Hi everyone and thank you for tuning in to the 437th episode of Awards Chatter, the Hollywood

Reporter's Awards Podcast, I'm the host Scott Feinberg, and my guest today is one of the

most promising young stars in Hollywood. She's a 21-year-old who was until recently known,

if at all, for playing one of the two leads on the Netflix sitcom Alexa and Katie, which

ran from 2018 through 2020, a recurring part on the CBS sitcom Young Sheldon during that same

time span, and the lead in the 2020 Indie run-hide fight. But then she was cast as Elsa Dutton,

the central character on and narrator of Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone prequel, 1883. And when

that 10 episode Paramount Plus Limited series began rolling out late last year, quickly becoming

a giant ratings hit, it immediately became apparent that a new star was on the scene. Isabel

May. Over the course of our conversation May, who bears a striking resemblance to Jennifer Lawrence,

another actress who got her start on a sitcom and then broke through in a make-up free part out

in the wild, reflected on her unexpected attraction to acting and what she learned from being thrown

right into the deep end with her first professional gig, how a couple of years later,

an audition for another Taylor Sheridan project did not result in her getting that part,

but led Sheridan to write the part of Elsa on 1883 specifically for her,

how she, a person who had never ridden a horse before, prepared for 1883,

and what she learned from the five months she spent shooting it in sweltering heat and freezing

cold out in the West, plus much more. And so without further ado, let's go to that conversation.

Isabel, thank you so much for doing the podcast, great to see you, meet you, and I understand this

as your first podcast. This is my first podcast, I'm so excited, I hope I do it right.

Hard to screw up, hard to screw up. On this one, we always go back to the very beginning at the

beginning and just if you can tell us where were you born and raised and what did your folks do for

...