Melbourne's Timothée Chalamet has arrived

Introducing Zen McGrath.

Introducing Zen McGrath.

He's got just 900 followers on Instagram but by next week, he'll more than double it.

Zen McGrath is the name. 

The kid from Melbourne who was cast over Zoom to star in Florian Zeller’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning debut film, The Father.

The Son is the name of the new project and it's seen the 20-year-old Australian (whose real name is Augustus) going from relative obscurity to holding his own alongside Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern at the premiere in Venice.

For The Son, Hugh Jackman must surely be in contention for an award this year for his emotional portrayal as Peter, the father of the acutely depressed Nicholas, played by McGrath in what critics are calling an “indelible” portrayal.

Deadline says the “gripping” film provides “a hell of a role” for Jackman. But McGrath is the one to watch.

McGrath play Nicholas, a 17-year-old New Yorker whose deteriorating mental health begins to rip apart his deeply loving but painfully damaged family, including father (Jackman), mother (Laura Dern) and stepmother (Vanessa Kirby), the arrival of whom, and his parent’s divorce, he largely blames for his depression.

Jackman was granted a week off from his Broadway show, The Music Man, which he has been performing for eight months, to come to Venice for the world premiere of The Son.

In one of the film’s fun scenes Jackman’s Peter, a New York lawyer and aspiring politician, dances alongside his new wife Beth (Kirby) and 17-year-old son Nicholas (McGrath) in an attempt to bring his family together.

Director Zeller explains that he chose the song, Tom Jones’ It’s Not Unusual, together with Kirby and Jackman. “It was a joyful moment in the middle of his journey.”

“It was a great feat to make Hugh Jackman a bad dancer,” Kirby quips.

“It's a Dad doing Dad dancing,” Jackman insists.

“You have to be a very good dancer to pretend not to be one,” Zeller asserts with a chuckle.

Jackman admits that when he read The Son script, which like The Father was adapted by Christopher Hampton and Zeller from Zeller’s play, he had “a feeling like a fire in my gut. It’s a feeling you rarely get as an actor - that this part is for you and you must play it.”

In this second of Zeller’s three-part stage and film series of stories dealing with mental health, Jackman’s Peter is the father of a son with acute depression. When Nicholas moves in with Peter’s new family he struggles as he blames his father for leaving his mother Kate (Laura Dern).

Zeller says that with the film, where the UK-Australia See-Saw Films is one of the producing partners, he wanted to “explore these very emotional territories in a very honest and humble way.”

Jackman says the movie shows how isolated people can be when it comes to mental health issues.

“There is a shame, there is a guilt, there is an intense desire to fix things. And then somehow as a father or as a mother or as a friend, it’s my job to fix it. 

“For many, many years as a parent the job was to appear strong and dependable and never worried and I don’t want to burden my children. But certainly since this movie I’ve changed my approach. I share my vulnerabilities more with my 17- and 22-year-old and I see their relief when I do,” he says of his two adopted children with his wife Deborra-Lee Furness.

Peter also has daddy issues as he was neglected by his own high-flying, cold and emotionally brutal father, played by Anthony Hopkins, who won the best actor Oscar for The Father. Hopkins and Jackman share a pivotal scene in the film.

“I think it reminds us that we're all sons and we're all daughters, no matter how old we are and that we're informed by our past as much by the present,” Jackman, 53, says.

“I was incredibly excited, and of course, a little nervous to work with Anthony. I mean, he's a titan for me. He's one of those actors I've looked up to for many many, many, years and to be on set with him is so inspiring because he has the curiosity and the work ethic of someone who's straight out of drama school. Florian told me that he was emailing him almost every day with questions and that he got almost as many emails for this as he did on The Father, where Anthony's in every scene. So it was a great joy. He's full of life and is childlike. He’s a beautiful man.”

So too is Jackman, Kirby then attests. We can only agree.