Penny Debelle: Adelaide talent pool has what it takes to make it in Hollywood
THE amount of Adelaide talent currently taking over Hollywood is startling. And there’s a couple of names you may have never realised got their start here.
I’M not sure why but I get quite a thrill whenever an Adelaide person pops up in a film.
Clearly it’s nothing to do with me if Sarah Snook is in the same frame as Michael Fassbender but still …
She’s a gorgeous talent who was seriously chuffed on a recent visit to find her name scrawled among the graffiti at Scotch College, and now there she is in Steve Jobs, opening here early next year, playing Apple publicist Andrea Cunningham with Fassbender as the scarily obsessed designer genius.
She’s been everywhere this year (most recently on the ABC in the Sunday night miniseries The Beautiful Lie) and she’s only 28.
Then there’s our — note the proprietorial our — fearless director from Gawler, Justin Kurzel, who dared to take on Macbeth for a new generation, again working with Fassbender who must now know by osmosis where Adelaide is.
Kurzel’s is a beautiful and dramatic rendition that invites you to fall in love anew with the wisdom and wonder of Shakespeare. Oh, and his brother Jed did the music.
This after they both made the shocking but incredible and much-admired film about the serial killers who stored bodies in barrels at Snowtown.
They’re everywhere, this Adelaide talent. Xavier Samuel, a former Rostrevor boy who was cast in the Twilight vampire franchise was in a film the other day with Brad Pitt — “ I just shuffled some scenes along,” he says — and will play the poet Banjo Paterson in Banjo and Matilda.
In Melbourne on the set of A Beautiful Lie, his brother Benedict wandered by; he’s playing Sarah’s destructive love interest.
Then there’s the glowing Teresa Palmer with two big films coming up, a remake of the surf classic Point Break and a new Nicholas Sparks film, The Choice. She’s shooting in Australia at the moment in the World War II drama Hacksaw Ridge, directed by Mel Gibson.
I’m saving the best for last. Meet Bruna Papandrea, the girl from Elizabeth who grew up in a Housing Commission unit with her single mother, and who is a thriving Hollywood producer and feminist role model for the industry.
She got chatting at dinner with Reese Witherspoon about the paucity of good lead roles for women so they formed the company Pacific Standard whose biggest hit so far was the scary Gone Girl.
She has 19 projects in development including The Dry, based on a book by a Melbourne journalist about a policeman who returns to his hometown where a childhood friend died in a gruesome murder-suicide.
Awarded the Orry Kelly at the Australians in Film awards in LA in October, Papandrea mentioned Elizabeth in speech, making the point that anything was possible no matter where you were from.
Jason Clarke was my big surprise. I first encountered Jason in the opening moments of Zero Dark Thirty (it means half past midnight in spook talk) where he took time out from torturing a suspended prisoner to greet Jessica Chastain who was an intelligence analyst on the trail of Osama bin Laden.
Great movie, and he left an impression. He’s turned up a few times since, most recently as Rob Hall, the doomed New Zealand mountain climber who died on Everest. I thought his Kiwi accent was particularly seamless given the obvious struggle Keira Knightley as his wife, and Emma Watson who played the expedition’s den mother, were having. Turns out he’s from Padthaway, famous for its wines but for some reason not for Jason Clarke.
I’m not silly enough to think this proves anything, given the floods of young Australian actors like the Hemsworths and Joel Edgerton and Ryan Kwanten and Sam Worthington and Margot Robbie, all of whom have serious film careers.
But it does show that when it comes to the virtues LA producers love about Aussies in Hollywood — healthy, natural looks and a strong work ethic — Adelaide is proudly represented in the talent pool.
The other message might be that you don’t have to be a hot young actor in Hollywood to do well. You can follow Bruna’s path and join the big boys who produce.