Sean Baker’s World of Outcasts

It’s not always easy to place an actor you recognize in a movie, but it’s even more challenging when that actor turns out to be recognizable from their “work” in a documentary. Judy Hill first made an impression when she appeared in Roberto Minervini’s 2018 nonfiction film What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?, which followed her and her community in the aftermath of Trump’s election and the murders of several Black people in the South in 2017. A moving portrait of people striving for justice and peace, it also revealed the extraordinary presence that Hill naturally possesses—in the film’s most stirring and complex scene, she tearfully shares her own difficult past to help a young woman with an addiction, and a conversation that began as a painful confession turns into an embrace. So it both is and isn’t surprising that Sean Baker cast her in his latest film, Red Rocket. Known for his predilection for raw, new talent, Baker reached out to Hill after seeing her in Minervini’s film; soon after, she was playing a drug dealer in a movie about a washed-up porn star returning to his native Texas City.