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Her Ender's Game character, who goes into space to train for interplanetary warfare, may seem like the bigger stretch, but then again, Steinfeld knows what it's like to be far from home with much riding on her work. She says Juliet's emotions--true love and the high stakes that attend it--are ones she has yet to experience. After all, she's still a junior in high school, which she attends via an online homeschooling program. She's taking driver's ed. She lives at home in Los Angeles with her parents--her father Pete is a personal trainer, her mother Cheri an interior designer--and is close to her older brother, whose college graduation she attended instead of the Toronto Film Festival. Though she prefers hanging out and listening to music, she and her friends sometimes go to the Westfield Topanga mall. Her cheeks, both on and off camera, tend to glow baby-doll pink. This visit to MOMA was her first. (The piece that drew the giddiest enthusiasm: Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans.)
It's almost enough to convince you she's just an ordinary teenager who has had extraordinary luck, especially because she seems so aware of the rarity of her success. "I realize how fortunate I am to have found what I love so young," she says. "I've had some really incredible opportunities."
But of course normal teenagers aren't nominated for Oscars. And while there's no denying that her luck has been good--her former acting teacher, Cynthia Bain, recalls helping Steinfeld prep for a Nickelodeon pilot shortly before True Grit was cast; if the pilot had become a series, Steinfeld might not have been available for the movie--that luck has had little to do with what comes next.
Which is good news for Steinfeld, since there's no planning for luck. Those who have worked with her say she has assets that can be counted on, assets that will aid her shot at stardom. There's her training--Steinfeld's parents made her take a year of classes before allowing her to even try anything professional--and also a level of talent that Bain says was evident early on. Combine that with persistence and a good support system and you have what Bain calls the ingredients of a fruitful career.
Those qualities pay off on set. "She's very focused, very mature in her work, and I can see her simply going from strength to strength," says Ben Kingsley, who plays military commander Mazer Rackham in Ender's Game. "She's very well rooted in her craft. There's nothing woolly or peripheral about her."
"I think she has a natural awareness of what she needs to do in front of the camera," says Damian Lewis, who plays her father in Romeo and Juliet. "She's got that freshness and that immediacy, which is so exciting. You can see it in her eyes all through her performance as Juliet. There's a real light behind the eyes. That's going to stand her in very good stead for film acting."
Perhaps her talents will be applied toward other goals someday, since Steinfeld says she'd like to explore other sides of the movie business at some point. That part, however, is much hazier than the rest. "I tend to not go much further than planning my day out," she says. "The future is so unpredictable. I don't necessarily have a specific place I want to be or know where I'm going to be five years from now."