Not every Hollywood success story starts with showbiz parents, talent scouts, or a lucky break on social media.
Some of them start with a construction company in Indianapolis, a stay-at-home mum who believed in the power of live theatre, and a father who once played jazz for a living and never forgot what it felt like to perform.
Keith and Kim Payne are not famous. They are not celebrities. But they are quietly one of the most compelling support stories behind one of Hollywood’s most exciting young talents.
This is the story of two parents who each brought something completely different to the table, and how their combined worldview helped Chase Infiniti become who she is today.
Keith Irvin Payne’s Construction Company ARHI and What It Stands For
Keith Payne is the founder and principal of ARHI Bldg & Remodelling, a premier building and remodelling company based in Indianapolis. The company is built on a philosophy of personalised, one-of-a-kind design, with Keith’s strength in both form and function at its centre.
ARHI was incorporated on February 20, 2016, and is officially registered as a Limited Liability Company. The business operates across general contracting, home building, remodelling, and commercial construction.
ARHI Building and Remodelling holds a general contractor licence alongside five other licences according to the Indianapolis licence board. Their BuildZoom score ranks them in the top 7% of over 22,000 licensed contractors in Indiana.
That is not a small achievement. The construction industry in Indiana is crowded and competitive. For a Black-owned small business to rank that high in a field that large speaks to a standard of work that Keith has clearly maintained over years of grinding, building, and earning a reputation one job at a time.
Keith prides himself on maintaining open communication with clients throughout every project, ensuring each job is completed according to the client’s design preferences. His process begins by understanding his customers’ goals, wishes, and dreams, whether they are pursuing new construction or home improvements.
That approach, understanding someone’s dream and then building it into something real, turns out to be something he practised at home too, long before the company ever existed.
His Education at Dillard University, a Historically Black Institution
Before Keith built anything, he sat in classrooms at one of the most historically significant universities in America.
Keith received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Dillard University after attending North Central High School in Indianapolis.
Dillard University is not just any institution. It is a private, historically Black university in New Orleans, Louisiana, founded in 1930, affiliated with the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church. Its roots go even deeper than that. The origins of the university date back to 1869, when the American Missionary Association founded Straight University to respond to the post-Civil War need to educate newly freed African Americans in New Orleans and the surrounding region.
As Louisiana’s oldest historically Black institution of higher learning, Dillard University has served as an engine of equity, recognised by the New York Times and U.S. News & World Report as one of the nation’s best performers in social mobility.
The fact that Keith attended an HBCU matters in context. He grew up in Indianapolis, a city with its own complicated racial history, and chose to pursue his education at an institution built specifically to serve Black students at a time when so many doors were closed to them. That institutional background, the values of community, equity, and purposeful education that Dillard was founded upon, became part of who Keith was long before he became a father.
A Jazz Drummer Before He Was a Builder
Here is the detail about Keith Payne that changes everything once you know it. He did not walk out of university and straight into construction. Before he ever broke ground on a single project, he was a musician.
Keith used to be in a jazz band. As Chase told Dazed Digital in late 2025, growing up with music constantly playing at home shaped her from the beginning. She was always singing and putting on shows for her parents.
Jazz is not background music. It requires listening, improvising, and responding to what is happening around you in real time. Jazz drummers, specifically, carry the whole structure of a performance on their shoulders. They hold everything together while staying adaptable. That particular combination of discipline and creativity is precisely the combination a performing artist needs to thrive in a volatile, unpredictable industry.
Chase grew up inside that sensibility without even knowing it. Her father’s musical past turned their household into a space where art was not a hobby or an aspiration. It was just the texture of daily life. Music played constantly. Performance was normal. The idea that a person could pour themselves into something artistic and have it mean something was never abstract in the Payne home. It was lived.
Kim Payne’s Role as a Full-Time Parent and Arts Encourager
While Keith built homes and businesses, Kim focused on raising Chase and her younger sister, Dolcé, at home, as Chase told Vanity Fair in August 2025. That decision, to make the raising of her daughters the primary work, turns out to have had an enormous and very specific impact.
While growing up in Indianapolis, Kim regularly took both daughters to musicals and plays around town, and at some point, noticed that Chase had a particular spark when it came to performing. She encouraged Chase to start auditioning, and Chase began acting in local plays before eventually moving to Chicago to study musical theatre at Columbia College.
There is a quiet but profound kind of parenting in that story. Kim did not simply buy tickets. She paid attention. She watched her daughters in those theatre seats and noticed something specific about one of them. Then she acted on that observation. She did not push Chase into a predetermined direction. She pointed her toward something Chase already felt but had not yet named for herself.
Chase has said that when she auditioned for her first school musical at 10 years old, she remembered thinking she wanted to do it for the rest of her life. As she told The Face in 2024, her mum encouraged her to try out for a musical, and it was the best decision she ever made.
That first audition did not happen in a vacuum. It happened because a mother kept showing up with her daughters at theatres around Indianapolis, building a hunger for something that would eventually become Chase’s entire reason for being.
The Advice Keith Gave Chase About Handling Rejection
Acting careers are not built on yes. They are built on surviving the no. Anyone who has ever auditioned for anything knows the particular sting of silence after a callback, the slow crush of being passed over for a role you know you could have done well. For a young actress from Indianapolis without industry connections, without legacy relationships in Hollywood, the rejection rate in the early years is brutal.
Keith Payne, the man who built a business from the ground up in a competitive industry, knew something about that.
As Chase’s career began and the early rejections came in, she turned to her father for support. She told Vanity Fair that her dad always instilled in her the importance of getting comfortable with the word “no.”
That is not a platitude. That is earned wisdom from a man who spent years operating a small business, pitching clients, losing bids, and coming back anyway. Keith did not tell his daughter that success was guaranteed or that hard work always pays off on a predictable schedule. He told her the truth: you have to make peace with rejection as part of the process, not as evidence that it is over.
That specific piece of advice, paired with the artistic environment both parents had built around her from childhood, gave Chase a grounding that most young performers never develop until much later, if at all.
Kim is bringing Chase and Dolcé to Musicals and Plays
It is worth pausing on the practical reality of what Kim did for those years in Indianapolis.
Indianapolis is not New York or Chicago. It is a mid-sized Midwestern city with a genuine but not abundant arts scene. Taking two daughters to musicals and plays consistently, making it a regular part of life rather than an occasional treat, required intention. It required a parent who genuinely believed that exposure to live performance was not a luxury but a necessity.
Kim raised Chase and younger sister Dolcé in Indianapolis, regularly bringing both girls to see live theatre as part of their upbringing. Dolcé Imani Payne, who now works in fashion, also came along on those theatre trips, suggesting that Kim’s investment in arts exposure was for both daughters equally, not just the one who would eventually go to Hollywood.
What makes this particularly meaningful is the consistency. A single trip to a musical is a memory. A childhood filled with them is an education. Chase did not discover a passion for performance in isolation. She was walked toward it, repeatedly and deliberately, by a mother who understood that some things have to be shown before they can be chosen.
Both Parents at the Golden Globes and the NAACP Image Awards
When Chase Infiniti arrived on the award season circuit for real, she did not go alone.
After her breakthrough in Presumed Innocent and her starring role in the 2025 comedy thriller One Battle After Another, Chase received nominations for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor at the Actor Awards, Best Actress at the BAFTAs, and Best Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes. Throughout the award show circuit, Chase brought along her mum or dad to celebrate with her. Keith was her date for both the 57th NAACP Image Awards and the 2026 Golden Globe Awards.
While speaking to Extra at the Golden Globes about playing several famous actors’ daughters on screen, Chase said she would pick her own dad as her favourite dad, adding that she loves him very much.
That moment, a rising star on the Golden Globes red carpet, naming her own father from Indianapolis as the best dad she could imagine, is the whole story in a single sentence. Chase was also nominated at the 57th NAACP Image Awards for her performance in One Battle After Another, the ceremony held on February 28, 2026, in Pasadena, California.
Keith Payne, the jazz drummer turned construction company founder from Indianapolis, was photographed at two of the biggest nights in Hollywood alongside his daughter. He confirmed in a March 2026 interview with the Indianapolis Star that, as parents, they had intentionally given both daughters names they felt would be well received if something ever happened to them, saying that most parents have grand visions of what their children will become.
