Musician Jesse Jo Stark keeps excellent company. She is the daughter of the Chrome Hearts founders, model Bella Hadid’s best friend, Cher’s goddaughter, and, most recently, is dating British pop-punk superstar Yungblud. But Olivier Rousteing and the creative team at Balmain saw in Stark leading lady material. The French fashion house cast her in their latest big swing, Fracture, a five-part episodic drama created to promote their fall 2021 collection, about a musician from a wealthy family trying to find her way at a ramshackle motel on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
Balmain has long found willing partners in the West Coast Hollywood-adjacent class. Early to embrace influencers, they are now betting on scripted content as well, and they appear to have a pick of the talent. They partnered with the U.K.’s Channel 4 to make the short-form series, and besides Stark, cast names like Tommy Dorfman, the 13 Reasons Why star who clarified that she is a trans woman last month, and Riverdale’s Charles Melton.
This is Stark’s debut starring role, though. She’s long worked in the family business, Chrome Hearts, and performed for quite some time, opening for both Lizzo and Guns N’ Roses, but it’s never too late to try new things. To prep she hired an acting coach and ran lines obsessively with friends. “I was so that stereotype, like, in my bedroom with my guitar on the bed, incense, candles, dim-lit, the pages everywhere, just trying to do my best, to focus and be Mya,” Stark told me from London, where she’s been for a month.
They filmed this summer in Mexico over the course of a week, and then one final ragged day in L.A., when they were all “zombies,” in Stark’s words. She described the scene as a “misfits summer camp.” Because of the pandemic, extra safety measures made for longer days and they rarely spent time outside of the production sites.
“I think my favorite times were, like, the car rides home because we were completely delirious,” she said. “My trailer was the closest one, so we all would pile in there and listen to the same songs over and over again. And it just, like, got so weird around 4 a.m. that we were all telling the craziest stories and sharing clothes and sharing I don’t even know, it was just, it was like one big family.”
Playing Mya for a week was not such a massive departure for her; she wrote a poppy rock song, “A Pretty Place to Fall Apart,” to accompany the story and the character, and, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, she performs it in the series.
Otherwise, the obvious inspiration for bridging the actor-musician gap is closer for her than one might think. When asked how her family met Cher, she tells a very L.A. tale by way of demurring. “I think people just meet and they did, and we all fell in love with each other and she’s been in my life for as long as I can remember,” Stark said.
“She’s so good at being her,” she added, speaking of the ease with which Cher inspires. “She met me when I was a baby. She always said she fell in love with my eyes. And then, you know, we just all fell in love with each other. She’s been there ever since.”
It sounds like a credible story, especially when one remembers Moonstruck, which had a resurgence during the pandemic. In it, Cher plays a Brooklynite from an Italian family in love with her fiancé’s one-handed brother, played by Nicolas Cage. And her big, doleful eyes steal nearly every scene. “I can’t wait until she watches the show, but I sent her the trailer and she was so shocked by it.” And the eyes have it again.
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