Before Paul Thomas Anderson called her “the heart of the movie” at the Oscars, before the Golden Globe nomination, before Leonardo DiCaprio, there was a girl in Indianapolis who spent every free hour she had in a rehearsal room.
Chase Infiniti did not stumble into acting. She was built for it, slowly, deliberately, in a city that most people would not associate with Hollywood dreams.
Her story does not begin with a lucky audition or a famous connection. It begins in a house full of jazz records, a mother who refused to let her daughter sit on the sidelines, and a stage program in a Midwestern public school that no one outside Indiana had ever heard of.
What happened between that first school audition at age 10 and her first scene opposite DiCaprio is a story about discipline, roots, and what it actually takes to be ready when the moment arrives.
A Creative Household Rooted in Jazz and Musical Theater
The foundation of Chase Infiniti’s career was laid before she ever set foot on a stage.
Infiniti said she was raised in a creative home and credited her dad, Keith, for her early exposure to the arts. Keith, who runs a construction company in Indianapolis, was previously a drummer in a jazz band. That detail matters more than it might seem. A home with a jazz musician in it is not a quiet home. It is a home where rhythm is in the walls, where music is not background noise but a living, breathing presence.
She grew up with music constantly playing at home and was always singing and putting on shows for her parents. Long before there was an audience of thousands, there was an audience of two, sitting in a living room in Indianapolis, watching their daughter perform.
Her mother frequently took the girls to musicals and plays, sparking Chase’s early love for performing. Between her father’s jazz records and her mother’s theater trips, Chase was absorbing the language of performance from every direction. Disney films, Hairspray, Grease, live productions, and home concerts for her parents. She was not waiting for permission to be an artist. She was just one.
Raised on the cusp of predominantly white and Black neighborhoods, Infiniti enjoyed a sporty childhood involving tennis, football, track and field, and weekend family bike rides. She was not a one-dimensional theater kid. She was athletic, competitive, and comfortable in physical spaces, a combination that would prove quietly essential years later when a film role required martial arts training and action sequences.
Her First School Musical and the Moment She Knew
Her mother encouraged her to try out for a school musical at the age of 10, which became an early milestone she later described as “the best decision” of her life. That is a striking thing to say about something that happened in elementary school. But anyone who has ever stood on a stage for the first time and felt the electricity of it will understand exactly what she means.
“I am not joking when I say that all I did growing up in Indianapolis was theater,” Infiniti told Interview magazine. That is not an exaggeration dressed up as a quote. It is a description of a decade-long obsession that began the moment her mother pushed her toward that first audition and did not stop until she had a BFA, a Golden Globe nomination, and an Oscars stage moment.
What that age-10 audition unlocked was not just a hobby. It was a direction. From that point forward, every school year, every summer, every spare hour was organized around one goal: get better. Get on more stages. Do more shows.
Training at the International School of Indiana
Before she transferred to North Central, Chase Infiniti’s early formal education happened somewhere quietly distinctive.
She attended the International School of Indiana, a private language-immersion school where she studied French, before transferring to North Central High School in Indianapolis and graduating in 2018.
The International School of Indiana is not a performing arts school. It is a rigorous academic institution where students are taught core subjects in languages other than English. Studying French there from an early age gave Chase something most young performers never develop: an intellectual flexibility, a comfort with stepping into a different mode of thinking and communicating.
It is the kind of detail that gets overlooked in a career profile but explains a great deal about the depth she would later bring to her performances. She was not just trained to sing and dance. She was trained to think carefully, to inhabit different frameworks, to be curious about the world beyond the one immediately in front of her.
High School Theater at North Central: Shrek, Pippin, and Show Choir
North Central High School in Indianapolis is not a famous institution outside of Indiana. But its alumni list tells a different story.
The school has produced notable names, including Priyanka Chopra, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, and Patty Guggenheim. Chase Infiniti can now be added to that list, and she earned her place on it the same way she has earned everything else: through relentless stage time.
At North Central, she was fully immersed in show choir, theater, and productions like Shrek the Musical, where she played Dragon at age 15, and Pippin. Dragon is not the lead role in Shrek. But it is one of the most vocally demanding parts in the show, requiring enormous range, physical commitment, and stage presence. Playing it at 15 is nothing.
She also starred as Morticia Addams in The Addams Family in 2017, a role that requires a completely different energy: controlled, cool, darkly comedic, and understated. The range she was already developing in high school productions was quietly preparing her for the kind of versatile screen work she would go on to do.
And then there was the show choir. As part of the school’s choir, Infiniti won Show Choir Nationals. That is a national competition. That is not a local ribbon or a participation trophy. That is a young woman from Indianapolis standing in front of judges from across the country and winning.
Summer Stock Stage and Her First Real Performance Credits
If North Central High School gave Chase Infiniti a foundation, Summer Stock Stage gave her a career before her career officially started.
Infiniti performed in school shows and local productions with Summer Stock Stage, a local Indianapolis theater group. She performed in shows including Bonnie and Clyde and Shrek in 2016, Pippin in 2017, Urinetown and The Secret Garden in 2018, and Violet in 2019.
That is five years of consistent, real stage work in a professional theater context. Not school productions where everyone gets a part. Not community theater with relaxed standards. Summer Stock Stage is a program that demands commitment, rehearsal discipline, and the ability to perform in front of paying audiences.
Summer Stock Stage’s founder and artistic director, Emily Ristine Holloway, said that while Indianapolis may not have the funding or notoriety for the arts like other cities, Infiniti’s success proves how much the local arts can inspire talented young performers. She added that people need to realize there are very high-level arts and artists in Indianapolis, and Chase Infiniti is the proof.
Even after leaving for college in Chicago, Chase kept coming back. She continued to travel back to Indianapolis and perform with her home theater group, including in the 2021 production of Godspell. That loyalty is telling. She did not leave Summer Stock Stage behind when something shinier came along. She returned because it still meant something to her.
The Decision to Leave Indianapolis for Chicago
In 2018, Chase Infiniti graduated from North Central High School and faced the decision that every serious young performer eventually confronts: where do you go to become who you need to be?
She pursued higher education at Columbia College Chicago, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Musical Theatre in 2022. Columbia College Chicago is one of the most respected musical theater programs in the country, a school that trains students in the full architecture of performance: acting, singing, movement, audition technique, and the relentless self-discipline that professional stage work demands.
The decision to go to Chicago rather than New York or Los Angeles was itself a kind of statement. She was not chasing the industry. She was building a craft. Chicago is a theater city in the truest sense, a city that respects the stage on its own terms and not just as a stepping stone to film.
During her youth, Chase trained in musical theatre, tap dance, voice, and theatre performance. At Columbia, she deepened all of it. She also did something entirely unexpected. While attending Columbia College Chicago, Infiniti formed a K-pop cover dance crew and worked as a kickboxing trainer, two activities that had nothing to do with her BFA on paper but would later prove to be exactly the physical and artistic edge she needed to land the most important role of her life.
She left Indianapolis as a theater kid with Show Choir Nationals on her resume and a Summer Stock Stage credit list that most drama school applicants would envy. She arrived in Chicago ready to become something more. And four years later, she did.
Her first professional screen credit came in the 2024 Apple TV+ series Presumed Innocent, but everything that made that performance possible, and everything that made Paul Thomas Anderson trust her with the lead in a major studio film, was built in Indianapolis. In a jazz-filled house on the cusp of two neighborhoods. On a school stage at age 10. In a Summer Stock rehearsal room on a Saturday afternoon. In a city that, as it turns out, had everything she needed all along.
