Listed: Seven of the greatest SA exports making waves overseas
After years of hard work, this South Australian has just landed one of the biggest jobs in the States as he tells SA Weekend that his journey to the top wasn’t initially smooth.
SA Weekend
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South Australia has long been a breeding ground for exceptional talent, infiltrating industries around the world.
And while some are well known, like our celebrated actor Sarah Snook or top singer The Kid LAROI, many fly under the radar.
SA Weekend wanted to list the top rising stars currently shining on the world stage. Let’s go …
Artistic director
REMI WORTMEYER
After a multi-month search among elite international dancers and choreographers, a once bullied, ballet-mad boy from Glenelg is the new artistic director of America’s BalletMet.
Remi Wortmeyer will join the company, based in Columbus, Ohio, in early September, leaving the Netherlands where he has worked for the past 14 years as principal dancer, choreographer, costume designer and teacher with the Dutch National Ballet.
Speaking from The Hague, Wortmeyer laughs now but growing up in Adelaide he changed school multiple times because he was bullied for being a ballet boy. Starting at Seaview Downs, he went to Goodwood Primary School – which he liked – then Adelaide High School and Charles Campbell College, followed by home schooling.
“School wasn’t the best place for me,” Wortmeyer says.
He was bullied for loving ballet and because as a child he modelled with Tanya Powell modelling agency and did fashion parades.
Still, he says, things could have been worse.
“It wasn’t like the stories I’ve been hearing now … because with social media, children never have a moment’s rest,” he says. “But it wasn’t great. And funnily enough, it wasn’t the boys, it was the girls.”
He excludes from the bullying his years at Goodwood Primary School and Charles Campbell College, and his time with Terry Simpson Studios in Gay’s Arcade. He cannot praise Simpson enough as an incredible person, mentor and dance teacher who treated all of her students equally.
“That was great; ballet was always the refuge and the students who went to ballet were always so great – it was just a safe space for me,” Wortmeyer says. “I know that ballet gets a really bad rap but for me it was a safe haven.”
Wortmeyer went to his first ballet class, incredibly, aged 2½, after his mother, a callisthenics champion, saw him doing moves in front of the TV.
“I wouldn’t say that I was a rising star at 2½ years old but I did learn good feet and bad feet,” he laughs.
Wortmeyer left Adelaide to finish his schooling at the Australian Ballet School in Melbourne – just ahead of Adelaide’s Hugh Sheridan who he already knew from Terry Simpson Studios – and graduated as dux before joining the Australian Ballet Company and later spending time at the American Ballet Theatre.
“Going to New York really did open my eyes because growing up you hear of the (London) Royal Ballet such a lot and a career in England was in my head,” he says. “But when I went to New York I realised there was a much bigger world than just Australia and England. It was really invigorating and I got the travel bug.”
In more than a decade at the Dutch National Ballet, which he says has one of the best repertoires in the world, Wortmeyer danced and became a costume designer and choreographer, completing his first full-length ballet, Picasso’s Ballerina, about Picasso’s wife Olga who danced with Ballet Russe.
He and his husband, Perth writer and director Malcolm Rock, who he met at the Spiegeltent in Melbourne, will now move to Columbus, a college town in Ohio with a dance-loving audience and a history of embracing new works alongside classics.
He will create new full-length ballets along with one-act pieces and he wants to tour the company more internationally, including potentially to Australia. “Let’s get that idea out there,” he says.
Columbus is the fastest-growing capital city in America and Wortmeyer – who still visits nieces and nephews in Adelaide and his father in Wayville – is excited to be part of a growing community with a strong cultural base.
“As an Australian, and a creative from Europe, I think that the beautiful thing about America is there is so much possibility and people are excited about that,” he says.
Film composer
JED KURZEL
Kurzel, who grew up in Adelaide’s north and went to Pembroke School, graduated in 1992 and became a musician where he was best known as the frontman and songwriter for the Sydney blues duo The Mess Hall, releasing four albums and winning the 2007 Australian Music Prize.
Kurzel’s film break came in collaboration with his brother, director Justin Kurzel, who asked Jed to create the music for Snowtown, the bleak film about the making of serial killers, that brought them both international attention, and won Jed Feature Film Score of the Year at the 2011 Australian Screen Awards.
Jed collaborated again with Justin on Macbeth, creating an original soundscape that mixed traditional Scottish music with haunting percussion and synthesiser effects.
He also worked with Justin on Nitram (2021), about the psychopathic Hobart mass murderer, and True History of the Kelly Gang (2019) which was nominated for Best Original Score at the 2020 AACTA Awards.
In his most recent screen score he collaborated with Hollywood actor Dev Patel, who both directed and starred in the stylish ultraviolent revenge drama Monkey Man (2024), which was overlaid with Hindu myths.
Kurzel also provided the music for last year’s supernatural horror film starring Russell Crowe, The Pope’s Exorcist, about a boy in Spain apparently possessed by the devil.
Talking recently about his formative experiences in Adelaide, Kurzel says he remembers when he was young watching an Italian horror film on SBS, Who Saw Her Die? which was scored by Ennio Morricone.
“The music was unbelievable. I was just a kid,” he says.
“It was the first time I kind of realised how important music was to film but also what it could actually do. It was a kind of creeping horror … an uneasiness in the music. I remember that being a big moment.”
Actor
JASON CLARKE
You know the face, you just never knew he was from Adelaide. Jason Clarke’s most recent major role was in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, playing the hostile security prosecutor Roger Rob, whose job was to discredit scientist and father of the atom bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy).
Clarke was born in Queensland but moved with his family when he was young – his father was a shearer – to Padthaway in South Australia’s southeast where he went to school until year 8.
“We lived in one of those idyllic little country towns where we knew everybody, the great outdoors, and a very sporting community with a tennis club and a football club,” Clarke has said. He went to the University of Adelaide to study economics and law but left to take up acting at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne.
In 2002, Clarke went through the Aussie actors’ rite of passage doing six episodes of Home and Away, playing Christopher “Kick” Johnson, an unconventional teacher.
After finding steady work in US television, his breakout role came in Kathryn Bigelow’s award-winning Zero Dark Thirty (2012), about the investigation leading to the storming of the compound by Navy SEALS who killed Osama bin Laden. Clarke’s CIA intelligence officer was big, tough, genial and lethal as he went about torturing prisoners for information, acting alongside Jessica Chastain.
Now 54, with a French wife and two children, Clarke’s list of films includes Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), Everest (2015), Chappaquiddick (2017) and the TV miniseries Catherine the Great (2019) with Helen Mirren.
Film Design
FIONA CROMBIE
Crombie is at the top of her field as an in-demand designer for major films, winning a BAFTA and an Oscar nomination for her work on the quirky Yorgos Lanthimos film about Queen Anne, The Favourite (2018). Crombie, who has won 17 awards, was born in Sydney but moved with her filmmaker parents to Adelaide where she was a student at Pembroke School.
After a year at the University of Adelaide, she enrolled at NIDA and her first job on film was working on the internationally acclaimed Snowtown, directed by her friend from Pembroke Justin Kurzel, about the dysfunctional lives of people in Adelaide’s north which bred the bodies-in-the-barrels serial killers.
Crombie collaborated with him again on the Hollywood film, Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender, where she had to recreate the atmosphere of 11th century Scotland.
For The Favourite, about a queen (Olivia Colman) who was ill and isolated, she created a palace filled with large spaces, minimal furnishings and huge expanses of cold wooden floors.
The Favourite led to more Hollywood-backed films including Disney’s Cruella (2021) and the angst-ridden psychodrama Beau is Afraid (2023) starring Joaquin Phoenix.
She also worked with director Benedict Andrews, also from Adelaide, on his film Una, and on the TV series Top of the Lake.
Crombie most recently led design on the upcoming sci-fi film Mickey 17, due out next year, starring Robert Pattinson, and directed by South Korea’s Bong Joon Ho, who won multiple Oscars for his 2019 film Parasite.
Talent manager and co-founder, Ergot
EMMA MANNSWIRTH
After living abroad for a decade, Mannswirth says the first question Adelaideans ask each other when they meet overseas is: “Where did you go to school?”
“Obviously it’s a reference point but I still find it amusing,” she says. For the record, Mannswirth went to Loreto College and studied maths and physics, hoping to become an automotive engineer. But after completing a marketing degree at Uni SA, an internship in Sydney led to a job at a fashion agency.
Three years later she moved to New York to become creative strategist at an architecture and design agency. From there, she worked with a buzzy marketing agency managing big-name brands, including McDonald’s, Roxy, Pernod Ricard and General Motors, and experiencing some magic “only in New York” moments.
“A memorable one was belting out Wonderwall by Oasis with the Olsen twins at Rihanna’s Met Gala after-party,” Mannswirth says. “I remember thinking, ‘How the hell am I getting paid for this?’” she says.
Two years ago, Mannswirth felt she had solid enough roots in entertainment and culture to go out on her own, forming talent management and creative agency Ergot with business partner Thea Gulbrandsen who had a similar background in music and entertainment, luxury and fashion.
“We represent a curated roster of individuals who are shaping culture within their respective industries, which includes art, sustainability, entertainment, sport, fashion and entrepreneurship,” Mannswirth says.
While the pandemic years were tough in New York, she says she stayed for the love of a dog. “It was a wild, crazy time but New York really banded together, we had each other’s back,” she says. “I couldn’t leave my dog not knowing when I’d get back to him, so Australia wasn’t really an option.”
Her parents are still here and she visits annually but her roots are in New York. “It’s hectic but that suits me. I still have a lot to accomplish but it’s a very fun ride,” she says.
While New York seems like a big city, Mannswirth says there are parallels with Adelaide in walking out the front door and almost certainly bumping into somebody you know.
“You have your neighbourhood spots, people know you and there’s always something new to explore,” she says. “Ducking into a gallery to discover a new artist or seeing a jazz legend play on a Tuesday night in a small bar will never get old for me.”
Dancer and choreographer
NICOLA WILLS
After a stint with Ballet Dortmund in Germany, Wills joined Opera Ballet Vlaanderen (Flanders) and is in her 12th year with Belgium’s national dance company, based in Antwerp. She says it took a lot of big disappointments as a teenager, along with resilience and dedication, to follow the dream to dance professionally that began when she was three at the Barbara Jayne Dance Centre. She continued dancing as a student at Annesley College and studied with Terry Simpson Studios before undertaking a two-year trainee program with Queensland Ballet.
Following that, Wills went on a six-week audition tour of Europe, trying out for 14 different companies and winning a short-term contract in Germany. “Mid-season Opera Ballet Vlaanderen held an audition and I got the job, so I moved to Antwerp for a more stable position,” she says.
Wills has danced with them as a soloist and worked with inspirational choreographers who helped develop her to the point where next year she will branch out on her own as a freelance choreographer.
In her time with them, Opera Ballet Vlaanderen has transitioned from doing at least one full-length classical ballet a year to a fully modern dance company, which has given Wills experience across different styles of dance. She says Antwerp is a hidden cultural gem in Europe, filled with amazing fashion, art, food and festivals.
“After living here for while, and immersing myself in the culture, I’ve come to love that small-city, metropolitan vibe,” Wills says.
She returns to Adelaide to visit family and friends, although not as much as she would like, and is looking forward next year to creating her first work in Australia for Queensland Ballet. “It will be an exciting homecoming for me.”
Her choreography has a strong ballet base with contemporary elements and she likes to explore social and emotional themes that provoke an emotional reaction from the audience. Wills’ work has been performed in Belgium, Germany, London, Italy, Spain and the US.
Film and stage director:
BENEDICT ANDREWS
Andrews has lived outside Australia for almost two decades and, after working in Berlin at the famous Schaubuhne, he moved to Reykjavik in Iceland where he lives with his wife, choreographer Margret Bjarnadottir.
Andrews made a brief return to Adelaide in 2016 to receive an honorary PhD from his old drama school, Flinders University.
“All those years ago when I was catching the 719 bus up the hill to Flinders, I would never have imagined that one day I’d be living in Reykjavik,” he says.
Primarily a stage director, Andrews directed two films, one of them, Una, about hidden child abuse, starred Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn and Rooney Mara.
Andrews – who started out working in Adelaide with State Theatre – directed UK actor Sienna Miller in a West End season of the Tennessee Williams play A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2017.
He also directs opera internationally and has worked in Berlin with Komische Oper and the Dutch National Opera in a revival of La Boheme.
In 2019, Andrews returned to film, directing Kristen Stewart in Seberg, the tragic story of the actor Jean Seberg who was targeted by the CIA for her political beliefs.
Andrews is regarded internationally as one of the leading interpreters of Chekhov and earlier this year staged The Cherry Orchard in London’s West End, starring German actor
Nina Hoss.
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