Chase Infiniti had a lot of nerves going into her role in “The Julia Set,” but it had more to do with the subject matter at hand than the acting challenge ahead of her. She’d been cast as a math prodigy while, by her admission, math was never her thing.
“I would not call myself a genius in any sense of anything,” Infiniti told Steve Pond at TheWrap’s studio at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. “I was telling my agent how nervous I was, because I was not good at math at school. That made me very anxious, because I was like, how am I going to portray somebody who’s very good at math if I can’t really do it myself.”
Her agent, Gersh’s Rhonda Price, found a way in.
“She told me, you have to just find something that you feel that you’re very talented at. Take acting, you’re passionate about it. Take that and bring it into Julia, and that’s the way she feels about mathematics,” Infiniti said. “So that was my cheat code.”
The coming-of-age film from Niki Byrne, in her feature debut, follows the “One Battle After Another” star as a college student who starts a relationship with her teacher’s assistant (“The Summer I Turned Pretty’s” Christopher Briney) as they’re preparing for a prestigious mathematics competition.
Gillian Anderson, Jason Isaacs and Nina Hoss round out the rest of the cast.
In his review for the film, TheWrap’s Chase Hutchinson wrote: “Even if you’ve appreciated Infiniti’s work prior, “The Julia Set” lets you fall in love with her talent all over again, particularly with her mastery of eye acting. Every time she stares, furrowing her brow at a worksheet placed before her or looking longingly at the TA, Pascal (Christopher Briney), who fires back reciprocal interest, you see that there’s a world of emotion waiting to be unleashed.”
Byrne said she found the idea for the film after taking a class in differential equations in 2018. She was curious to see if she still had the aptitude for math as an adult than she did as a kid. As it turns out, she did not.
But the class led her to a tutor, Nicholas Beshert, who became the film’s math consultant and introduced her to the Putnam exam.
“I was a big fan of the movie ‘Whiplash,’ and I think ‘Whiplash,’ structurally, from a script perspective, is really a sports film dressed in jazz,” Byrne said. “So I wanted to write a sports film dressed in math. That was the approach for this film.”
For Briney’s turn as the TA, he tapped into his competitive side to try to find a path towards empathy with his difficult character.
“I’m competitive, and I think when things are easy for other people, it is unfair because, like I’m working so hard. So much of his journey is just the feelings of inadequacy and the feelings of never being enough,” he said. “So I didn’t really spend any of the time we were filming thinking about how bad of a guy he was and how mean the things he said were because they’re his truths. It’s true to him that it’s unfair. It’s true to him that he should be better than he is.”
“The Julia Set” had its world premiere at TIFF on Friday.
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