Rachel Hilson Is Getting in on the Action

PHOTOGRAPHY Don Brodie

STYLED BY Jensen Edmondson

In J.J. Abrams’s new HBO Max series, Duster, Rachel Hilson’s character, Nina, is put through the ringer: shootouts, kidnappings, and car chases are all par for the course for the rookie FBI agent. And while Hilson was excited to do her own stunts—tuck-and-rolls out of moving cars, diving forward while firing a gun—there were others she was happy to leave to her outstanding stunt team.

“There are some brutal fights where they’re literally throwing themselves off of cliffs. I didn’t do those—I’m not there in my career just yet,” she says, adding with a laugh, “I’m not Tom Cruise.”

Maybe she’s not literally throwing herself off of cliffs just yet, but metaphorically, Hilson, 29, isn’t afraid to throw herself head first into her work. She’s Zooming in from her Brooklyn apartment on a gray Monday morning, cuddled up in an oversized sweatshirt with a cup of coffee while enjoying some rare downtime. “I just moved into a new place, and there’s an outside space, so I’m planning to plant things and make it look cool and cute,” she says.

Goodness knows Hilson deserves the break; she’s been in the industry a long time. As a child, she auditioned for a Broadway camp with the intention of becoming a dancer (at one point, she’d memorized Zoe Saldaña’s routine from the iconic 2000 movie Center Stage), but she had fun when they asked her to read some lines. That camp led to a gig as a backup dancer on a kids’ TV show called LazyTown, which in turn landed her an agent and a role in a short film. It was an easy introduction to acting—almost too easy.”

The first audition I went out on, I ended up booking, and I was like, This is a piece of cake,” Hilson says. “And then, you keep auditioning, and you’re like, Oh, maybe this is a little bit more challenging.”

Hilson pushed through, continuing to audition through high school. She also took the time to be a normal kid while studying at the Baltimore School for the Arts. “I’m very grateful for that, because I was able to really study the craft, and I got to play all of these wacky people,” she says of her time at BSA.“That prepared me for the next phase of the journey, because it’s such a long and wild and heartbreaking journey—and it can be hard, especially as a young person with a fragile ego who’s still figuring out who they are.”

For Hilson, that next phase was peppered with lots of guest appearances on major TV shows and miniseries; her breakthrough moment would come when she was cast as ballet dancer Beth Clarke—the teen version of Susan Kelechi Watson’s character—on This Is Us in 2019. The same team of creators went on to tap Hilson for Love, Victor, and shortly after, she landed a role in the blockbuster Amazon Prime adaptation of Red, White & Royal Blue. “I was very excited to get This Is Us, and I think that really opened things up for me,” she says of that time. “Suddenly, there was some momentum. And I was ready for it.”

That wave has now carried Hilson to the 1972-set crime thriller Duster. Her character, Nina, attempts to take down a crime syndicate in the Southwest with the help of getaway driver Jim (Josh Holloway). Calling it her “first real adult role,” Hilson faces the pressure of serving as co-lead alongside Holloway, a seasoned actor—and the star of Lost, another Abrams project. But Hilson wears it as easily as she does Nina’s groovy ‘70s-era costumes. To prep for the role of the (fictional) first Black female FBI agent, she studied up on the real-life female FBI agents who broke the agency’s glass ceiling. (Particularly informative was FBI Retired Case File Review, a podcast by former agent Jerri Williams: “I was able to listen to dozens of stories from FBI agents from different eras,” Hilson says, suggesting that everyone add it to their rotation. “Some of these cases are just insane.”) She also learned to speak Russian and practiced shooting guns with an FBI field agent. And then there was the stunt work. “Coming from a dance background, the choreography of stunt stuff is really fun to me—learning the choreography, and then getting to bring some flair to it,” Hilson says.

Coming from a dance background, the choreography of stunt stuff is really fun to me. 

But if the badass stuff is what pops on screen, it’s the emotional core of the story that makes Hilson’s Nina so magnetic. She carries the character from standoffs with her racist and misogynistic coworkers to undercover operations inside dangerous criminal rings to quiet revelations of her heartbreaking backstory with equal strength and ease. It’s what drew Hilson to the role in the first place.

“She’s this person who’s so complicated, and you’re able to see it. I think that’s the one thing that you don’t always get; you get this badass heroine, but you don’t always get to see the layers and how she got there,” Hilson says. “Some of my favorite scenes were the phone calls with her mom, because you see that she’s a hurt little girl; she’s still a child who has experienced loss. I was really excited about getting to work with all of those colors.” 

There’s a moment in Duster where Nina is in conversation with a young Black woman working in the office as a cleaner, who is trying to warn her about things her white male coworkers are doing to sabotage her. The young woman tells her how much it means to see a Black woman like Nina as an agent; Nina, in turn, tells her that she’ll make a great agent herself one day. It’s a quiet scene that packs a big punch, both for the viewer and for Hilson.

“Another fact of being Black is the fact that Black people are always rooting for other Black people. That’s one of my favorite parts of my community, the sense of wanting each other to win, and so I think that is very much [present throughout Duster],” she says. “You want to extend your hands to people younger than you, or at the start of whatever journey they’re on, because that’s how we keep excelling, keep doing the amazing things we’ve always done.”

Hilson, too, is going to keep doing the amazing things she’s always done. We’ll wrap our Zoom, and she’ll enjoy her precious downtime; lately, she’s been writing poetry and seeing lots of theater. (Just the week before, she saw Gypsy with Audra McDonald. “Everybody in that cast is truly remarkable, and the way that it’s been reimagined with an almost all-Black cast is just very cool,” she raves.) Her sister recently had a baby, so spending time with family is a top priority. And she also devotes her time to food justice, working with local organizations like The Campaign Against Hunger and Heart of Dinner.

The future is looking very bright for Hilson. Duster premiered at Canneseries, and while Hilson wasn’t able to make it to the Croisette herself due to work obligations, she cheered the team on from afar. “I’m so proud of the cast, and LaToya [Morgan, the show’s co-creator], and literally every person who’s had a role in it,” she says. Also on the horizon for 2025 is a big birthday: This fall, Hilson will turn 30. She’s already been telling people that she’s 30 to mentally prepare (“I don’t want it to be this radical shift for me,” she explains) and ignoring the “social chatter” around what it Means, capital M, to leave your 20s. As she does with everything, Hilson is going to chart her own path.

“Everybody says [the 30s are] their best decade, which I hope is the case—my 20s were absolutely tumultuous, so I’m not mad to leave them,” she says. “I’m doing my best to have my own experience.”

HAIR: Akihisa Yamaguchi

MAKEUP: Marco Campos

SET DESIGN: Louisa Fulkerson

CREATIVE CONSULTANT: Mariana Suplicy

PRODUCED BY: Dana Bosland

PHOTO ASSISTANTS: Brandon Abreu and Wil Pierce

STYLING ASSISTANT: Alessandro Thomson