If there’s any new artist in show business who’s been blessed with success, it’s Hailee Steinfeld.
As an actress, her first feature role — as Mattie Ross in the 2010 remake of “True Grit” with Jeff Bridges when she was just 14 — got her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
As a singer, her first single, 2015’s soaring pop hit “Love Myself,” sold platinum and has 150 million views on YouTube.
And now, for her first tour, Steinfeld is the supporting act for Meghan Trainor, one of the biggest new pop stars, whose debut album went double platinum and had four Top 15 hits that among them sold 15 million copies.
The tour comes to the Allentown Fairgrounds grandstand Saturday.
“I mean it’s crazy,” Steinfeld, who hasn’t hit her 20th birthday, says in a recent call from the tour in Chicago. “The opportunities that I get and have worked for that have come my way are absolutely insane. And I feel very, very lucky and blessed to have been given these opportunities.”
Of course, talent may have something to do with it. Steinfeld already has another single, the teen romance anthem “Starving” with DJs Zedd and Grey. Released July 22 to coincide with the tour — it already hit the Top 25 on the Mainstream Pop chart and was rising this week.
She has another movie, “Edge of Seventeen,” scheduled for release Sept. 18, that she says has “a very sort of classic John Hughes vibe to it,” referring to the 1980s director of teen classics such as “Sixteen Candles.”
But this summer Steinfeld is concentrating on music.
A California native, Steinfeld says she’s always loved acting and music, and intended to pursue both. But it was her acting career that took off first — landing her roles in television commercials and guest appearances on TV programs starting when she was 8.
Her breakthrough came when Steinfeld was chosen out of 15,000 girls for the “True Grit” role when she was 13. After that, she played Juliet in the 2013 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet.” She also had parts in the 2014 crime film “3 Days to Kill” and in last year’s “Pitch Perfect 2,” in which she sang.
“The acting just happened first, so it became the main priority and music sort of became more of a side project over the years,” Steinfeld says. “Until I had that movie ‘Pitch Perfect 2,’ which gave me the opportunity to perfectly, seamlessly segue into making music.”
Steinfeld says it was at an event after “Pitch Perfect 2” filming wrapped that she happened to be sitting next to Charlie Walk, executive vice president of Republic Records.
“We got to talking and I expressed my love and passion for music and making music,” she says. “And he, from that conversation, believed me — believed in me — and gave me the opportunity with signing me to the label to make an EP and to release music and to take it to the next level.”
That process started with the release of “Love Myself,” which Steinfeld co-wrote. With lyrics such as “I’m gonna put my body first/ And love me so hard till it hurts,” and a video in which Steinfeld wears a sexy body suit emblazoned with the phrase “Self Service,” the song has been widely interpreted to be a paean to masturbation.
Asked about that, Steinfeld is diplomatic. “I think like any art form, it’s up to the person watching, or in this case listening, to interpret it as they will,” she says.
“To me, the song is a self-empowerment anthem. And yes, it covers the fact that there is so much power in being able to provide for yourself — whether that be physically or emotionally or with material things. It’s a reminder of how much power there is in being able to love yourself and have that self-confidence and self-reassurance.”
Asked whether she knew the song was going to be so big, Steinfeld remembers being in her bedroom the night before its release, concerned about how it would be received.
“When you put something out that you worked so hard on and you’re very passionate about and excited about, you suddenly get this wave of, ‘Oh my God, it’s literally coming out within a matter of hours from now. Are people going to like it? Are people going to respond to it the way I did? I was sort of having all of these second thoughts,” she says.
“And it’s crazy, it’s nerve-wracking. And I definitely had this whole sort of night-before anxieties before releasing the song. And then seeing what it did, I could never in a million years have imagined it to do what it did.”
The rest of the EP has been a work in progress. It originally was released in November, but was re-released in February to replace the original solo version of the song “Rock Bottom,” with a remix featuring the group DNCE, which was hot after having its hit “Cake By the Ocean.” The remix became the second single from “Haiz” and also broke the Top 40 on the Pop chart.
And in July, “Haiz” was re-released a second time, this time to add the new single “Starving” as a bonus track.
Steinfeld says “Starving” is one of her favorite songs — partly because it paired her with the Grammy-winning Zedd.
“I’m a huge fan of his and been wanting to collaborate with him for some time, actually,” she says. “And we’ve been talking about it and going back and forth on it for a while. And he sent a message saying he had this track that he wanted me to hear. I did, obviously, everything to hear it as soon as I could.
Within a day, she says, she had signed on and Zedd introduced her to Grey, who had compiled the track and simply had to add her voice.
“It was one of the fastest experiences I’ve had,” she says. “It was really less than a week and that song was completed. Just in time for me to take on tour with me.”
The EP’s multiple releases simply represent the process of finding herself as a music artist, Steinfeld says.
“I think that you can always sort of have something in mind in terms of what you want to sound like or what you want to sound like or what you want your video to look like or what you want sort of the style of whatever it is you’re working on to be,” she says. “But things come together and … it might not always end up sort of what I initially thought.”
Joining the tour was a simple as Trainor reaching out to her, Steinfeld says.
“We met a while back and we have run in the same circles and we’ve talked about getting together and hanging out and getting to know each other,” Steinfeld says. “And when she reached out to me and said she was looking for somebody to go on tour with her, I was honored.”
She says that after the tour, she’ll head back home to Los Angeles to finish writing and recording her full-length debut album.
Before that, though, will be the release of “Edge of Seventeen.” Steinfeld says it’s the type of move that “I don’t think my generation has been exposed to much.
“It’s a very honest telling of being a teenager and growing up, and it’s a perfectly imperfect world that my character lives in.”
Steinfeld confirms she’s also on board for “Pitch Perfect 3,” which is in preproduction and now scheduled for release late next year.
“I think that every idea or expectation I’ve ever had in terms of the things, the projects that I’ve worked on, have always been exceeded,” she says. “And I owe a lot of that to the people I work on these projects with.”