Close-up: the system finds its new generation of stars
Who will be our next Cate Blanchett or Russell Crowe? There must be something in the water, as talented young Australians are taking over the stage and screen.
For the past 10 days, casting director Anousha Zarkesh has been combing through Kalgoorlie on the hunt for the next big thing. Zarkesh is casting a movie called Kid Snow, a period piece about a washed-up boxer – when are they ever anything but? – who is offered the chance for a rematch of the fight that got away. Shaka Cook, the First Nations actor stealing the show in the Australian production of Hamilton, is set to star.
Zarkesh believes Cook is our next great leading man – and anyone who has seen him on stage as Hamilton’s bold, brash, pants-tailoring Hercules Mulligan can attest to that. But Zarkesh is someone who really knows. The vice president of the Casting Guild of Australia has more than 25 years’ experience. She discovered Mia Wasikowska as a 15-year-old dancer and cast her in her first film. Unearthing Australian talent is what Zarkesh does. She remembers meeting a 17-year-old Heath Ledger and feeling the full weight of his star power. “He had enormous charisma, sexy to boot, vulnerability and sensitivity that oozed out of him,” Zarkesh recalls. “Something that transcended … ”
But what exactly does that mean? Fellow casting director and CGA president Thea Mcleod, who has cast talent incubator Neighbours for more than a decade, says transcendence is “that magic I can’t even explain. I could have 50 people come into the room and that one young girl will walk in, and I’ll go: ‘Oh my god’.”
It is an exciting time for Australian rising stars. There’s Kodi Smit-McPhee, an Oscar nominee at just 25 and star of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis with Olivia DeJonge, herself star of The Staircase with Odessa Young, another homegrown talent. There’s Mare of Easttown’s Angourie Rice. Zarkesh raves about the “authentic” Madeleine Madden, at the helm of The Wheel Of Time, and Milly Alcock, about to play the most crucial, proto-Daenerys role of a young Targaryen princess in the anticipated Game of Thrones spinoff. “There’s something about her,” Zarkesh says. “Something beyond her years – you can’t teach that.”
And there’s more. Markella Kavenagh, one of the lead roles in the splashy new Lord of the Rings series; and Toby Wallace, star of Babyteeth with Eliza Scanlen, whom Mcleod discovered when he was 14 and she was casting Underbelly. “You are going to be a star,” she thought. “I knew it instantly.” This month, Wallace headlines Danny Boyle’s scandalous Sex Pistols’ biopic.
Scanlen is another next-gen talent, who so seamlessly jumped ship from Home & Away to acting opposite Saoirse Ronan in Little Women it is as if Summer Bay were but a dream. There’s Geraldine Viswanathan, one of the most in-demand comedy actors right now; Ayesha Madon, taking centre stage in Netflix’s Heartbreak High; and Liv Hewson and Courtney Eaton, terrorising audiences in Yellowjackets.
Then there’s Wentworth’s Zoe Terakes; Barons’ Jillian Nguyen; Rahel Romahn, the recipient of this year’s Heath Ledger acting scholarship and his Here Out West co-star Arka Das – both just wrapped the mega big-budget adaptation of Shantaram.
“The casting directors in America are looking at Australian actors all the time,” says Zarkesh. Seeing many former nominees at the CGA’s Rising Star awards – including Wallace, Alcock and Young – break out on the global stage makes Mcleod feel like a “proud mum”. “That’s why we’re in this profession,” she says. “Discovering new, fresh talent. That discovery is so exciting.”
The first time Odessa Young was on a film set, she was 11. “I remember being a really arrogant little precocious bitch,” she says, laughing. “And I’m filled with shame about it to this day.” Young’s drama teacher had put her forward for ABC’s My Place, and she has “a very distinct memory of telling the actor who was playing my older sister – this actor was two years older than me and had worked before – ‘Oh, maybe you should do it like this’,” Young groans.
Still, acting felt natural. “It was so much fun, because it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life anyway,” she says. “I liked being good at it … I liked the feeling of getting the job in the first place; it’s a really nice way to feel validated. And I’d definitely be lying if I said that still wasn’t part of the reason I do it.”
Young, now 24, has been acting professionally longer than she has not. Director Ben Briand, who cast her at 13 in his short Blood Pulls a Gun, remembers “a maturity radiating off her. I always felt like she would do something exciting on camera because she’s coming from such an authentic place,” he says.
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This month, Young stars in Binge’s true crime thriller The Staircase with Colin Firth and the languid costume drama Mothering Sunday, with Firth again. He recently told Vogue Australia that Young “is one of the most level-headed, unfussy actors I’ve ever worked with, delivering remarkably convincing and powerful performances with no display of effort.” Young responds: “I adore that man, I really, really do. He has really taught me so much about grace, and I feel pretty incredibly lucky to have been able to work with him.”
For the past 13 years, film sets have been Young’s classroom, playground and home. And she likes it there, even if she finds herself gravitating to difficult, soul-baring work. “I’m not here to have fun,” she stresses. “I like to have a challenge.” And yet, during the pandemic she suffered from depression and almost quit. Then in February she came home for the first time since 2019, went straight to Frangos – her Australian accent becomes more pronounced when she talk about Portuguese chicken – saw her family, and reflected on why she does what she does. When Young returned to New York she saw a Broadway play and watched the film Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, which reminded her what a good actor in a great piece of art can do. “I am comfortable with my abilities to act,” she says. “So if I can commit to it, and take that path, and maybe allow someone to have a moving experience that makes them think about the insides of themselves, that’s a little step away from apathy.”
This is how Angourie Rice likes to work, and to live: periods of toiling away overseas – quarantining with Kate Winslet for Mare of Easttown, playing a young Rebel Wilson in Netflix’s Senior Year, starring with Jennifer Garner in an Apple TV+ series – before returning home to Melbourne. She’s been back for three weeks and she’s been having a lovely time. “I’ve just been seeing art – and it’s been the best!” she enthuses.
Film sets have been Odessa Young’s classroom, playground and home. And she likes it there, even if she finds herself gravitating to difficult, soul-baring work
Like Young, Rice started early, making her first short at six, her feature debut at 11, and at 15 sharing the screen with Ryan Gosling in The Nice Guys. She says she learns something from every role, but it’s her co-star in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, Kirsten Dunst, whose career she most wants to emulate: “I admire the career path she’s taken, especially because she started when she was so young,” Rice says. She hopes her future also involves a shift into producing, offering Margot Robbie as a role model. “I definitely have a desire for more control. I look up to those people who make that transition and build a business around it.”
It sounds apocryphal, but Arka Das was standing on Hollywood Boulevard when he got the call that changed his life. He had just been cast in Lion opposite Dev Patel – a levelling-up moment. Here Out West, the collaborative film about life in Western Sydney, was another. Das both wrote and starred in the movie, which became the word-of-mouth sensation at 2021’s Sydney Film Festival. “We were creating something that was so special but we didn’t really know it at the time,” he reflects.
Das will next be seen in two epic series, Bali 2002 and Shantaram. “I really wanted that job,” he admits. “I don’t do that often. When you’re an actor, you just do things and say, ‘yeah, we’ll see’, because you get jaded with how much rejection there is.” He spent three months in Bangkok making Shantaram, a career highlight, and is now working on the script for his debut feature about migrant workers in the restaurant industry. “It’s daunting and nerve wracking and there are deadlines,” Das says. But he’s excited. “It’s another challenge.”
At the beginning of their career, Zoe Terakes told a lie. “I said I wanted to be a director,” Terakes admits. “I thought it was less embarrassing for me to say that.” Terakes, who identifies as non-binary and trans, wasn’t sure if there was a space for them doing the thing they really loved to do: acting. “I love how playful it is,” Terakes says. “That’s something our job lets us get away with – mucking around and pretending it’s serious.” They started taking acting classes, were cast in Janet King while still in high school and then, in 2019, booked their first lead role in Wentworth. “Zoe is making history with what they can do,” raves Mcleod.
Recently, Terakes has been thinking about the future. “I’m torn between wanting to tell stories about trans people I could have watched at 17 that would have made my life very different and a f. klot easier to understand,” they explain. “But part of me just wants to get to be an actor and get to play the roles everyone who is just an actor gets to play, where their gender is not the punchline, or the point, or the entire character description.” Terakes wants the career of Timothée Chalamet – “everyone wants to be him, or do him, or have his career, or all three”. They want to do an intimate two-hander, a searing drama, a love story, “because everyone else gets to”.
Jillian Nguyen says “fate” led her to acting, but actually it was Tony Leung. She was doing film studies when she saw Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love and realised: This is it. I’m going to be an actor. But it would take years before revelation became reality.
Nguyen was born in a refugee camp, the miracle daughter of Vietnamese immigrants. “They sacrificed so much. They couldn’t follow their dreams,” she says. She hustled between acting classes and student films and waitressing, seven days a week, until she landed a small role in Justin Kurzel’s The True History of the Kelly Gang. “My first experience on a film set ever,” Nguyen says. “Can you imagine doing nothing your whole life and then you end up on Nicholas Hoult’s lap?” Returning to reality was a brutal awakening. “I lost my job because I was so depressed,” Nguyen recalls. “I was like, why am I not on a film set every day?”
It hasn’t been overnight success for Nguyen, even if it may seem that way with her roles in Clickbait, Barons and Loveland, in which she is, shockingly, the first Asian lead in an Australian film. “I’m a big believer in dreams, and my dreams did come true,” she says.
And now? “I want to keep working with my dream directors,” she says. “Bong Joon-ho: I’m here. I’m waiting. I’m ready.” Really, Nguyen wants to make work that matters. “I don’t care about money or fame or any of that stuff,” she says. “I just want to tell stories that inspire and empower other people. Especially people who look like me.”