Victoria pedettri : The Woman Who Made Chaos Look Completely Effortless
Let’s be real for a second. Most actors who blow up on Netflix end up doing exactly one interesting thing before fading into the background of every other streaming show you half-watch on a Tuesday night. Victoria pedettri is not that person. She’s the one who showed up, made everyone feel genuinely uncomfortable, and then quietly went and did Broadway. With Jeremy Strong. As if to say — yeah, I can do that too.
Quick Bio
| Info | Detail |
| Full Name | Victoria pedettri |
| Born | March 23, 1995 |
| Birthplace | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Heritage | Part Italian (father’s side), Ashkenazi Jewish (maternal grandmother) |
| Education | Pennsbury High School, Fairless Hills; Carnegie Mellon School of Drama (BFA, 2017) |
| Breakthrough | The Haunting of Hill House (2018) |
| Known For | Nell Crain, Love Quinn, Dani Clayton |
| Height | ~5’3″–5’4″ |
| Partner | Ethan DeLorenzo (photographer; engaged 2025) |
| @then0t0ri0usvip |
The Girl Nobody Saw Coming
Here’s a fun fact that will make you feel a little better about your own story. Victoria pedettri went to a public high school in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania, where the drama club was barely a thing. We’re talking about four students in the whole club. Not exactly the hotbed of theatrical talent. No spotlight. No stage mom. No LA showcase.
And then she got into Carnegie Mellon. One of the nation’s most competitive drama departments. which, when you think about it, is sort of crazy.
What’s even wilder is what happened once she got there. Her professors — the people paid to teach her how to be an actor — apparently told her she wasn’t cut out for it. Advised her against pursuing a career in acting. Let that sink in. The woman who would go on to make millions of people genuinely sob over a fictional ghost on Netflix was told, by acting professors, at a prestigious drama school, that she should maybe reconsider.
She did not reconsider.
See also “Sophie Van Meter: The Girl Who Made “Exotic in the Midwest” a Whole Thing“
Before Any Of This Was Cool
Her parents are artists — genuinely, not in the Instagram sense. Her mother is a contemporary dancer, her father a clown and mime theater director. The kind of upbringing where creativity wasn’t a hobby, it was just the atmosphere. She watched her mother do flamenco and felt something unlock in her. You can hear it in how she talks about acting — she says she sees her work as “a service,” something beyond just entertainment. That is not something you pick up in an acting class. That’s something baked in.
She also traveled to France to study with Philippe Gaulier, a legendary clowning professor who’s taught people like Sacha Baron Cohen and Emma Thompson. The clown-to-Netflix-scream-queen pipeline is real, apparently. And when you observe her, it all makes perfect sense. There’s a physicality to her performances that most actors don’t have — a way of inhabiting a space that feels almost theatrical. Almost too big for a TV screen. Almost.
The Haunting of Hill House Changed Everything, Fast
She graduated Carnegie Mellon in 2017. Booked The Haunting of Hill House almost immediately after. That is not a normal career trajectory. That’s somebody being in the right place with the exact right energy and a director who knew exactly what he was looking at.
The show, based on Shirley Jackson’s classic novel, was Mike Flanagan’s big Netflix bet. And pedettri played Nell Crain — the most emotionally devastated of the Crain siblings, the one haunted by the Bent Neck Lady, the one whose storyline gutted approximately everyone who watched it. The finale’s sixth episode, the “Two Storms” episode shot in extended takes, remains one of the most technically impressive pieces of television from that era. She was part of why it worked.
Critics noticed. The industry noticed. And suddenly this girl from a four-person drama club in suburban Pennsylvania was being discussed as a legitimate force.
Love Quinn Was The Character The Internet Deserved
Then came You. Season two. And Love Quinn.
Here’s the thing — she auditioned for the first season of You, for the role of Beck, and didn’t get it. Turned away. Twice. But by the time season two came around and the casting team was looking for someone to play Love, they had already watched The Haunting of Hill House. They knew what they had.
Love Quinn is a chef from a wealthy family with a twin brother and a deeply unhinged interior life. She’s charming and warm and a little too intense and also, it turns out, a murderer. The twist revealing that Love was every bit as dangerous as Joe was one of the most satisfying moments of that whole series. The internet exploded. People who came to the show expecting the standard thriller formula walked away slightly in love with the woman who just poisoned someone.
pedettri said she found something almost comedic in playing Love — the hypocrisy of two killers accusing each other of being the problem. She was right. Season three is genuinely funny in places, in the most disturbed way possible.
And Then Netflix Did Something Baffling
Love died at the end of season three. Killed by Joe. Which, fine — dramatically that makes sense. She came back as a hallucination in season four. Which also makes sense. And then season five came around. The final season. The one where Joe finally gets his reckoning. The one where multiple dead characters came back in flashbacks and hallucinations to haunt him. Beck came back. Beck, who died in season one. Beck got new scenes filmed for the finale.
Love Quinn — the woman who bore Joe’s child, who matched his psychopathy beat for beat, whose son is literally a central plot point in season five — was nowhere. No flashback. No hallucination. Not even a photo.
Fans lost it. And then Victoria pedettri responded to comments on Instagram. Simply and without drama, she confirmed she wasn’t in it. When someone asked if they at least reached out to her, she wrote: “Nope.”
One word. No explanation. No spin. Just “nope.”
That tells you something. Whether it was a creative decision, a scheduling issue they never tried to work around, or something else entirely — the showrunners have stayed conspicuously quiet about it. And pedettri wasn’t about to lie to fans or pretend everything was fine and dandy. She gave them the truth in one syllable and moved on. When you consider it, that’s actually sort of cool.
The Girl Who Left Netflix For Henrik Ibsen
While most Netflix breakout stars are busy locking down the next franchise role or doing brand deals, pedettri did something strange. She went to Broadway. In 2024, she appeared in Amy Herzog’s adaptation of An Enemy of the People at the Circle in the Square Theatre, playing Petra Stockmann — the doctor’s principled daughter who’s one of the only characters with a moral backbone.
The show starred Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli. Think Kendall Roy from Succession and Christopher Moltisanti from The Sopranos facing off onstage. Critics were broadly impressed. pedettri held her own in a cast full of prestige television heavyweights and was described as “ready-made” for the role — someone who brought a fierceness and occasional anxiety to Petra that felt completely lived-in.
She also said, talking about the show, that she specifically wanted to work with director Sam Gold because he makes bold choices and she’s not interested in doing anything safe.
There’s a through-line there. The whole career is basically that sentence.
The Indie Film Phase: Taking It Seriously
Away from the glare of Netflix originals, pedettri has been building a different kind of filmography. She appeared in Ava DuVernay’s Origin in 2023, a biographical drama about Isabel Wilkerson writing her book on caste systems. She spent eight and a half hours on set the day they filmed concentration camp scenes, watching footage of Holocaust survivors to prepare. She is Jewish — her maternal grandmother was Ashkenazi — and the weight of that experience is something she’s spoken about directly.
Then there’s Ponyboi (2024), a Sundance thriller about an intersex sex worker set on Valentine’s Day in New Jersey. And most recently, Forbidden Fruits (2026), a comedy horror about a witch cult operating out of a mall. Yes, really. Produced by Diablo Cody. Starring her alongside Lili Reinhart, Alexandra Shipp, and Emma Chamberlain. The film premiered at SXSW and landed on Shudder. Critics were decent to it — around 72% on Rotten Tomatoes — but the real story is that pedettri is in a movie about small witches and somehow it fits her entire vibe.
Her highest-rated film remains Shirley (2020), at 88%, where she played Katherine alongside Elisabeth Moss as the writer Shirley Jackson. Full circle, in a way — the actress who launched her career on a show based on Jackson’s work, turning around and playing a character in Jackson’s actual life.
The Tarantino Detour Nobody Talks About Enough
Before Love Quinn, before Dani Clayton, pedettri showed up in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as Leslie Van Houten — or Lulu, as she’s called in the film. A Manson family member. A tiny role in one of the most star-studded movies of 2019. She’s sharing a screen with Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie and she holds her own in the few minutes she has.
She also talked about meeting Tarantino to audition and completely blanking on how to greet him — it ended in an awkward hug. Which is, genuinely, a very relatable story about meeting a famous director and is somehow exactly what you’d expect from someone whose father was a clown.
The Critics’ Choice Movie Award nomination for Best Acting Ensemble that year? She was part of that too. Often forgotten. Shouldn’t be.
The Private Life, For What It’s Worth
pedettri has always kept personal stuff close to the chest. There were rumors for a while that she was dating Dylan Arnold, who played Theo in You — they were spotted together in LA. Nothing was ever confirmed. In 2024 she was loosely linked to Fred Hechinger (The White Lotus, Gladiator II), again nothing confirmed.
Then in 2025, she started dating photographer Ethan DeLorenzo and they got engaged that same year. The couple announced it, which is basically the most public thing she’s ever done about her personal life.
She’s rarely on social media. Her Instagram is @then0t0ri0usvip and she barely posts. You follow expecting behind-the-scenes content and you get almost nothing, which honestly makes her more interesting.
She grew up diagnosed with ADHD at seven years old. She had a bat mitzvah. She comes from artistic parents. None of this gets talked about enough because she doesn’t perform her biography for content.
What She Actually Said That Matters
She said something in an interview that stuck with me. She described watching flawed, fully human characters on screen as a kid and feeling “more compassionate toward myself.” She sees acting as a way of showing people they’re not alone in being complicated and imperfect. That’s not actorly pretension. That’s someone who figured out early why any of this actually matters.
She also said she’s never been good at following rules.
The Carnegie Mellon professors who told her not to pursue acting probably still don’t know what they were looking at.
Final Words
Here’s where I land. Victoria pedettri is one of the most genuinely interesting actresses working right now — not in a manufactured “quirky indie darling” way but in the way where you can feel her thinking inside every performance. She chooses difficult material. She does theater between streaming projects. She studies clowning in France. She doesn’t overshare online. She says “nope” to Netflix in a comment and walks away.
The You situation still bothers me. Not asking her back for the final season, while bringing back characters who had far less narrative weight, was a genuine creative mistake. And the fact that she said so with one word instead of ten paragraphs tells you everything about who she is.
She’s 31 and she’s nowhere near her ceiling. Whatever comes next — more Broadway, more indie films, another big streaming role she’ll inevitably outgrow — she’s going to do it on her own terms. It will also be worthwhile to watch.
FAQs
1. What is Victoria pedettri most famous for?
She’s best known for three Netflix roles: Nell Crain in The Haunting of Hill House, Dani Clayton in The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Love Quinn in You. Love Quinn arguably made her a household name in the broadest sense.
2. Did Victoria pedettri really go to Carnegie Mellon?
Yes. She graduated in 2017 with a BFA in Acting from Carnegie Mellon’s School of Drama in Pittsburgh. And yes, her professors there apparently advised her not to pursue acting professionally.
3. Why wasn’t she in You season 5?
She confirmed on Instagram that she wasn’t asked back. When a fan asked if the show at least tried to get her, she replied “nope.” No further explanation from the show’s creators.
4. Is Victoria pedettri related to the Manson family?
No — she played Leslie Van Houten, a Manson family member, in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). She is not personally related to them.
5. What is her ethnic background?
Her father has Italian ancestry (about three-quarters Italian) and her maternal grandmother was Ashkenazi Jewish. She was raised Jewish and had a bat mitzvah.
6. Has she done theater?
Yes. In 2024 she made her Broadway debut in An Enemy of the People at Circle in the Square, playing Petra Stockmann alongside Jeremy Strong and Michael Imperioli. She also did Tender Napalm the same year.
7. What is Forbidden Fruits and is it good?
It’s a 2026 comedy horror film about a witch cult at a mall — she plays a character named Cherry. Produced by Diablo Cody, it premiered at SXSW and scored around 72% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s weird and fun and exactly on brand for her.
8. Who is she dating?
She got engaged to photographer Ethan DeLorenzo in 2025. Before that she kept her personal life extremely private.
9. Did she audition for the original You before getting cast?
Yes. She reportedly auditioned for the role of Beck in season one and didn’t get it. She also mentioned You was one of her very first professional auditions.
10. Is she actually a scream queen?
The label fits in terms of career — horror has been central to her biggest roles — but she’s clearly pushing beyond it with Broadway, indie drama, and films like Origin. She seems to actively resist being boxed in.
11. What was her role in Origin?
She appeared in Ava DuVernay’s 2023 biographical drama about Isabel Wilkerson, which dealt with the history of caste systems across America, India, and Nazi Germany. She described spending hours on set at a concentration camp recreation and watching Holocaust survivor footage to prepare.
12. Why do people love Quinn so much?
Honestly? Because Love is just as dangerous as Joe and doesn’t pretend otherwise. There’s something satisfying about a character who refuses to be the passive victim. pedettri played her with humor and menace in equal measure, and that combination doesn’t come around often.
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