Odessa Young

The stigma of the Australian child prodigy

Odessa Young was born in Sydney in 1998, and before turning eighteen she was already carrying the dramatic weight of a major national production. In 2015 she starred in The Daughter. That performance earned her the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Award for Best Lead Actress.

It was a debut without a safety net.

But the industry in her home country quickly felt too small for her. Her parents, both involved in design and writing, realized the logical next step was to cross the pond. So Young moved to North America with the aim of avoiding the sugary teen roles that tend to flood the careers of actresses her age.

In 2017 she took part in the series High Life. It was a digital project that explored bipolar disorder with a rawness that caught the attention of casting directors in Los Angeles.

Conquering the independent market

In 2018, she made her breakthrough with Assassination Nation. Sam Levinson's film turned out to be a explosion of satirical violence that sharply divided critics. Young led a young cast in a story about mass hysteria and the leaking of private data.

And the gamble paid off.

That same year, she shot A Million Little Pieces under director Sam Taylor-Johnson. On this shoot, she crossed paths with Aaron Taylor-Johnson and began building a reputation as an actress who prefers physical and emotional risk to the comfort of big superhero franchises.

In 2020 she worked alongside Elisabeth Moss on Shirley. Josephine Decker's direction demanded a high level of improvisation and a suffocating atmosphere, which Young handled with remarkable technical coolness. In the film, she plays a young woman trapped in the twisted marriage of writer Shirley Jackson.

The Sundance critics noted that her presence managed to balance out a volcanic Moss.

Maturity and period projects

In 2021, she starred in Mothering Sunday, directed by Eva Husson. The film is a period drama set in interwar England, where Young appears on screen alongside veterans such as Olivia Colman and Colin Firth.

It was her first major leading role in a prestigious European production.

Young has shown she moves better in silences than in overexposed dialogue. In 2022 she took on a demanding challenge in the miniseries The Staircase. There she played Martha Ratliff, one of Michael Peterson's daughters, in a meticulous recreation of one of the most famous criminal cases in American television.

Zero concessions to cheap sentimentality.

In 2023 she joined the cast of The Order, a thriller about a group of white supremacists in the 1980s. On this production she shared the set with Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2024.

By late 2024, her casting in Deliver Me from Nowhere, the biopic about Bruce Springsteen directed by Scott Cooper, was confirmed. The 20th Century Studios production set up its base of operations in New Jersey with an estimated budget of 70 million dollars.