Australian actor Leila George finally steps into the spotlight
With roles in Ryan Murphy’s forthcoming American Love Story and a leading role opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in action thriller Road House 2, she’s anything but a nepo baby.
It’s a hot July evening when WISH Zooms into Australian actor Leila George’s Brooklyn apartment, with its views out across the East River to the twinkling Manhattan skyline beyond.
George has just returned from an express three days in Greece for a family get-together (“Quite a brat decision,” she laughs), booked last minute in between filming American Love Story – Ryan Murphy’s new anthology series chronicling the romance and subsequent marriage of John F. Kennedy Jr and fashion publicist Carolyn Bessette. Their love story was tragically cut short three years after their wedding, when the pair – along with Carolyn’s sister Lauren – died in a private-plane crash off the coast of Massachusetts in 1999.
The much-hyped production currently shooting in NYC follows on from Murphy’s American Crime Story and American Horror Story successes.
“I think everything that Ryan Murphy does turns to gold,” George smiles. The ice blonde locks that defined her breakout role playing a young version of Cate Blanchett’s character in 2024 hit Disclaimer are gone. Instead, she’s now a warm brunette to morph into Kelly Klein, the then wife of fashion designer Calvin Klein, where Carolyn Bessette worked prior to her marriage.
“Sarah Pidgeon is going to blow everyone away,” George says of the American actor charged with playing the eternal style icon. “She’s so gorgeous and so perfect for this part, but it’s their story,” she adds of the hapless pair that features newcomer Paul Kelly as a doppelgänger of JFK Jr, chosen after some 1000 actors were reportedly auditioned. “We are all there to support them. It’s a great group,” she says of the extended cast that includes Naomi Watts as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Meryl Streep’s daughter Grace Gummer as Caroline Kennedy and Dree Hemingway as Daryl Hannah – JFK Jr’s former girlfriend.
Of course, fashion has its own starring role in the series. So much so that the production faced an outcry from fans after a “first look” of the couple was posted to social media. Everything from Bessette’s shade of blonde to her Hermès Birkin (a 40 not a 35, as was originally shot) were picked apart online, resulting in a reshoot.
“It will probably be the best dressed I’ve ever been as a character,” George grins. “Hands down, no question. It’s my favourite. The colour palette back then … it’s all coming back and it’s all my favourite creams and beiges, greys and browns. I’m in heaven in the clothes.”
Her next role will require a slightly different wardrobe, given she is playing lead opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in action thriller, Road House 2, directed by Ilya Naishuller. “Jake is such an incredible actor. I’m so excited to be working alongside him. He’s been so lovely and welcoming. And I’ve been waiting, hoping, dreaming of a physically demanding role like this one for a long time. I can’t wait to dive into all the training. It’s one of my favourite parts of this job, when you get to learn new skills for a part.”
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For George it’s been a long road to recognition, despite having grown up in the industry. “I’m 33 now, but I do feel I’ve just started doing this as a job,” she shares. Her father is Italian-American actor Vincent D’Onofrio (most famous for his 10 years playing Detective Robert Goren in Law & Order: Criminal Intent), while her mother is Emmy-winning actor Greta Scacchi (The Player, Presumed Innocent, White Mischief, Looking for Alibrandi), who was born in Italy and grew up in Britain and Australia. George was also married briefly to actor Sean Penn. The pair started dating in 2016 and were married in 2020 during covid, before George filed for divorce in 2021.
“I think it’s so easy to fall into this nepotism trap,” she continues, acknowledging her Hollywood adjacency. “And actually, I understand why people get behind that because I think that there are some actors out there, children of ... that maybe don’t necessarily deserve to be where they are based on their talent. But I actually think most of us do. I’ve worked so hard to get here, it was not easy. No one’s hired me because of my parents. [Disclaimer filmmaker] Alfonso Cuarón isn’t giving me the job because of who my dad is. I studied and I continue to study and I’ve made my own money. I’m here today because of the work that I’ve put in and I can safely say that.”
George is, in fact, her middle name. “I chose not to use either of [my parents’] names in my career. I just cut their names off,” she clarifies. “I confidently feel I did this myself. I am really happy right now, because I’ve worked my butt off to get to a place where I’m being considered for jobs. And it’s all I’ve wanted for the past 12, 13 years to be in a place where – I mean, I hope, touch wood – that I will be employed for this whole year. And that is nuts to me. And it’s sad that it’s nuts, but it’s the first time that’s ever happened, so I’m taking it all while I can. I’ve been struggling for so long and I’m really proud of myself.”
Apple TV+’s Disclaimer was her career tipping point. “Until Disclaimer came out, I just never had any traction,” George reflects. Not that she wasn’t putting herself out there. “Oh auditioning, auditioning, auditioning. I mean, non-stop. All those self-tapes where you feel like you put all this effort into it and then press send and it just goes off into this black hole of, ‘Did anyone even watch that’? It’s that phrase of, if a tree falls in the woods, but no one’s around to hear it, did it actually happen?
“The amount of times I’ve cried, had meltdowns and said, ‘I’m just going to quit’. My manager, who’s one of my best friends – he’s been with me since day one – he fields all of those calls where it’s like, ‘Should I just stop doing it ...? Should I do something else? Should I go back to school?’.”
George’s backup plan? “I really love cooking and baking. I would go to culinary school and maybe have a bakery. But I also love making clothes,” she adds of the practical skills of patternmaking and sewing.
“Disclaimer changed that. The confidence it’s given me is major. I’ve been welcomed into the club for now and it’s my membership to lose. But right now, I’m there and it does feel different.”
Her role in the erotic psychological thriller, in which she plays two sides of the same character – one that is playful and light and the other shaded in an extreme darkness that remains hidden from the audience until the very end – was well earned.
“Casting director Victor Jenkins, who I feel I need to build a little shrine for in my apartment, threw my name in the ring,” she explains. “And then Alfonso [Cuarón] called me and he kind of just cast me. I’m sure he’d never seen anything that I’ve done. I can’t imagine he’s at home watching [the American adaptation of] Animal Kingdom,” she laughs, of the role that put her on Hollywood’s map. “So I didn’t really know … but I didn’t question it. I think initially when I got the job, they were planning on doing CGI and kind of face replacing Cate’s [Blanchett’s] face onto me. So, it wasn’t actually at the end of the day going to be me …”
Her performance on set in Italy’s Forte dei Marmi changed that. George was nominated for a 2025 Critics Choice Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie Made for Television, while Blanchett and the series’ cinematographers are up for awards at the Emmys later this month. “Honestly, it wasn’t until a year later when I saw it that I found out that they weren’t going to replace my face I just burst into tears. It was the best thing ever. I love Alfonso. He was amazing. I just want to work with him again and again and again.”
George also dreams of returning to Italy to film to perfect the language. “I was such a little brat growing up. My mum would talk to me in Italian and I would respond in English. So now, I’ve been left with understanding fluently but speaking very mashed up, disjointed tenses. If I just spent six months there, I would be fluent. I do feel like I need to be fluent in Italian in the next two years or I’ve failed as an Italian. I want to do Italian jobs. I know I could do that.”
Funnily enough, where Disclaimer was shot – on the Tuscan coast near Pisa – is somewhere George visited many times in her youth. “I knew it was a place that was a favourite of my Italian families,” she recalls. “I didn’t know quite how much until I got there. I was there talking to my mum [on the phone], and she was like, ‘Well, there’s a house that we used to stay in as a family’. And as she said the name of it, I opened my trailer door and my trailer was literally parked in line with the door of this villa that my family used to stay in …
“There were a lot of things on this job that felt like strange synchronicities where you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m in the right place doing the right thing right now’.”
So far, she says the fame game has not affected her anonymity. “I honestly feel like Hannah Montana where my hair changes colour and suddenly no one knows that I’m an actor. No one recognises me – ever,” she laughs, recalling a time when she was out with her castmates from Animal Kingdom. “Everyone will get recognised and then the fans will ask me to take the picture. It is like I’m quite sadly forgettable. Honestly, I feel like I introduce myself to people so many times. Sometimes I think it’s a really useful thing, but for the most part, I’m like, ‘Well, I wish I was a bit more memorable’,” she chuckles. “Let’s pretend it’s such because I’m such a good actor,” she winks. “I melt into these characters and make it less about the fact that I have just the least memorable performances ever!”
It was in fact her parents’ careers that initially deterred George from pursuing anything in front of the camera. “Mostly because I think everyone would always ask me if that’s what I was going to do. I’m quite shy and it’s a scary thing to admit that you want to do it, even if your parents both do it. I saw how hard it was, I saw them both go through periods of not working,” she says.
“And also, I didn’t like attention … at school, I just wanted to be invisible. I wasn’t popular and I didn’t want to be singled out.” That said, she always felt at ease on sets and backstage in the theatre. “I knew I wanted to do something in that industry because I loved the people. My grandmother was a dancer. My grandfather was a painter. My dad’s dad was a director. It’s generations of this in my family. I love being with the travelling circus … the camaraderie … It’s where I feel comfortable. It’s where I feel like I can be myself.”
Her approach to the inevitable rejection that comes with the industry is to keep learning. “I take classes still, whether they’re Zoom classes or private coaching. I auditioned for The Actors Studio here in New York and got into that, which was so exciting for me,” she smiles. “So when that job does come, you’re ready, but also you still feel like an artist.”
During the downtimes she optioned a book with old family friend, Australian actor and director Gracie Otto.
“We’ve wanted to do something together forever. We used to live together in LA and she’s like a sister to me. I’m more excited about producing something, but there’s a [small] part I would like to play. But it’s more that it’s a really great story that could make a really fun film.”
George has also been working on something herself. “I don’t enjoy it,” she says of the process of writing, “but I have a story that I want to tell, and I felt like I was the only person that could write the first few drafts. I cannot wait to hand it over to a professional writer because I don’t get any joy out of writing. But I like storytelling.”
Her own story is a nomadic one, largely cloistered from the trappings of fame.
“When I was born [in Sydney], Mum very quickly took me to the English countryside and I was pretty sheltered from all of that Hollywood stuff,” she recalls. “But I knew she was someone that people knew. And then Law & Order started when I was about eight or nine, and I remember walking around with my dad in New York and everyone knew him. I just wondered why he was friends with everyone. So I think you just feel a bit special, but I really was kept away. I wasn’t a Hollywood kid. I wasn’t around that. And my mum’s frugal. We weren’t flying around first class or doing anything fancy like that. And I’m so grateful for it,” she adds, recalling her mum’s bob-a-job mentality for pocket money.
“It gave me a really good work ethic. I was waitressing at 16 in the UK. And as soon as I could earn my own money, I wanted to because I wasn’t getting it anywhere else. My mum didn’t just give us money.”
George was a boarder at Brighton College in England, where she thrived and completed film studies for her A-levels. “I really was very lucky and very sheltered. But yes, boarding school was the best. I would send my kids there in a heartbeat. It’s like you get to live with your best friends from 12, 13 years old and copy each other’s homework. That was the main upside to me. Because otherwise, I’d be at home and I would have such crying fits about my homework. I was so scared of authority, getting told off by a teacher, that I would have absolute terrors. So then when you start boarding, [you had] everyone to ask.”
After graduation she returned to Australia to pursue film studies at Sydney Film School, before studying method acting at Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in NYC, at her father’s suggestion. “I’m really grateful for it now,” she says of her life’s peripatetic chapters. “When I was younger, I think I felt like I wanted to be in one place just because I was really shy, and I notice it now in that I don’t have a crew. I don’t have a group of friends that are all on chats. I have very close individual friends in a lot of different places, but they don’t all know each other.”
In fact, she dreams of drawing them all together for a destination celebration. “It’s all I think about these days,” George laughs. “I have an Airbnb-trip dream,” she admits of the houses she has bookmarked all over the world. “I was doing it this morning … but now that I’m older, I really appreciate how much I travelled around. I feel like it matured me in a way. Just growing up around different cultures, I think everyone should do it.”
These days she does, however, “feel most at home” in Sydney where she stays at the Coogee apartment she was brought home to from hospital by her mum as a baby.
“I moved back there from England when I was 18, and I had been struggling a bit with friends and a bad 18-year-old break-up,” she laughs. “I just remember not feeling like I ever fitted in and getting to Sydney and working at Ravesis in Bondi Beach and finding people that to this day are some of my closest friends. So 100 per cent Australia, but I also feel very in touch with my Italian blood,” she adds of her mother’s side of the family in the north of the country (Milan and Lake Como) and her father’s Neopolitan heritage. “I think in my mannerisms, my personality, my heart, my soul is very Italian, but Australia is my home.”
In 2023 she returned from NYC to shoot David Vincent Smith’s disarming debut feature, He Ain’t Heavy with Scacchi in Perth.
“We’d worked together once in the theatre and we survived that, so that made me feel like maybe we’d be OK,” she laughs, recalling the Black Swan State Theatre production of The Seagull in 2014 that starred both George and Scacchi.
“She’s my North Star. She’s been right about everything in my life, but we still can get a bit scratchy around each other after about five days – it’s just mothers and daughters. But it was so lovely to work with her,” she redirects.
“I’d love us to do a mother-daughter comedy because she’s so funny if someone wants to write that or cast us? A road trip or travel adventure, that is gold, because Greta is so funny. People don’t even know …”
The subject matter for He Ain’t Heavy, however, was anything but. It is excruciating viewing, achingly human and heartbreaking from start to end. George plays Jade, a desperate woman who resorts to kidnapping and enforcing rehab on her violent and drug-addicted brother in a last-ditch effort to save their lives.
“At the time my mum and I were going through something not that dissimilar to what goes on in the film, and so it was very close to home and we were having conversations as characters that we’d had recently,” she shares.
“It’s a very heavy subject matter that is close to a lot of people’s hearts and so it’s very important to get it right. I find that stuff really therapeutic actually,” she says. “It gives me an opportunity to go through it all and then leave it there. I’m quite good at getting it all out and then going home and being me again.” She pauses before adding, “I don’t walk around as the character,” and says she uses music to tap into strong emotions on set. “I think it was quite therapeutic for both of us, actually,” she says. “Looking back, it was a really, really special time.”
George is a big advocate for therapy. “I’ve done therapy my whole life and I find it really helpful.” She also values physical strength and has found the perfect 45-minute yoga class in Williamsburg that she does most days, intermixed with gym sessions and walking her german shepherd, Sky.
“I always do some workout,” she shares. “It keeps me sane and I’m a bit crazy in that way … If I don’t work out, then it feels like I haven’t had a proper day.”
With her biggest and most physically demanding role ahead of her when filming starts on Road House 2 later this year, and Gonzo Girl and Runner still in the release pipeline, George is keenly aware of what it takes to stay balanced.
“How do I stay grounded?” she repeats while pondering her answer to WISH’s question. “I think when you help others, it does things that nothing else can do for you. I think it’s the cure for everything. For heartbreak and sadness, just helping others in any way. If you don’t know what to do and you’re struggling and you’re lost – help others. It’s a cure.” And clearly one that will help her navigate the brightening spotlight. Invisible no more.
Photography: Reto Sterchi
Styling: Isabella Mamas
Hair: Maria Pelo
Make-up: Rie Omoto
Production: Casey Pipet
This story is from the September issue of WISH.
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