Elizabeth Debicki: Creative Brilliance

From Marvel to Steve McQueen, she shines through her choices and impresses with her exemplary career graph.

Elizabeth Debicki, the Australian actress lands the Women in Film and Max Mara Face of the Future Award at just 28. In this conversation, she speaks forthright about her much applauded journey so far. Edited excerpts:

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The Max Mara Award recognises women who are at a turning point in their careers. Do you have the feeling?

When you live your life “from the inside”, you do not really realise what’s changing around you, even if people perceive you differently. For an actor, the only way to judge and value one’s work is to be seen. When a piece, a film starts to benefit you in terms of exposure, then we say we are taking a step. On that note, I come to think of Widows, a feature film I recently shot under the direction of Steve McQueen. People around me, especially women, reacted with such force. For the anecdote, it is also after this film that, for the first time, people approached me in the city, for example at the pedestrian crossing...

I read that your parents were both dancers... How did this influence your life choices?

I grew up in an ultra-creative atmosphere. We went to the theatre and also to ballet. My parents have stimulated me a lot artistically. I am grateful to them because it helped me in developing an aesthetic sensibility at a very young age. It is because of that I learnt how to build an identity. I have realised that life is nothing but a project of art. At the same time, there was a part of me that said: “Maybe you should practice a trade? Become a lawyer or an engineer may be...” But I was always aware of the difficulties of pursuing a career as an artist as I have lived with artists all my life. In short, I was “warned” by myself when I chose to enrol myself in a school of drama, and that was at the age of 17.

You live in the United States, you grew up in Australia and were born in Paris. How does it feel, travelling and changing countries time and again?

Absolutely amazing, but I left France quite quickly, when I was five years old. My mother has Irish, English roots and my paternal family is Polish. This expeditious and inter-cultural upbringing gave me an insight to understand people and their characters. We learn to culturally assimilate things and become extremely aware of the rules, the behaviour of people in a city… I remember when I arrived in Melbourne, Australia, I felt literally out of place: I had to learn to adapt.

You’ll star in Neil LaBute’s upcoming film, The Burnt Orange Heresy. A universe very different from that of Marvel and Guardians of the Galaxy, of which you were a part of in 2017. Do you believe that the key, for an actor, is to feed on different genres?

If you have the opportunity, you have to grab it. To play a character in a fantasy world and to “cultivate” reality is a very different challenge. It is like playing a role whose essence and writing is strictly naturalism. From the point of view of an actor, the creative process is the same, but these different worlds and genres force us to adapt... I was very lucky to shoot my first film, Gatsby the Magnificent, under the direction of Baz Luhrmann. So many things were interacting on a single undertaking, and yet the energy on the set was conducive to the development of an inner world.

What bet do you make on tomorrow?

Continue to advance, as an actress and as a woman. That’s my goal. For an actor, the only way to judge and value one’s work is to be seen.

From the August 2019 issue of L’Officiel India.