Jordan Kristine Seamón Found Herself — And Italy — In We Are Who We Are

By Alex Gonzalez


At 17, Jordan Kristine Seamón has already built a staggering résumé. You could know her as Caitlin Poythress on HBO’s coming-of-age series We Are Who We Are or you could have caught her appearances in The Vampire Diaries and Insatiable. In back of acting, Seamón has several talents, including her chameleonic ability to adapt to new surroundings, as with her chosen city of Atlanta, where she moved six years prior immediately after growing up in Philadelphia.


“There are no sidewalks in my development,” Seamón tells MTV News, “and I have a dog right now, so Whenever I have to walk my dog, I have to walk in the middle of the street. I miss sidewalks and I miss the hustle and bustle that you hear every night. I need noise to go to sleep. It’s very quiet here, and I miss noise.”


Nevertheless she has grown to love Atlanta’s green, hilly parks and mobile art scene, Seamón finds herself missing Philly as soon as she’s out walking her corgi puppy, Nova. Still, both cities are far from the Northern Italian vistas where director Luca Guadagnino — who also helmed Call Me By Your Name — shot Who Are Who We Are, a short series following an audience of teenagers living on a American military base abroad. Prior to landing the role of Caitlin, a 14-year-old daughter of a conservative soldier grappling with a newfound queer identity, Seamón had never traveled outdoors of the United States. Over the course of a six-month production, Seamón became well-acquainted with the local culture.


“It was very new,” Seamón says, “and I enjoyed learning the Italian language and just overall, being in Padova, where we stayed, and Chioggia and Bagnoli di Sopra, where we shot most of the series.”


To get there, Seamón’s mother, Felicia, whom she affectionately calls her “momager,” first noticed a posting for the role of Caitlin on a casting site and encouraged her to audition for the role. She’d known since age 6 that she wanted to be an entertainer; originally, she wanted to be a singer. By 10, she had joined local theater troupes, where directors instructed her she “wasn’t that bad,” so she determined to explore both.


As a child, she starred in local productions of plays like Lord, Why Did You Make Me Black?, Marching to Freedomland, and Next Actor Please. (No, they’re not on Vimeo — at least she hopes.) Her debut EP, an experimental mashup of hip-hop and bedroom pop called Untitled, was released in 2018 under the moniker J.K., Her first and middle initials. A full, pop-oriented album called Identity Crisis followed this year, just before the September 14 premiere of We Are Who We Are. Her songs explored love, heartache, and mental health through upbeat R&B and were mostly written while filming the series in Italy. “I’m growing up and I’m still attempting to identify who I am and who I wanna be and where I fit in the world,” Seamón says.


Right after submitting self-audition tapes from house, she flew to California to meet with Guadagnino and co-star Jack Dylan Grazer, who decided she fit flawlessly with them and the rest of the series cast, including Kid Cudi and Chloë Sevigny. She learned that she’d landed the extraordinary role throughout an exceedingly ordinary location. “I got a telephone call about a week later While I was driving through McDonald’s, and so they informed me that I got the role. And I screamed at the girl taking my order.”


She brought that enthusiasm to her onscreen portrayal of Caitlin, a teen who explores her gender identity while in the season’s arc. She adopts a gentleman alter-ego named Harper any time as soon as she goes to a coffee shop and meets a young lady. Seamón, who herself is bisexual and gender-fluid, says her experience with her identity was similar in the ways she explored it — she rocks short hair, like Caitlin, and expresses herself through androgynous style — though she recognizes how fortunate she was to have grown up with understanding family member and friends.


“I think Caitlin is having the exact same thing, with attempting to calculate gender identity,” Seamón says. “But because Caitlin’s on a military base, the only access she really has is the world wide web and [Grazer’s character] Fraser.”


In one particularly shocking scene in the season’s fifth episode, Caitlin expresses curiosity about anatomy different from her own. Whenever Fraser is peeing, she asks if she can hold his penis as he stands in front of the toilet.


“When I read the script,” Seamón says. “I looked at my mom and was like, ‘I don’t know, I think @we could have to cut that scene out. I don’t know how they count on shooting that, because I refuse.’ Although then once Luca expressed, ‘Oh no, you’re not actually gonna have to do anything, it’s just the best half,’ I was like, ‘Oh, OK, no problem. I can do that.’ It was just funny to me, because I didn’t understand, nevertheless soon after actually shooting the scene and learning the meaning beyond it — Caitlin attempting to be able to see what it’s like to have [a penis] — it’s just curiosity. Every kid has that moment where you’re just curious.”


The following scene, Caitlin sticks hair shavings onto her face, as a means to make the appearance of having facial hair. She speedily realizes she won’t be happy unless she shaves her entire head. In a tender moment evocative of their burgeoning friendship, Fraser starts cutting off the lower half of Caitlin’s hair, then proceeds to remove the rest. Seamón says that the lower half was made up of extensions, although everything else was her actual hair.


“I really just wanted to scream,” Seamón says. “You can visualize Jack is staying in character, as if Fraser just told Caitlin to quiet down, because I am actually screaming. I didn't remember that we were filming a TV show for a hot minute, although then whenever you visualize the cameras, you remember. Nevertheless it was very thrilling and very exciting.”


Seamón’s parents have been helpful of how she expresses herself — soon after filming this scene, Seamón says her mom shaved her head in solidarity — along with her creative endeavors while in her life. In 2018, she and her father published a coloring book called Daddy’s Big Secret: Jordan Learns the Truth. In the series, yet, Cailtin’s dad, Richard (played by Kid Cudi), was chagrined if he first seen a bald Caitlin. He yells at her and forbids her from hanging out with Fraser.


Seamón assures us that Cudi couldn’t be more unlike his conservative, Trump-supporting character.“It was hard as soon as we had scenes where we had to be sort of upset at each other or just not super happy,” Seamón says, “because we have so much fun with each other. He is the perfect TV dad ever.”


Though Seamón grew up listening to Cudi’s music, she did not know what he looked like up until production started on We Are Who We Are.“When I first met him, I didn’t know he was Kid Cudi,” Seamón says. “He introduced himself as Scott, so I was like, ‘Oh, nice to meet you Scott, cool.’ However While I noticed out he was Kid Cudi, I was like ‘Oh my god, I loved that guy in middle school.’ That was my music. Like, it was all I listened to.”


In We Are Who We Are’s sixth episode, Fraser imagines him and Caitlin re-enacting Blood Orange’s “Time Will Tell” video by singing and replicating its choreography clad in white before a grand piano. Seamón says that despite the complicated work she and Grazer put in to brilliant the dance in over “two or three days” and film it in over 10 takes, this was one of her preference scenes to film.


“I don't mention I'm a dancer,” Seamón says, “I think I can dance, I can hold the beat in a rhythm, however I don't classify myself as a dancer. I don't classify myself as an actor, really. Yet that's another story for another time.”


Seamón currently lives with her parents in Atlanta, and so they have already binged the complete miniseries, though they also watch it with each other every Monday night on HBO. Nevertheless her parents are fans of the show, Seamón still feels awkward watching some scenes with them.“Some parts I just turn away,” Seamón says. “Even though we’re all super, super comfortable with one another and we’re all mature, I’m still like, ‘OK, I don’t wanna watch myself kiss someone else.’ It feels weird. I cringe.”


The miniseries wraps on November 2, and though there’s no word on future episodes, Seamón is on board to return. Because the show’s first season takes place in 2016, Seamón hopes for a time jump in a hypothetical second season. “I feel like we’ve all grown a lot since the show,” Seamón says, “so I would like to be able to see what the characters are doing in a couple years’ time."