-led sets are all that Ziegler has experienced so far in her young career, and she wants to continue to see that push in the broader industry as she expands to other areas of being on the big screen. Beyond that, Ziegler wants to play a female assassin in a film, à la Scarlett Johansson in the 2014 film Lucy. Ziegler knows her years of dance could be a great asset for a physical role like that, which would mean a chance to do her own stunts. “I don't know what my life would be like without working," she says, "but I love it so much and I don't want to stop.”

And she isn’t stopping. Ziegler’s upcoming project, My Old Ass, started filming shortly after Fitting In wrapped. The feature film, starring Aubrey Plaza as the older version of main character Elliot Labrant and directed by Megan Park, was bought by Amazon MGM for $15 million after its 2024 Sundance Film Festival premiere in January. Ziegler’s character is one of Elliott Labrant’s, the younger version played by Maisy Stella, best friends; Ziegler joined the cast only two weeks before they began filming.

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