I got to shoot a feature right before I started at USC. And then that film was supposed to take off at Sundance. It was at Berlin, and then there was all this drama and that careened off the tracks. I gave up acting, but I was like, “I don’t want to wait for someone to give me a job. I want to start writing movies and making movies and producing movies. I want to be the one making the decisions.” At USC, I had a mentor who’s a film director who is the reason why I got into boxing. He said, “You have a lot going on. Come by the gym.”

And I fell in love with boxing. Boxing is what got me into teaching and fitness. And then that brought Peloton, and now here we are.

There’s a performance aspect to leading these classes though it seems.

Totally. You have eight cameras, it’s live-streamed. The format with Peloton is more about entertainment, I would argue, than it is even about fitness at a certain point.

I’m very proud of the fact, if you were taking my classes, I’m very difficult but I love to build a playlist. I am obsessed with movie scores and Hans Zimmer and all that, and how to tell a story and have a really good fitness class. Particularly when you’re doing something as boring as cycling, you really need as much help as you can get to keep it interesting.

With Peloton, music licensing was really difficult. On my new app, I’m really proud of the fact we have commercial music. We have a streaming license. I custom curated all of these playlists, and I tell you what energy to go for the class.

But yeah, we did so many cool things. I did a Halloween episode. The whole narrative was that I secretly was the villain, and I was chasing after them at the very end. It’s worth a Razzie, but it’s very camp. I did the Kubrick stare, and then I was like, “Hereeee’s Kendall.” I think back on it and I’m like, fuck, that’s so cringe.” I did a whole episode about female heroes. We had the score from Wonder Woman. We had the score from Memoirs of a Geisha.

What types of movies and TV are you engaging with usually?

I binge everything. I’ve been back in my film noir era. I went back and watched Mulholland Drive. Hold on. I literally made a list. I knew that we were going to talk about this, and I get so bad when people ask me on the spot.

Are you on Letterboxd?

Okay, this is embarrassing. I did not know Letterboxd was a thing. Until everyone on Twitter was like, “What’s your Letterboxd, queen?” I don’t have one. But here’s my argument: I’m on social media so much, I just can’t do another thing.

That’s fair.

But I do log my favorite movies in a notebook. I’m old school. I write about what I thought about it, how I felt about it.

So you have a manual Letterboxd, basically.

Yeah, I have the analog version of Letterboxd. I don’t need to make more content for public consumption. Your girl’s tired.

Do you have a favorite four off top? That’s the key Letterboxd feature.

I’m going to go for my favorite four feel-good movies, what I always put on. Some of it’s embarrassing, some of it’s good. Some Like It Hot is always my favorite little silly, playful go-to, whenever I’m in a bad mood. Rear Window. If I’m missing Los Angeles, I will watch Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, because so many of the locations are spots that I grew up in. I mean, Raising Arizona I love, which is weird and different. True Romance.

Classic. One of the things I really love about living in LA is all the classic theaters and all the repertory screenings. I saw True Romance not too long ago, Shadow of a Doubt at the Egyptian…

New Beverly had a midnight screening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but we were flying out at 6:00 AM the next morning. I was like, “Fuck.” I would so go to see it in a theater setting. I love that you brought that up. Have you done the cemetery screenings at Hollywood Forever?

Not yet.

I did that in October. There’s this Italian restaurant across the way that you can get a picnic basket from, then you get a little bottle of wine. The Hollywood Forever screenings are an all-time favorite. It’s such a vibe, and it’s not creepy. One thing I would love is for drive-in movies to come back. Wouldn’t that be cool? Whenever I go back to LA, I go through Hollywood and it’s like, Netflix bought everything. It was never like this, and look, it’s cool, they have a lot of money, they do a lot of cool work, I’m not going to lie—it’d be cool to end up on a Netflix show one day, or to have a show on Netflix, we all would love that. But there’s so much movie magic and old history, especially in downtown LA and those old theaters. I always wanted to redo one of those and make it a community center or a theater. You don’t get that energy like you used to anymore.

Well, you did say you felt like we were approaching a golden age earlier. Why do you feel that way?

Well, usually in times of crisis, cinema is a thing that brings us together. They say that every 100 years things repeat themselves. Back then it was the stock market crash, we have this huge surge into technology and AI. We have so much corruption and instability around us. We feel so lost and overwhelmed, but hyper-connected, but also super disconnected, to me. And the hopeful stance is “Oh my gosh, this is a time when the arts comes in.” And protecting being human is going to be even more important in the next five, seven years in particular with AI.