Eliza Taylor

From the Suburbs of Melbourne to Science Fiction

Eliza Taylor didn't need to go through an elite drama school to understand how the entertainment industry worked in Australia. By the age of fourteen, she was already filming Pirate Islands, and soon after she joined the cast of The Sleepover Club in 2003. Those childhood shoots were her real technical training in front of the camera.

Melbourne is a city that chews up young actors who don't keep their feet on the ground. Taylor survived that machine thanks to her role on Neighbours in 2005. She played Janae Timmins for three years and filmed more than three hundred episodes before she turned eighteen.

Then she decided Australia was too small for her.

She arrived in Los Angeles in 2013 with almost no money in the bank and a plan to go back home if nothing worked out within a month. She had no agent in the United States, but luck came her way when her Australian agent sent an old tape to the casting directors at The CW network. They were looking for the lead of a survival story, and she fit the profile of a suffering heroine.

The Salary of Space Survival

The role of Clarke Griffin in The 100 changed her financial situation overnight. The series remained on air for seven seasons, and Taylor ended up earning a salary of more than 40,000 dollars per episode in the final stages of the project. It was a physically exhausting shoot in the forests of Vancouver that ran from 2014 to 2020.

But success in American television is often a golden trap. Taylor had to deal with pressure from the series' fans and constant scrutiny of her private life. In 2019, she secretly married her co-star Bob Morley, and the announcement created a media buzz the actress didn't expect to handle so soon.

The gamble paid off.

After the show ended in 2020, she looked for projects that would give her more creative control. She didn't want to be just the face in the spotlight. So she set up her own company to develop small projects where she could make decisions about the final cut and casting.

Refuge in Independent Film

In 2023, she starred in the thriller I’ll Be Watching, where she also worked as an executive producer. It was a side of the business she began to explore seriously so she wouldn't depend on calls from the major studios. Because Hollywood forgets its familiar names quickly once the big hits wrap.

Her work on It Only Takes a Night in 2023 marked a return to her Australian roots. It was a modest production shot entirely in Perth on a budget far from the standards of the big streaming platforms. Taylor now prefers the flexibility of short shoots that don't force her to live in a trailer ten months a year.

And the plan worked out.

I’ll Be Watching was sold to international markets after its run on digital platforms in the United States in May 2023.