Seraphine
The meaning of this name is fiery. Seraphine is the birth name of Seri DeYoung - an actress who is also a writer, producer, photographer, cinematographer and director. Regarding the latter, two of her male inspirations are Denis Villenueve and Alfonso Cuaron. Two of Seri’s favourite directors are Nicolas Winding Refn and Paul Thomas Anderson. When it comes to cinematography, one of her mentors was Bill Pope. Seri worked with him on Frank Miller’s The Spirit (2008) where she was employed as the stand-in for Scarlett Johansson. Ironically, Seri DeYoung looks more like Naomi Watts. On The Spirit, Seri was credited as Seraphine DeYoung. Bill Pope had to have been reminded of the character Seraph from the first two sequels to The Matrix. As a screenwriter, one of Seri’s mentors was Mark Fergus - one of the four guys who were credited for the screenplay of Iron Man (2008).
Her IMDB page doesn’t reveal it but Seri DeYoung had a recurring role on a spin-off to The L Word called Generation Q. Seri was trained in Taekwondo, and she can also snowboard. If someone in Hollywood ever decides to do a gender-reversed reboot of xXx (2002), they could cast her and call it xXina (about an ex-con named Christina since X means Christ). You can see a little bit of Seri DeYoung’s TKD in a mini-pilot called Gringas (2011). She appeared in Steven Seagal’s The Keeper (2009) and an episode of Jean-Claude Van Johnson (2017). If Seri ever gets to have a main role in an action film, it could easily be the villain because she has been dying to play an antagonist after playing a criminal in a few episodes of S.W.A.T.
Seri DeYoung was raised in New Mexico, which is where Eric Stoltz used to live when he was in a relationship with Bridget Fonda. Seri appeared in an episode of Breaking Bad, which ironically Eric didn’t work on as either actor or director. With Los Angeles being so expensive to film, New Mexico is one of the more affordable places to shoot. New Mexico’s tax incentive program allowed Seri DeYoung to audition and work in the industry while she was still at school. Although she moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, Seri never put New Mexico well behind her. On September 28, 2024, that was where she married Otha Cole. He worked with her as a screenwriter and producer on a short film called Unfaithful! This brings to mind something else - Seri’s tweets about black people’s rights have more weight to them than the average white celebrity because of her interracial marriage.
In February 2025, Unfaithful! won Best Comedy Short at the Santa Fe Film Festival. One of Seri DeYoung’s earlier short films, Still Life, debuted at this festival on December 10, 2016. This had finished filming by Sunday, February 1, 2015 whereas post-production was complete by the end of August. Let’s get back to her Taekwondo training. Seri’s instructor was Denise Møller Farrell. You would think that Seri would have become a stuntwoman (double or not) or even a choreographer, but no. Having said that, there are more female choreographers in America than there were in Hong Kong. Then again, H.K. is even slower in another area. It took many decades for that industry to have a casting director as a credited profession. Seri’s cinematography mentor, Bill Pope, had worked with H.K. stunt professionals on The Matrix and its first two sequels. He also worked with H.K. maestro Dion Lam on Spider-Man 2 (2004). Like the Wachowskis, Sam Raimi is a big fan of H.K. cinema.
Over a dozen years ago, Seri DeYoung had performed stand-up at The Comedy Store and Laugh Factory as part of MTV’s Comedy Showcase. She only did it for fun, but that could have segued into other things had someone took her up on it. Here is a sample of herself in a sketch piece. In this decade, Seri had learned about on-set editing after reading interviews with Bong Joon Ho and his editor Yang Jin-mo. In an interview from a site that is no longer around, director James Gunn compared South Korean cinema to Hong Kong cinema in terms of the peerless mixing of genres. Much like the turn of the century, we are once again living in an era where contemporary Korean cinema has more relevance than contemporary Hong Kong cinema. The only difference is that K-pop wasn’t popular in the West two decades ago, but then neither was Cantopop. Back to Seri DeYoung, her first audition in 2016 was for a martial arts film but she didn’t specify what film this was.
Ironically, Seri wasn’t cast in Britt Sheflin’s Revenge of the Rising Sun. It was made in 2013 but released in 2020. This short film was edited by Devin Schiro: one of Seri’s regular collaborators - either as cinematographer or editor (both of these roles were performed by him for a 2013 film of hers called Daisy). Also, he has been her glamour photographer many times. Devin worked as a still photographer on her ex-boyfriend’s Four Winds (before 2013), and he worked as a colorist on Still Life (2015). In the case of Revenge of the Rising Sun, Devin worked with producer/writer Craig Greager on the color grading by using a 1980 Kung Fu movie as a reference i.e. Fists of Dragons (a.k.a. Cunning Kids). Unlike Seri DeYoung, director Britt Sheflin studied Wushu. Craig was one of the actors as well as Britt’s boyfriend.
A person’s Facebook fan-page or Twitter log helps provide info that otherwise wouldn’t be available on IMDB, especially regarding filming dates or even ADR dates. You wouldn’t know it from her IMDB page but Seri DeYoung participated as both producer and actress in Burning Kentucky. This was released in 2019 but it was first made in 2014 with different casting. In fact, casting began in the week prior to the below photo. Originally, Ronnie Gene Blevins played Rule, Dara Tiller played Jolene, Luke Loving played Arlo, and writer/director Bethany Brooke Anderson (below) played Millie. This would suggest that the original film was a proof of concept, which are usually shorts anyway. The second version was done in 2017.
The released version runs for an hour and a half. Speaking of having a significant other half, it’s a wonder that the aforementioned Eric Stoltz didn’t marry Bridget Fonda despite having acted in four of the same films - Singles (1992), Bodies, Rest & Motion (1993), Grace of my Heart (1996) and Mr. Jealousy (1997). As for Seri DeYoung, the aforementioned ex-boyfriend was Nick Brokaw. He had co-produced Daisy (which Seri wrote and directed). Nick worked as an assistant director on this, Still Life (2015), LA Stories (a 2014 short where Seri only acted) and In Touch (a 2014 short that had Seri in front and behind the camera).
Before that, Nick Brokaw wrote, directed and produced a short (Four Winds) where Seri worked as both actress and assistant camera operator from 2010 to 2011. As such, she participated in the promotion of it at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2013. Seri went there again in 2016 for Still Life. There is a pragmatic convenience that comes from casting yourself as well as your loved ones, as Seri noted in a May 2015 article for Pyragraph: “For my second short film, In Touch, I cast myself out of convenience. I didn’t want to pay an actress, or risk her flaking/rescheduling.”
Time for some tweets from Seri DeYoung…
Jan 15, 2020: No one on Breaking Bad actually knew what burqueños talk like. No shade, they really just didn’t know.
Mar 10, 2020: Last night I dreamed that a Starbucks barista was really mean to me and I complained and then they gave me a $60 gift card. This....this is the stunning narrative my white girl brain is spinning in my subconscious. Just, wow.
Mar 19, 2020: Really missing the days when I could greet my friends by licking them on the mouth. :(
Apr 22, 2020: I just emailed a production asking for footage for something I shot last year and they responded immediately and sent me a download link in under an hour. Honestly in this haphazard time a moment of pure efficiency is just so beautiful I could cry.
Jun 30, 2020: To the white woman I just saw with the fake poofy lips walking through a busy sidewalk wearing a tank top that says “spiritual gangster” and NO MASK: absolutely f*ck you.
Aug 10, 2020: All the men on Raya either look like American Psycho type murderers or like they do mountains of coke every weekend or some combination of the two.
Mar 7, 2021: Men will really screenshot the entire map of their run, a literal map to their home, and post it on the internet.
May 10, 2021: If Spike Jonze had written Her in 2021 they would have made him turn it into a quirky Hulu original series starring Paul Rudd and everyone would love it but it would be worse.
Aug 10, 2021: The difference between people in LA and people in San Diego is that people in LA are great at pretending that they’re really happy. Whereas people in SD are just actually happy.
Oct 29, 2021: Spotify cannot tell the difference between the music I listen to like for real and the music I listen to as a joke and that’s why AI will never take over.
Jan 23, 2022: I genuinely cannot imagine caring about anything as much as my neighbors care about football. They are screaming. Like is your best friend on the team? They’re so emotional I don’t understand.
Aug 6, 2022: I feel bad for people who grew up in LA. Most of y’all would have been the legit hottest and coolest kid in a smaller town, like you would have absolutely ruled your high school. But instead you were out here, bland and mediocre by LA standards. You could have been royalty.
Jun 7, 2023: Those first few episodes of Love Is Blind should be a podcast. Voice only. We shouldn’t get to see them either.
Nov 2, 2023: This strike is absolutely becoming my villain origin story.
Dec 3, 2023: I just started watching the first season of The Morning Show and while I LOVE it I am also horrified by the unrestrained use of facial CGI on the women. It’s distracting and hurts my soul low key.
May 10, 2024: I can always tell when a scene in a moving car is not actually filmed in a moving car and I hate it. Idc how much the tech has progressed, I can tell, sorry. You look like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Aug 16, 2024: As an Aries, I have never been demure for one second of my entire life.
Sep 19, 2024: I’m sorry but a lot of you don’t know how to wear a bucket hat. You look like a lampshade.
How you make an exit is just as important as how you make an entrance. In another life, Seri could have been a costume designer as evidenced by her Etsy page. She could also have been a journalist. In 2015, an article of hers for “Seed and Spark” was reposted on IndieWire whereas Seri had written several articles on Pyragraph - a currently defunct site.