Lovie Simone wants to get inside your head. “I’m interested in acting because of human behavior,” says the 22-year-old New York City native. “If I weren’t an actress, I’d probably do something in psychology.”

Lucky for us, she chose the former. Simone landed her big break, a role in the dramatic series Greenleaf, before she finished high school, and has gone on to star in a string of movies, including the 2020 dark comedy Selah and the Spades, in which she plays a boarding school senior who runs her clique like a teenage Vito Corleone, and The Craft: Legacy, a stylish sequel to the cult classic ’90s horror romp.

Next up for Simone—who sings, writes, and paints in addition to her work onscreen—is a leading role in Power Book III: Raising Kanan, a prequel to the hit Starz series Power. It’s a coming-of-age story that plays out in a gritty New York City criminal underground, and it allows her to indulge in a bit of armchair psychoanalysis. “I’m not acting for anyone else,” she says. “A big thing for me isn’t convincing other people but convincing myself that I am who I’m playing. Once I can do that, everything else feels easy.”

Simone is photographed in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood, where developer and design collective the Brooklyn Home Company partnered with New York’s esteemed French furniture dealers Maison Gerard and French California to outfit its new townhouse with the midcentury French design studio Guillerme et Chambron—the first retrospective of their furniture.