INTERIOR – COMMANDER’S PALACE – MORNING
A woman in towering heels stands in front of Commander’s Palace. Her dress, a psychedelic dragon print, dares the morning traffic to look away.
We’re shooting a cover.
Oak trees offer shade, but the humidity laughs. It’s the kind of wet heat that melts makeup and fogs diamonds.
She twirls, then lifts an arm. This isn’t a woman posing. This is an actor commanding.
And she’s holding court in the street like she’s the one who paved it.
ACT ONE: WALKING THE LINE
Before Quentin Tarantino changed the course of her career, before she stole a scene from Leonardo DiCaprio, before the velvet gloves and the lights, camera, action …
There was a balance beam. Four inches wide, shellacked wood, not suede. Falling was part of the deal.
Laura Cayouette, fourteen years old, stands four feet off the ground in a leotard, arms stretched for balance.
“My whole childhood was performing and storytelling,” she tells me between bites of salad. “I didn’t know I was preparing to be a performer, but I was.”
Laura wasn’t chasing applause; she was studying stillness. Learning how to move with precision, how to fall and recover. How to keep her eyes forward even when the room tilts.
She grew up “too tall” for most boys. By freshman year she was already 5’8”, with movie-star posture, still growing toward just over 5’10”—and still not quite feeling she belonged.
“They thought I was confident,” she says. “But I was just surviving.”
She dated a boy from Uruguay. “He was loyal and saw me as beautiful before others did,” she says. At seventeen, she saved enough money to visit his family in South America. While there, she entered into an international beauty pageant in Uruguay, landing second place.
“The hardest part was giving TV interviews in Spanish,” she laughs.
Not her first rodeo.
By eleven, she’d already been interviewed on TV by Richard Sher and a young Oprah Winfrey, co-hosts of People Are Talking.
The beam of the spotlight flickered early, but it would be years before Laura followed it west.
Her path to Hollywood was an elaborate floor routine that stretched across the country. She began with an English degree at the University of Maryland, completed a master’s in creative writing at the University of South Alabama, and trained at the prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.
Then came the pull of Los Angeles.
The City of Angels didn’t open its arms; it cracked its knuckles. So Laura stretched out her own wings.
ACT TWO: STEALING THE SCENE
Turns out, L.A. doesn’t hand out auditions. It hands out aprons.
Laura did wait tables for three months, but not out of necessity. “So I could have some version of the experience everyone talked about as actors,” she says.
But her primary income came from private SAT tutoring and working for eight years tearing tickets at Universal Studios’ CityWalk, the largest movie theater in the world at the time.
“Matt Perry and his clique used to come all the time and involve me in their practical jokes on each other,” she says. She even tore tickets for screenings of her own movies—The Evening Star, Krippendorf’s Tribe, and Enemy of the State.
It was the kind of glamorous grit Los Angeles is known for: just enough flash to make you stay, and just enough grind to test your mettle.
Laura wasn’t there to orbit the dream. She was there to learn its gravity.
FLASHBACK – AMERICAN ACADEMY OF DRAMATIC ARTS – NEW YORK CITY
The building smells like ambition and disinfectant. Every day, Laura climbs the school’s grand staircase, passing class photos on the walls: Spencer Tracy. Lauren Bacall. But one photo holds her gaze.
Danny DeVito.
If you could do it, I can do it. Height doesn’t matter, Laura. Just be as good as Danny DeVito.
She studies with elite coaches, sitting in rooms where nerves hum louder than dialogue.
BACK TO SCENE
New York taught Laura her craft. Los Angeles tested it. And on set, she received her second education.
Shirley MacLaine.
“She stole the scene by clapping,” Laura says. “That’s it. She turned her no-lines background moment into an entire story and involved everyone around her–without adding one word.”
She pauses, forks a sliver of avocado, then adds, “It wasn’t about stealing focus. It was about shifting the energy. Emotionally. Invisibly. With impact.”
MAKE IT SO THEY CAN’T SLEEP
Early in her career, friend and mentor, Richard Dreyfuss, gave Laura a piece of advice that sounded impossible: Make it so they can’t sleep. Make it so they can't sleep at night figuring out how to put you in their movie.
The line landed like Zen.
The advice was regarding an audition for The Evening Star, the sequel to Terms of Endearment. She walked in to read for the role and gave casting director Jennifer Shull goosebumps. She left certain she’d booked it.
A month later, her agent called. She didn’t get the part; it went to Jennifer Grant, daughter of Cary Grant.
Minutes later, her commercial agents called: eight days in Paris with five-time César-winning director Bertrand Blier. Laura packed, flew to France, shot, and tried to enjoy the view. But the certainty nagged.
Back in Los Angeles, her agent phoned again. “You remember that movie you didn’t get?” she said. “The director couldn’t sleep. He wrote you a part.”
Laura landed a role in The Evening Star.
“I was twenty-five when I started studying and thirty-one when I got my first movie,” Laura says, “so I figured I had to be really good. Better than people who had been working since they were in diapers.”
Somewhere between the grind and the glimmer, Laura found her rhythm. Her big break came with Tony Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer’s Enemy of the State with Will Smith and Gene Hackman, and Hollywood soon vaulted her to the big leagues with For the Love of the Game opposite Kevin Costner.
THE SUPPORTING CAST
What sets Laura apart in her field?
Her presence. The way she stills a room without saying a word. Laura didn’t just land the parts; she stuck the landing. And somewhere along the way, she started keeping the world up at night with her understated talent.
Over the years, Laura has worked alongside leading actors, including Dick Van Dyke, Christoph Waltz, Christopher Lloyd, Ruth Buzzi, Malcolm McDowell, Woody Harrelson, Kate Bosworth, Matthew McConaughey, Scott Bakula, Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elizabeth Banks, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Arsenio Hall, Johnny Knoxville, Hayden Christensen, and Abigail Breslin, as well as a constellation of other Hollywood stars.
She’s worked with directors like Jake Schreier, Sam Raimi, Anthony Hemingway, and Martin Campbell, and made television appearances in True Detective, Queen Sugar, and Friends (Season Three, “The One with the Screamer” alongside Ben Stiller and Jon Favreau).
Quentin Tarantino worked with her on five movies, casting her in roles alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained and Michael Madsen in Kill Bill: Volume 2.
Tarantino collaborated with her on several additional projects. They produced Hell Ride together, with Laura playing Dani, a biker-bar owner. He also produced Daltry Calhoun, where she appeared alongside Johnny Knoxville and Elizabeth Banks. When Laura directed her award-winning first short, Intermission, starring Joanna Cassidy, Danica McKellar, and Julie Brown, Tarantino did more than lend her his guidance—he lent her his personal camera.
These weren’t just names on a call sheet. They were collaborators, confidants, and fellow pilgrims in the strange, shimmering world of film.
Sure, the inspiration from Danny DeVito, the golden clap from Shirley MacLaine, and the priceless advice from Richard Dreyfuss might have opened the door. But it was Laura’s quiet magnetism that kept her in the room.
“The biggest value of being an actor is that I get to walk a mile in everybody’s shoes," she says. "And if you judge it, you can’t play it. Acting asks you to look inside yourself to find everybody else. And you must dare to fail if you will ever succeed.”
ACT THREE: COMING HOME
Laura Cayouette never left Hollywood. But at some point, she did come home.
“I just thought, What am I doing in L.A.?” she says. “Everything I love is right here.”
Summer afternoons on the Tchefuncte River. Sunlight filtering through the Spanish moss. These experiences gave permission for something within Laura to exhale.
“We used to go knee-boarding or just drift along on the boat or pool noodles and inner tubes,” she says. “But it wasn’t just the river. It was the people. People in Louisiana value happiness. They value community. My family has been in this state since at least the 1700’s. If home is where the heart is, Louisiana has always been home.
She’d visit her Aunt Norma in Mandeville, the woman who taught her never to interrupt a compliment and to hold her head high. They’d sit on the porch in Beau Chêne, facing the golf course, calling out to neighbors by name.
“I have so many wonderful memories inside that house,” she says. “We were one of those loud Louisiana families that laughs a lot, and that house used to be filled with laughter.”
QUIET ON SET
Laura still takes roles, but these days she’s walking a different kind of beam—a higher one, stretched between doing and being.
Still determined and resilient as ever, Laura continues to overcome obstacles.
When she was forty-eight, she suffered a hip ailment that limited her flexibility. But instead of thinking, I'm going to do my best with my frozen hip, she declared, “I'm going to get my splits back by fifty.”
First came the right leg, then a full decade later, the left followed. “I got my left leg split back at sixty,” she grins.
Don’t believe it? Check her Instagram: @thelauracayouette.
Laura isn’t one to stop doing. One month she’s on the red carpet in Cannes, the next at a Saints game or a backyard crawfish boil. She writes screenplays, produces films, and pens essays about navigating the industry without losing your soul—or your accent.
“I think that if everybody on planet Earth took three acting classes, it would change the world. Because acting asks you to look inside yourself to find everybody else.”
Laura is also a member of the New Orleans Pussyfooters, an iconic women’s dance krewe. Composed of more than a hundred women over thirty, the nonprofit participates in over fifty events each year for fellow charities, and, with their signature Blush Ball, raised $62,300 this year to aid survivors of domestic violence.
These days, Laura is giving more oxygen to her inner philosopher, staying up late to write books like Know Small Parts: An Actor’s Guide to Turning Minutes into Moments and Moments into a Career, a title that doubles as autobiography.
She blogs. She coaches. She teaches. She hosts panels for actors who come not chasing fame, but truth.
“In this culture,” she says, “we really, really put a high value on youth. And I’m not entirely sure why. Because as you get older, you're going to see how ridiculous youth can be. I think most Americans, and certainly people in my industry, define success as fame, money, power. I define success as happiness. If I’m happy, that is the wealth. Happiness is in my control. And so I can choose to be successful all the time."
“Fame was never the goal,” she adds. “Freedom was.”
INTERIOR/EXTERIOR – COMMANDER’S PALACE – NOON
In just under two hours, Laura moves freely through Commander’s Palace, not like a guest, but like someone who remembers when the curtains were hung.
Black velvet and white gloves in the ballroom, flanked by marbled-gold mirrors. A burgundy polka-dotted ensemble rising like smoke up the staircase—chef’s kiss. From the second-story window, Laura lifts her arm to echo the curve of a live oak branch just beyond the glass.
“Sometimes you have to go out on a limb,” she says, a nod to Shirley MacLaine. “Because that’s where the fruit is.”
The final shot is across the street, against the plaster-smeared brick wall that backs up to Lafayette Cemetery No. 1.
Laura leans her back into it—as all of us must, eventually—her figure framed by vines and wild greenery that, somehow, found a way to bloom through even the smallest cracks.
THAT’S A WRAP
I circle another leaf of lettuce with my fork, suspecting I’ll never reach the bottom of the bowl.
When we started the interview, we were the only ones in the room. Five hours have passed. Now the place is full and all eyes are on Laura, who, somehow, unintentionally, has stolen the scene.
Because that’s what the movies are, in the end. A shared experience. A collective dream conjured in the dark, when the lights grow dim.
And Laura, a star still being born, keeps us suspended for just a moment longer.
Long enough to find our balance.
Long enough to stay on the beam.
Long enough to remember what we once believed… That dreams really can come true.
FADE OUT
Connect with Laura by visiting her website (lauracayouette.com), following her on Instagram (@thelauracayouette), and subscribing to her newsletters for insider tips on acting, writing, and enjoying New Orleans (laura-cayouette.ghost.io). Laura’s wardrobe for this photoshoot was provided by Trashy Diva Clothing (trashydiva.com).
“Commander’s Palace has the very best service and makes me feel like a valued neighbor and friend of the family every time I dine there.”