Kodi Smit-McPhee in running for The Australian’s Australian of the Year

Kodie Smit-McPhee has nabbed a Golden Globe – and now is in the running for The Australian’s Australian of the Year.

For 15 years, Kodi Smit-McPhee has slowly taken his acting career from strength to strength. Now, he’s officially made it.

In 2021, the 25-year-old faced possibly his most challenging year yet, but he garnered critical acclaim in Jane Campion’s western, The Power of the Dog.

For the Adelaide-born star, it’s been a long time coming. He credits his love and passion for film to his father, a professional wrestler tuned actor.

Their first project together, when Smit-McPhee was eight, was a short film. His father now appears as “kind of an Easter egg” in some of the films he stars in, Smit-McPhee says, “in the sense that he’s often hidden in the background or he’s extra somewhere”.

Emerging on the American big screen at age 13 among Hollywood’s A-list, he starred in The Road alongside Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall and fellow Aussie Guy Pearce. Major roles since include superhero Nightcrawler in the X-Men franchise and in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

It hasn’t been easy. He suffers ankylosing spondylitis, a rare auto-immune disease, and also has iritis, a form of inflammation that can cause blindness.

If he wasn’t already on the map, he is now following his breakout performance in The Power of the Dog, acclaimed as one of the best films of 2021, earning him a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor and setting him up for Oscar glory.

Dubbed the “secret weapon” of the film, Smit-McPhee plays Peter Gordon, a shy teenager who brings out a softer side in Benedict Cumberbatch’s masochistic cowboy, Phil.

“Despite the many big names in the cast – who all deliver awards-worthy performances too, no doubt – the secret weapon of The Power of the Dog is Smit-McPhee,” one critic wrote.

But he remains humble. “You’ve got to take it with a great sense of humility that it can take 10 years to break out, or have a breakout role in any avenue,” he told i-D late last year.

Australians will see him next in director Baz Luhrmann’s musical biopic, Elvis, as country music legend Jimmie Rodgers. But before then he may earn another accolade – he is nominated for The Australian’s Australian of the Year.

Readers are encouraged to submit a nomination for The Australian’s Australian of the Year. Prominent Australians can be nominated by filling out the form, or emailing to [e-mail]. Nominations close on Friday, January 21.