Categorie: Cast

Phoebe siert de cover van de januari 2024 editie van de Australische editie van Harper’s Bazaar ter promotie van haar nieuwe Netflix serie ‘Boy Swallows Universe’.

Galerij Links:
http//: Darren McDonald (Harper’s Bazaar Australia)

Phoebe Tonkin spent her early years in the fantasy-television genre. Now, at 34, she’s ready for her close-up as a dramatic actor via grittier roles, none more so than Frankie Bell in ‘Boy Swallows Universe.’

SOMETIME OVER THE COURSE of last summer, Phoebe Tonkin reinvented herself. herself. She was in Brisbane shooting Boy Swallows Universe, the new Netflix limited-series adaptation of Australian journalist Trent Dalton’s best-selling debut novel. It’s a coming-of-age story loosely based on his real-life experiences growing up in ’80s Brisbane, embedded in an underworld of heroin dealers and drug lords and their terrifying, scar-faced enforcers. Tonkin had been cast in the role of Frankie Bell.

Pre-shoot, Tonkin had already devoured films about drug users, such as The Basketball Diaries, Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream, along with letters written by addicts to their families. But then, after every day of shooting on Boy Swallows Universe, she spent the nights trying to go deeper and deeper under Frankie’s skin, immersing herself in books (and podcasts) about trauma, addiction, sobriety and healing — from authors such as Bessel van der Kolk, Brené Brown and Gabor Maté.

“It was truly the best six months of my life — the first time in my career that I could really relax on a longer shoot. I’d also just finished another film, so I was kind of running on steam,” reflects Tonkin via Zoom from “my childhood bedroom in my childhood home” in Mosman, a suburb on Sydney’s affluent Lower North Shore. It’s just days after the end of the protracted SAG-AFTRA strike and Tonkin is finally able to talk about a role that could be, if not career-defining, then at the very least the switch to make the film industry sit up and take notice of her.

“It was probably more abstract research than I’ve ever done,” she continues. “It just felt so important to me to do this right and to honour these characters. I was doing all this research about people who’d faced adversity and overcome hardships. It was almost like a six-month vacation for my mind, because I would go to work and then, at night, I was nourishing myself with positivity from the podcasts and books that were so important to me for shaping the character of Frankie. But then [I] took on all those messages subliminally. I kind of came out of it [as] this really evolved version of myself.”

The role shows the depth of Tonkin’s range as a dramatic actor, arguably for the first time in her 18-year career, the first 12 of which were dominated by back-to-back roles in the teen-skewed fantasy-TV genre, variously channelling her inner mermaid, witch, vampire and werewolf.
(meer…)