Passion for the Planet
Nathalie Kelley is an actor on a mission
Nathalie Kelley, styled by Laura Sophie Cox, in a Savannah Morrow dress from Wendy Foster Clothing Stores. Hair by Andre Gunn at Art Department, makeup by Gina Brooke. Shot on location at Twin Peaks Ranch/Turtle Conservancy in Ojai.
Written by Kelsey Mckinnon | Photographs by Sami Drasin
A few months ago actor Nathalie Kelley attended New York Fashion Week, but not to watch the latest collections go down the runway. Instead she went to ask stylish partygoers—tongue in cheek—what they will be wearing to the planet’s sixth mass extinction event (like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, except this one will have been caused by humans instead of an asteroid). “I’ve always been a provocative little shit-stirrer,” says Kelley, who turned the Q and A into an Instagram video for her 1.5 million followers. “I love creating tension. I live for discomfort.” Kelley’s mission isn’t just to raise awareness for environmental causes; it’s nothing short of changing the world. “I’m trying to take down the whole global capitalist system, baby,” she says. “Gonna set it on fire.”
Kelley attributes her passion for justice to her own origin story. She was born in Peru, where she and her mother, who is of Indigenous heritage, faced discrimination. “Even from birth, I was [aware of] a great injustice done against me and my mother. So I’ve been programmed against it and to sniff it out very quickly,” says Kelley, whose biological father, Leon Walger, the now-deceased Formula 1 race-car driver and “ladies’ man,” was not involved in her upbringing.
Kelley and her mother emigrated to Australia, where the actor was raised and attended the North Sydney School for Girls (Nicole Kidman’s alma mater). In 2005 she moved to Los Angeles for a role in an Aaron Spelling–backed pilot that never got picked up. But Kelley didn’t have to wait long for her big break, which came the following year, when she was cast as Neela in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Film and television roles ensued, with credits that include Cruel Intentions, The Vampire Diaries, Dynasty, and The Baker and the Beauty, which was the number-one show on Netflix when it was released in 2020.
“Kelley’s mission isn’t just to raise awareness for environmental causes; it’s nothing short of changing the world.”
Despite all this success, Kelley, now 38, says she’s “deeply depressed” about the kind of roles and stories coming out of Hollywood. In Dynasty, for example, she played Cristal Flores Carrington, a public-relations exec at an oil company who was engaged to her 50-something billionaire boss. “I’ve told my agents already, if [a script] serves the patriarchy and the current militarized globalized system, then just don’t send it my way,” she says.
Kelley’s work now is decidedly more purpose driven. She sits on the board of directors for both Kiss the Ground and the Fungi Foundation. She recently appeared in a parody show entitled Big Oil for Australian commerce and content company Riise, and she regularly collaborates with media company Earthrise on Instagram segments about everything from the hypocrisy of corporate greenwashing to global supply chains.
Kelley was eager to put some physical distance between herself and Hollywood, too. Drawn by the prospect of being surrounded by farmland, the legacy of the Chumash people, and likeminded friends and neighbors—like Eric Goode’s Twin Peaks ranch and Turtle Conservancy—Kelley decided to move to Ojai during the pandemic after visiting a friend in the area. The best part has been engaging in the local food movement. “My kitchen is my temple. I'll go to the farmers’ market and say hello to all the fruit and vegetables before I buy them. Then, when they get home, I welcome them with this yummy cleansing bath,” she says. “I’m really learning to build up a reverence with the food I eat.”
“I have the opposite trajectory of success of most people,” she says of her constant efforts to downsize.”
Kelley’s mindfulness practice begins the moment she wakes up. “You are going to laugh, but I pray to my water every morning and ask it to hydrate me. I bless all the water over the world, asking for it to be purified and free from contamination,” she says. To that end, Kelley has stopped dyeing her hair and opts for product-free beauty treatments, such as microblading. In 2020, alarmed at the pollution statistics from the fashion industry, she went a year without buying a new article of clothing, and now she only purchases items secondhand or from brands with highly transparent supply chains. “I have the opposite trajectory of success of most people,” she says of her constant efforts
to downsize.
This summer she plans to decamp to Mexico to join an agroforestry team aimed at rescuing an ancient crop-growing system developed by the Maya. “I’m ready to live it. I want to wake up every day and put in two good hours with a machete and go to bed with soil in my fingernails, exhausted from a hard, glorious day building forests,” says Kelley. She plans to use the opportunity to film a documentary called The Future Is a Forest to show how lessons from indigenous people are vital to human survival.
To honor her own indigenous heritage, Kelley recently changed her legal name to Iya Mallqui. Iya means “sky” in Ecuador’s Sapara language. (She was given the name on a trip to the Ecuadorian Amazon years ago.) Mallqui is her grandmother’s surname, which in Quechua, the indigenous Peruvian language, is the word for both “seedling” and “ancestor.” It refers to the way the Incas buried their ancestors like precious seeds that would be nourished by the ground and be reborn as a tree, shrub—or, perhaps in Kelley’s case, an entire forest. ●
