From high school dropout to Colin Firth co-star: Odessa Young’s big gamble

The Australian ditched her final year of school to chase her acting dream, then did nothing for a year. Now she’s crossing continents for roles and trying not to cry

Odessa Young dropped out of her Sydney high school a couple of days after her 17th birthday. The teenager had two big Australian movie roles to her credit, her performances celebrated on the film festival circuit, and had decided year 12 meant “the learning part was over and then it was all about testing”.

She was “pretty persuasive” with her parents that she was serious about acting: “I was always a good debater, so they had no choice but to accept.”

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Young was single-minded in her ambition. She had had her big career break at 16, playing the eponymous runaway teenager in Sue Brooks’s Looking for Grace, before a week later filming the part of Hedvig in Simon Stone’s film The Daughter, based on Henrik Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck.

But the gamble would take time to pay off. No roles were offered the high school dropout. “Nothing happened for a year, and I sat on my arse and didn’t do anything,” she says with a laugh. The day after her 18th birthday, Young moved to Los Angeles.

Now 24, Young has been living in the US for six years – the past four of them in New York (“I don’t like single industry towns,” she says, of leaving LA). She takes a star turn as a 1920s English maid in French director Eva Husson’s film Mothering Sunday, which comes out in Australia this week. Her character, Jane Fairchild, is prevented from marrying her secret upper-class lover Paul Sheringham (The Crown’s Josh O’Connor) by the strictures of class, gender and religion, having been raised in an orphanage where she was trained then pressed into domestic service.

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Odessa Young in Mothering Sunday. The 22-year-old plays her character Jane as a young woman and a woman in her 40s. Photograph: Robert Viglasky/AP

The feminist role, in which Jane achieves freedom through receipt of a typewriter and the words of Virginia Woolf, is a departure from Young’s breakout role in The Daughter. At the centre of a gloomy family maelstrom, Hedvig was afforded no room for autonomy in that story, only fatal tragedy.

I figured that I’m good at crying on camera; now I’m actively trying not to cry

“I think I got typecast as ‘the screamer’ for a while after that one,” Young jokes, speaking from her home of the past four years in Williamsburg, New York, where she lives with her boyfriend and dog. “I figured that I’m good at crying on camera; now I’m actively trying not to cry.”

Mothering Sunday was released in the UK in 2021 and the US in March, with Young’s performance praised for its vibrancy and toughness. The screenplay is based on a 2016 Graham Swift novella and the film was largely shot in 2020 in the small English village of Hambleden in Buckinghamshire, west of London. Young, aged 22 at the time of filming, plays Jane both as a young woman and in her 40s, prompting director Husson to describe Young as “an old soul”, saying it is “sometimes hard to remember she is only in her early 20s”.

While playing the older Jane, Young was thinking about her own mother ageing. “Ultimately what I’ve seen change in her is just becoming more and more herself, which is a really exciting thing to play,” Young says. “I can only hope that’s what will happen for me … it was a nice way of pretending I was already there, that I’d already figured some things out.”

Until then, Young is learning from the best, such as O’Connor, with whom she shed inhibitions in bedroom scenes. “There’s an alchemical luck to that,” says Young of their casting. “It doesn’t help to necessarily dilly dally talking about these things: we both knew what we needed to check in with each other about, and then we just got to make each other feel comfortable.”

Jane’s employers, Godfrey and Clarrie Niven, are played by Colin Firth and Olivia Colman, who are broken by the death of their two sons in the trenches of war. Colman’s performance is a study in grief, but she thoughtlessly tells orphan Jane, in what she thinks is a statement of kindness: “How very lucky to be comprehensively bereaved at birth.”

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Olivia Colman (L) and Young in a scene from Mothering Sunday. ‘Olivia has this gift of cutting through any tension in the room,’ Young says. Photograph: AP

“Olivia has this gift of cutting through any tension in the room,” says Young. “It wasn’t an easy scene, but it’s one that makes the job worth it. I learned so much from the day that I might not be able to articulate until many years in the future, but the way she carried herself was so powerful and defining.”

Most recently, Young starred in true crime series The Staircase as one of murder suspect Michael Peterson’s daughters, Martha. Toni Collette stars as Kathleen Peterson, the woman infamously found dead at the bottom of the family stairs, and her husband, Michael, is played by Colin Firth – it is the second time Young has worked with him.

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“[Firth] is one of the most important people in my career up to this point, because he’s just so bloody good,” says Young. “So bloody nice.”

In that role, Young felt some of the “lostness” of her character. “I felt absolutely incapable, I felt like I was doing the worst job in the world,” she says. Really? “Yeah, I felt I was being unspecific. I was deeply uncomfortable and unsettled for six months of shooting, and then I realised, actually, I don’t think there was any way to feel comfortable and settled.”

As she learned more about the case, Young abandoned all preconceptions, concluding “it’s none of my business whether he did it or not”.

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Young (second from left), as Martha at the funeral of Kathleen Peterson in The Staircase. Photograph: HBO/Binge

Young is taking a break and considering her next move. She wants to do more film next, finding television a “sprint at the length of a marathon”. For the foreseeable future, balancing her transatlantic screen career, New York will remain home.

It has an “un-squashable identity”, she says. “It made me feel in love with the city more, being in it through the pandemic, because I felt all of a sudden that I had stakes in it, I was being active in it, as opposed to just observing it or getting to reap its benefits without giving myself to it.”

Unlike Jane in Mothering Sunday, Young is not feeling in the least bookish as she winds down. “If I’m being completely honest, I’m really struggling with my TikTok addiction right now,” she says. “I haven’t read a book in like a year, and it’s been awful – it’s been really bad, and I feel completely soft brained.”

Planting a dry Australian tongue firmly in cheek, she adds: “I’m just trying not to spend too many hours looking at my phone. I want to be transparent about it and give people hope that talking about it can help.”

Mothering Sunday is released nationally in Australia on 2 June