For her short film, Crisis Actor (which make its world premiere this week as part of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival), filmmaker Lily Platt pulled from a world she knows very well for a depiction of a person most people wouldn’t want to know very well.
Written and directed by Platt, who grew up in and around the New York City arts scene, Crisis Actor stars Sarah Steele as Celine, a struggling actress who turns everything into a production. She tells sob stories to phone operators to get fraudulent refunds on purchases. In the middle of acting for students in a teaching hospital, Celine starts hitting on a hot doctor, resulting in her firing. After that fiasco, which she insists isn’t her fault, she tries to bum a smoke off an attractive guy (Philip Ettinger) outside of an Al-Anon meeting. Wanting to impress him, Celine fakes having a family member with addiction issues just to get close to him. But when Celine is finally confronted by someone suffering from the real problems she fakes having knowledge of, the trajectory of her day is further altered.
We chatted with Platt a few days before Crisis Actor was set to premiere and talked about people with big personalities, the levels of lying inherent in the short’s main character, the art of letting go, and what sets movies about New York actors apart from those set anywhere else in the world.
Crisis Actor screens as part of Short Film Program 4 at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
