NEW YORK, NY.- Jaime King had been feeling that something was off. “There’s this strange, volatile energy,” the actress, director and model said on a recent Saturday. She perched on the hearth of a fireplace at her home in Los Angeles, knees to her chest, gaze flitting between the fire and the view beyond a sliding-glass door. “If I’m not looking at you, it’s because I’m listening,” she said to a reporter.
“I was nervous earlier, and then I was like, shaky, and then I was like, whoa, what is this vibration?”
The premiere of her latest film, “Lights Out,” in which she plays a morally corrupt police officer, might have had something to do with her apprehension. King, a self-described introvert, was about to embark on a promotional blitz that would take her from the hillsides of Hollywood to the scrum of New York.
“Socially speaking, I don’t really go a lot of places,” she said. “Once in a blue moon, I’ll go to the Bungalows,” meaning San Vicente Bungalows, the members-only club that has replaced the Soho House as LA’s premier venue for people of means. Besides that, “I’ve been keeping my circle very tight.”
As a teenage model for labels like Christian Dior and Chanel, King, now 44, graced the covers of magazines, including a 1996 cover story for The New York Times Magazine called “James Is a Girl,” by Jennifer Egan and photographed by Nan Goldin.
From there, she starred in increasingly dark movies (consider “Happy Campers” from 2001 versus “The Resurrection of Charles Manson” from 2023). Behind the scenes, she embarked on a spiritual journey brought on by her own drug use and the 1997 fatal overdose of her boyfriend, photographer Davide Sorrenti at age 20 — “the love of my life,” said King, who was 17 at the time.
The ensuing critique of the prevalence of drugs in the fashion industry and “heroin chic” (even President Bill Clinton decried it) made her spiral. “I was like, if there’s a God, tell me,” she said, using an expletive. “If not, take me out.”
The following year, she found a book, “Spiritual Warrior,” by John-Roger. “I opened it up like the ultimate skeptic,” she said, but John-Roger’s tips for incorporating practices like meditation and Sanskrit chanting into everyday life resonated with her. “It helped my young mind and heart,” she said. “Now I’m just following that path.”
Along the way, she studied at the Peace Theological Seminary & College of Philosophy, founded by John-Roger in Los Angeles. She also found fellow travelers. Shortly after noon, one arrived at her front door: Angie Banicki, a former publicist for Blackberry and Grey Goose who is now a tarot card reader to such clients as Usher, Rachel Zoe and Snapchat.
“I am so happy to see your face,” King said, wrapping Banicki in a tight embrace. They had last seen each other in March 2020, over Zoom. “I had to make a very serious decision to leave a personal situation,” King said. “Angie helped me.” (In May of that year, King filed for divorce after 13 years of marriage to director Kyle Newman.)
“We first met in our previous lives,” Banicki said, when she invited King on a trip to the Bahamas she had organized on behalf of a luxury resort.
Banicki and King pushed aside an ottoman and sat cross-legged on a nubby gold carpet. Banicki shuffled a deck of cards and spread them out, face down. Tupac Shakur’s “Do for Love” tinkled through the speaker of her iPhone.
“Because of the Taurus, you really cleared the last three years,” Banicki began, flipping over some cards. “You won’t go through that again for another 18 years.”
King said she hoped not.
“This is your magic year,” Banicki continued. “This is the year of manifesting. Your thoughts are becoming things.”
“Something is shifting in my consciousness,” King said. “I don’t know exactly what that is yet. There’s just so much junk in the world, whether it’s billboards or consumerism or parenting paradigms.” (King has two sons, ages 8 and 10.)
King, who is directing a feature called “Kill Me Now” and writing a film, “Precipice,” prefers to communicate through her work, and through activism. She was arrested, she said, during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020. “I don’t care what trouble I get into.”
“This card is about using your voice,” Banicki said, tapping one of the cards she’d turned over. Two remained face down. “Where do you want to go from here?”
King double-tapped one. Banicki flipped it and parsed its meaning: “The greater your sensitivity, the more acutely you will feel the presence of helpful influences in your life.”
King nodded. “How do you feel right now?” she asked, leaning into Banicki.
“So good,” Banicki said. “I’m used to doing readings where I have to bring the other person into it. But I came in, and the portal was open.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
