Rising star Eliza Scanlen leaps behind the camera

Few would have suspected that the mesmerising young ­actress with the deep Missouri ­accent was Australian.

Actress Eliza Scanlen back home in Sydney. Picture: Jane Dempster

Few would have suspected that the mesmerising young ­actress with the deep Missouri ­accent was Australian.

Eliza Scanlen, playing the unsettling­, uninhibited Amma in the Emmy-nominated thriller Sharp Objects, more than held her own against co-stars with serious acting chops, Amy Adams and Patricia­ Clarkson.

More recently, Scanlen morphed­ into quiet, fragile Beth, the pianist and optimist of Greta Gerwig’s largely adored reimagining of Little Women.

“I liked her face right away,” Gerwig said of Scanlen in an ­interview with Vogue Australia. “It’s open and available but it keeps changing: she can look innocent and then evil and then old-fashioned and then modern and then seductive and back again in an ­instant.

“And then, of course, she’s also just a knockout as an actor.”

But if “chameleonic” is one Hollywood cliche that could apply to the 21-year-old Scanlen, ­“meteoric rise” is another. Back in 2016, she was playing an obsessive stalker in Home and Away. Her very next TV appearance was her breakout role in Sharp Objects, HBO’s slow-burn tale of murder, mystery and family secrets, as half-sister to Adams’s Camille.

In November, fresh from the premiere of Australian drama Babyt­eeth, Scanlen made her Broadway debut in Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird, and her Little Women family came out to support­ her: Laura Dern, who played her mother, Saoirse Ronan, who played her sister Jo, and writer-­director Gerwig visited her during the run. The show was a critical and box-office hit, but its run was cut short when Broadway closed because of the coronavirus.

Scanlen in Babyteeth.

Now, back home in Sydney, Scanlen has a new film coming out, but this time she’s behind the camera. The short work Mukbang, named for a South Korean YouTube trend, which Scanlen wrote and directed “for the pure fun of it”, has been ­selected for the Sydney Film Festival.

“I’ve been making little films ever since I was a kid, I’ve always had a passion for it,” she said. ­Because of coronavirus restrictions the festival is a virtual event this year, available online.

For Mukbang, which is about a teenage girl and her internet fixatio­n, Scanlen found cast members among local actors she’d come to know through acting classes or from previous projects.