LOS ANGELES — Chase Sui Wonders has been named one of The Associated Press’ Breakthrough Entertainers of 2025, part of an annual list the news organization released earlier this month. The recognition follows a breakout year powered by her ambitious Quinn Hackett on Apple TV+’s “The Studio”, a role that put her Harvard-to-Hollywood pivot in the spotlight, Dec. 18, 2025.
In its year-end roundup — The Associated Press’ Breakthrough Entertainers of 2025 — the organization highlighted five performers whose work broke through in distinct ways across film, television and voice acting. Chase Sui Wonders joins Arden Cho, Owen Cooper, Tramell Tillman and Danny Ramirez on the list, a group tied less by genre than by a shared leap in visibility.
For Chase Sui Wonders, the timing is hard to separate from “The Studio,” a behind-the-scenes satire about a movie company chasing hits, celebrity approval and relevance. The series’ premise and core ensemble are spelled out on Apple TV+’s page for “The Studio”, which places Wonders among an executive-team cast led by Seth Rogen. AP reported that the show piled up 23 Emmy nominations and 13 wins in its debut season, an awards run that helped elevate Quinn from “supporting character” to scene-stealing engine. In the same AP interview, Wonders described the career jolt in plain terms: “The attention’s definitely weird, but can feel good,” she said.
Chase Sui Wonders leans into the Harvard-to-Hollywood pivot
In a recent AP profile of Chase Sui Wonders, she described arriving at Harvard with an early interest in astrophysics before turning back to filmmaking and graduating magna cum laude in film studies and production. The detour matters because it frames her career as a series of deliberate switches, not an overnight “discovered” narrative. AP also reported she nearly took a corporate job in Beijing after a discouraging stretch trying to break into the industry, then chose to give acting one more attempt — a decision that soon led to her role in the teen drama “Genera+ion,” and later to higher-profile projects such as “Bodies Bodies Bodies” and “The Studio.”
Older reporting shows how long that mix of discipline and comedy has been part of her orbit. A 2017 W Magazine profile introduced her as a Harvard student studying film production, writing for the Harvard Lampoon and playing on the school’s club hockey team — while also navigating the curiosity that comes with being fashion designer Anna Sui’s niece.
By 2021, she was already tying performance to image-making. In a Vanity Fair photo diary tied to HBO Max’s “Genera+ion”, she documented the set and talked about the “raw, fumbling honesty” of stories about adolescence. That sensibility still shows up in her “The Studio” work, where Quinn’s humor often reads as a defense mechanism — quick, pointed and always calibrated to the room.
The AP Breakthrough Entertainer honor is not a prediction so much as a snapshot of momentum. AP noted that Chase Sui Wonders’ 2025 also included the “I Know What You Did Last Summer” reboot, and that she has more projects lined up — including “I Want Your Sex,” the A24 thriller “October” and a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” reboot series — as “The Studio” moves toward a second season.
