In December 2010, fourteen-year-old Hailee Steinfeld — Thousand Oaks resident, newcomer star of the Coen brothers’ True Grit — was the awards-season story everyone in LA media was writing about. The FishbowlLA framing placed her in a small lineage: Keisha Castle-Hughes in 2003, Ellen Page in 2007, and now Steinfeld out of LA’s own backyard.
Then
The Coens’ True Grit opened Christmas Day 2010 and made Steinfeld the breakout of the cycle. Amy Kaufman’s LA Times profile piece — published the prior day — captured the precocious-and-grounded mix that the awards-season press kept gravitating toward. The film paired Steinfeld with Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin; Bridges had publicly praised her preparation; the studio campaign was building toward Best Supporting Actress nominations at the SAG Awards and the Academy Awards.
The original FishbowlLA framing was admiring without overselling. Horgan placed Steinfeld in a recognized career-launching slot — fourteen-year-old foreign-or-newcomer actress, awards-season ascent, the kind of cultural moment that previous cycles had produced for Keisha Castle-Hughes (Whale Rider, 2003) and Ellen Page (Juno, 2007).
What separated Steinfeld from the prior comparators was geographic: she was local. The LA media coverage of a Thousand Oaks teenager landing in the Coens’ western was unusually invested.
Now
Steinfeld did get the Best Supporting Actress nomination at the 2011 Academy Awards. She lost to Melissa Leo (The Fighter) but the awards-season profile launched a career that has, fifteen years on, gone in more directions than the 2010 framing predicted.
Her subsequent film slate has been substantial — Begin Again, the Pitch Perfect franchise (which made her a streaming-era recognizable lead), The Edge of Seventeen (2016), Bumblebee (2018) anchoring a Transformers spin-off, and the Marvel franchise role as Kate Bishop in Hawkeye on Disney+ and the subsequent Marvels feature. Her TV work has included the Apple TV+ Emily Dickinson series Dickinson (2019-2021), which earned strong critical reception.
She has also built a substantial music career on the side — multiple top-40 singles, several albums, and a documented presence on the pop-music side of the entertainment business that the 2010 acting trajectory did not anticipate.
The Keisha Castle-Hughes / Ellen Page comparison Horgan made in 2010 has proved durable in some respects (Page went on to a long-running TV career with The Umbrella Academy and continued film work; Castle-Hughes continued with Game of Thrones and other projects) but Steinfeld’s specific trajectory — film, then franchise, then music, then Marvel — has been broader than the comparators predicted.
The Thousand Oaks-as-LA-suburb framing the 2010 piece leaned into has aged in its own way; Steinfeld is now LA-resident in ways that the original framing’s local-girl-makes-good lede wasn’t fully anticipating. The 2010 piece reads now as an early-career capture of a continuing arc.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: December 2010 snapshot