As she enters the deserted tea shop in Soho, Chloë Sevigny is carrying a large cardboard box containing vintage Margiela boots from the RealReal, a giant pink neoprene tote, and a boxy black Loewe purse. Her long beachy-yellow hair is down under a CANNES ’69 ball cap, and her crisp sky-blue oxford is buttoned all the way up over black hot pants so short you can’t see them under the shirt. She’s wearing really, truly, absolutely no makeup. She’d be camera-ready except her eyes — red-rimmed with incipient tears — are a dead giveaway that something isn’t right.

“I dropped the kid at camp, crying, screaming he didn’t want to go in,” she says as she settles onto the stool next to mine at the counter. “So it was very challenging, part of why I’m crying.” Then she had walked back the ten or so blocks to her under-renovation apartment (she’s combining it with the unit next door) to drop off some checks for the contractors and pick up the package she’s now carrying, then back to this café, which is near where she started. Her husband, the gallerist Siniša Mackovic, is currently out of town at an art fair, so she’s been solo parenting. She orders a matcha with extra hot water, and when it comes, she seems immediately restored by the tea the way characters in old British novels are. She cradles the cup in her palms and sits with her endless legs primly crossed. “Okay,” she says. “So what are the questions?” The morning up till now disappears. Chloë Sevigny has arrived at work.

For more than 30 years, Sevigny has represented the height of downtown cool, but since Vanja was born in 2020, she’s also become a working mom who gets emotional when her toddler clings to her leg at drop-off. It’s somewhat surreal to see her struggle with the same things that I and every mom I know have been working through. But as she tells me about life with Vanja and the next stage she’s envisioning for her career, she sounds just like herself. Her fall schedule is packed. “I have a film, Bonjour Tristesse, going to Toronto, so I go to the Toronto Film Festival for a couple of days, and then Monsters” — the new installment of the Ryan Murphy series, in which she plays Kitty Menendez — “comes out, so we do some promotion for that. There’s a premiere in L.A. and then press in New York and then Charli XCX is playing at Madison Square Garden. And then I think I have a fashion requirement — going to a show in Paris.” After that, in November, she’ll turn 50. “And hopefully nothing big comes along and I can start really focusing on one of the features” — three films she wants to direct — “really full-tilt boogie.” Her hope is that by the time her birthday rolls around, a new era in her career will open up, one in which she’ll get to spend more time behind the camera than in front of it. She has directed short films but never a full-length feature. She’s been conceptualizing these three films since the pre-pandemic, pre-baby era of her life. It’ll be a huge change to work on a project where she’s the boss.

The day after our interview, she’s planning to fly to London with Vanja to shoot Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, in which she stars with Andrew Garfield, Julia Roberts, and Ayo Edebiri. She tells me the film is set at Yale and centers on a student’s accusations of inappropriate behavior by a professor. Sevigny plays a psychologist. She arranged for her babysitter, who’s currently in London stocking a hotel room with Vanja’s favorite snacks from Whole Foods, to have a small role in the movie, so she’ll have her child with her on set for some scenes.

The daily drop-offs during this clingy phase have been so wrenching that sometimes Sevigny just gives up and lets Vanja tag along to wherever she’s going, which this week included a photo shoot for this magazine. “He’s a good set baby,” she says. “He is very quiet — he realizes that if he wants to make noise, he has to go outside.” And for Sevigny, emotionally, it’s easier just to bring him. “I almost like it better having him there and then I feel less guilty about being at work.”

Sevigny describes her parenting style as “still skin-to-skin.” She feels bad when she’s doing something that isn’t work or being with her kid, even getting her nails done. “I like having him close by. Maybe I spoil him or baby him too much, but I feel more at ease,” she says. “All our faults, we’ve made them ourselves. We’re in our bed, and we have to lie in it. But now, it’s like I can sleep better when he’s there.” She shows me pictures on her phone, which, since she tries to keep him off her Instagram, is the first time I’ve seen Vanja’s face. He has a halo of golden hair and a radiant smile, and she scrolls with delight, showing me snaps of him playing outside and smiling for the camera. Vanja is not always an angel, she hastens to say. At his age, everything is a struggle, like brushing teeth and hair and taking a bath. From his Montessori school, he’s learned to say, “I don’t want to do that with my body right now, Mama,” which is cute except when it’s time to cut his nails or wash his hands. “Everything is a negotiation,” she says.

Sevigny is aware that she and Mackovic can be pushovers. It comes, she says, from being an older parent, and Vanja’s being an only child, and maybe a bit from the dramatic experience of his birth at a time when COVID protocols trumped Sevigny’s idyllic birth plan. “Everybody was so terrified that they were asking you to do insane things,” she says. “I can’t imagine they would ever ask anybody to do that in their right minds.” Instead of going into labor naturally, she had to be induced so she could be tested for COVID before the birth, and things went downhill from there. Complications landed Vanja in the NICU. “I’m still dealing with all the PTSD of that,” she says.

Family time is now the highest priority for Sevigny. She and Mackovic were introduced by a mutual friend at an art-gallery party in 2018, when she was 44 and he was 31. The two were married a couple months before Vanja’s birth. They walk him to school as a family whenever they can. When they drive (which is rare since they don’t own a car), Sevigny will usually sit in the back seat holding Vanja’s hand. The soundtrack to these journeys is pure Encanto. “I have friends that are very cool, and their kids listen to the music they listen to, and somehow we don’t. We just fall back on Disney.”

While some couples find that their child’s earliest years can put a strain on their marriage, for Sevigny and Mackovic, the opposite has proved true. “I value my relationship with my husband so much more. I value him and how much he participates and what he does for our household so much more than I ever could imagine. I’ll do anything not to lose him,” she says. “I don’t want to do this by myself.” Mackovic handles all the logistical aspects of family life; Sevigny hates contending with emails and jokes that as a “coddled actress,” she doesn’t even know how to buy a plane ticket. He also helps Sevigny deal with her uneasiness about being away from Vanja for work. “When I’m having one of my anxiety spirals, he’ll always talk me down,” she says. “What’s so nice about my husband is he’s so competent. I can trust he can take care of everything, so I don’t have to, and that’s really relaxing.”

The rigors of parenting have made it harder for her to connect with the people who were once her “real core friend group,” mostly because she goes to bed at nine, when their nights are just beginning. “I’m trying to figure out how to spend more time with them, but there’s no babysitter at 6:30 in the morning,” she says with a shrug, throwing up her hands.

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