Australia’s newest ‘it’ girl Alycia Debnam-Carey rejects overnight success label: ‘Not for the faint-hearted’
She is one of the rising Australian stars in Hollywood but Alycia Debnam-Carey says it takes a lot to make it. Here, the Dior ambassador reveals how ‘blind naïveté’ played a part in her success.
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She loves to surf, recalls a childhood spent climbing the mango tree in her backyard and can’t wait to get her hands around a decent cup of coffee every time she comes back to Australia.
But anyone meeting Alycia Debnam-Carey for the first time might not be able to immediately place her as one of our own.
Her American drawl – the product of 13 years living in Los Angeles – is so on point that she struggled to revert to her native accent when she returned home to film The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart, the 2023 Prime Video series based on Australian author Holly Ringland’s best-selling novel.
“It took me a couple of weeks to feel normal in the cadence,” Debnam-Carey tells Stellar of playing the titular character opposite Sigourney Weaver, Asher Keddie and Leah Purcell.
“I felt ashamed, like, ‘What’s wrong with me? Have I forgotten my Australian roots?’”
It’s a fair question, given Debnam-Carey’s tenure in a pair of long-running TV series in the US. Now, after the enthusiastic response to The Lost Flowers Of Alice Hart – which received 12 AACTA Award nominations (it won the gong for Best Miniseries) and four nods at the Logies – Debnam-Carey is gearing up for the release of two high-profile projects that could further broaden her profile.
The first, It’s What’s Inside, is a genre-bending thriller that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and will likely appeal to fans of polarising 2023 movie Saltburn when it hits Netflix this week.
But it’s Apple Cider Vinegar, an upcoming series about fraudulent wellness influencer Belle Gibson, that will reveal Debnam-Carey’s versatility. After all, your familiarity with her TV work depends on your appetite for post-apocalyptic fare.
The genre is where she has made a name for herself by wading through mud and covered in blood, first on the action/thriller series The 100 and then on Fear The Walking Dead, part of the popular and sprawling undead TV franchise.
“Gore is not something I usually vibe with,” she once confessed, before going on to spend a combined 11 seasons on the two shows.
So you can understand why Debnam-Carey, 31, might bristle at being thought of as an overnight star. “We’re so accustomed to seeing the success stories of ‘Wow, they soared right through’, but for most actors it’s a real painstaking process,” she says on a Zoom call from LA, a few weeks after shooting her Stellar cover during a visit home to Sydney.
“People aren’t aware of how much strategy goes into everything and how much timing is involved … It’s definitely not a career for the faint-hearted.”
If Debnam-Carey’s deft portrayal of an Instagram influencer in the mystery-thriller-horror mash-up It’s What’s Inside expands her reach globally, it’s the Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar – dubbed “a true-ish story based on a lie” and due for release next February – that will chime with local audiences.
As she points out, anybody who watched Gibson’s startling 2015 interview on 60 Minutes, in which she was challenged by interviewer Tara Brown over her claims to have cured herself from cancer with natural remedies, is unlikely to have forgotten it.
“[That image] is etched into my brain,” Debnam-Carey reveals. “I remember at the time thinking, ‘What a wild story,’ and how captivating – although disturbing – it was.”
Filming in Melbourne allowed Debnam-Carey to work with Australian actor friends Aisha Dee and Tilda Cobham-Hervey, along with US star Kaitlyn Dever, who plays Gibson. Of the series, in which she portrays Milla, a wellness influencer, she explains, “It’s a difficult story to try and tell, something so macabre and so heartbreaking, but [then to] make it not just palatable but have an emotional core and understanding.”
There’s a combination of the prosaic and magical in Debnam-Carey’s own story. Raised in Western Sydney by Leone, a children’s television writer, and Jeff, a musician, she and younger brother Angus were familiar with a creative environment. But when Rachel Ward cast her at the age of eight to star in her 2003 short film Martha’s New Coat, she knew instantly that she wanted to act. “The world went into technicolour for me,” Debnam-Carey recalls.
“The light bulb had gone on and I knew my perspective was never going to be how it was before.
“I had always desired to be taken seriously, and I remember Rachel Ward being so generous. After that point, there was nothing else I wanted to do. I remember going back to school three weeks later and, like such an annoying idiot, being like, ‘I have had this profound experience and none of you will understand.’”
As a teenager, she bypassed going to drama school and undertaking training through local series such as Home And Away and Neighbours and instead took roles in short films. She then made the big move to Hollywood and signed with agent Gabriel Cohen, who also represents Margot Robbie. In 2013, she appeared on Next Stop Hollywood, a single-season, six-part ABC series that followed six young Australian actors trying to find their industry break during the frenzied pilot season.
While opening doors in the US may have been easier with Cohen on her side, chronicling her ambitions for the cameras to be aired back home was nonetheless a gutsy move.
“I was just like, ‘I want to go, I just want to do it’,” Debnam-Carey says. “There was probably some blind naïveté to it. But I got really lucky and it worked.”
By the end of the reality series’ run, she had been cast as the lead in 2014 horror movie The Devil’s Hand. Disaster film Into The Storm quickly followed, as did a role in a pilot for a series from filmmaking titan Ridley Scott. But when that pilot was dropped, Debnam-Carey faced the first real test in her nascent career.
With barely any work during her second year in Hollywood, she says, “I had $2000 in my bank account and I thought, I’m going to have to go home.”
Ultimately, that period taught her some useful lessons. “It’s a job that’s not a meritocracy,” she says of acting. “The nature of it is that it’s like a flood then a drought and you’ll be doubting yourself every time you’re not working. If you really want to be doing it, it’s about the passion for it. It’s also about having the resilience and tenacity to keep going.”
Holding her nerve has paid off. Eight years playing Alicia Clark on Fear The Walking Dead not only gave her security but also cemented her acting credentials and added a raft of talents to her skill set, including horse riding, boat driving and stunt and weapons training.
The trouble was, she wanted to grow and take risks with other types of roles. And for Debnam-Carey, that means rom-coms or period dramas. “I’ve always wanted to look over the green pastures like Keira Knightley and say something incredibly serious but profound,” she tells Stellar with a laugh.
Although she jokes that she may have to manifest the elusive romantic comedy by putting it on a vision board, she admits to having a penchant for mapping out her style inspirations: “I’ve been a fashion girlie for as long as I can remember. My entire youth was spent chopping up magazines and putting them in little scrapbooks and in my diary.”
While it’s common these days for young artists to align with a fashion house – a career landmark that can increase their clout and usher them into a certain echelon of celebrity, the kind whose visage moves products and furthers their influence beyond the screen – there was one problem. Her day job meant she was most often seen by the public only when covered in guts and grime. But Debnam-Carey is nothing if not strategic.
“I made this very consistent, very meticulous effort in my personal life to dress up and be glam and feel very feminine and enjoy my creativity through clothes,” she says.
Maria Grazia Chiuri, the first woman named creative director at Dior, was quietly taking notice. In 2022, when Debnam-Carey was back in Sydney, she was invited to a Dior event at the city’s glamorous Shell House.
“Little did I know that they’d already been watching me from the sidelines in secret,” she says, “so it was a really serendipitous moment.” A year later, she was tapped to be Dior’s inaugural Australian fashion ambassador and found herself attending her first Paris Fashion Week with the brand.
Debnam-Carey, who channelled the mood of “an actress on her day off” for Stellar’s shoot, adds that a chance to see Dior’s archive collection while in Paris made her appreciate the fashion industry beyond the obvious.
“I’m thinking of that scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep is Miranda Priestly and she’s dressing down Anne Hathaway’s character and she’s saying, ‘You picked out that lumpy blue sweater thinking this had nothing to do with you … But really, that’s a decision made by hundreds of thousands of people and it’s made so many dreams come true and directed so many creative avenues and opportunities.’ That’s what I’ve come to understand through working with Dior.”
The ambassadorship has also coincided with what Debnam-Carey dubs her “existential crisis”. When she turned 30 last year, she celebrated in Italy with friends, some from her school days. But turning 31 this year “completely up-ended me, knowing that women have their own obstacles that they’re forced to reckon with in an industry that values youth and these crazy societal expectations of beauty standards,” she reveals.
“I didn’t want to be funnelled into being this 20-something ingénue – and then that’s it.”
After a decade focused on building a career, she now has to consider where she belongs. Ideally, she’d love to split her time between the US and Australia, where she loves hanging out with her parents and Angus, who is in the Sydney-based retro-pop band Cosmic Spice. (She also confirms she’s in a relationship, but remains guarded on the details.)
Even though she can surf in California and enjoys gardening and cooking – she enthuses about making a heirloom tomato and peach salad – she still misses home. “Is it hard having my family [far] away?” she muses. “Being 31 is a new stage of my life, where it’s like, ‘OK, kids? What do you want? What does that look like?’ And I want my family around. I wish I had all the answers.”
On the back of Apple Cider Vinegar, Debnam-Carey says she would like to work on a feature film in Australia or collaborate with her idols – Cate Blanchett, Sofia Coppola, Greta Gerwig and “Margot, obviously”. But if there is anything she’s learnt since taking a chance on Hollywood, it’s the fruitlessness of trying to control the uncontrollable.
“I’ve always been a perfectionist, very ambitious, very driven and a little impatient,” she says. “I’m always like, ‘I’ll do whatever it takes.’
“But I also want to feel a sense of peace and calm in my own journey,” she adds with a sigh. “So I’m trying to lean into the philosophy that what will be mine is meant for me, and what will come to me is meant to be.”
See the full cover shoot with Alycia Debnam-Carey in the latest issue of Stellar. For more from Stellar, click here.
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