Phoebe Tonkin’s universe
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.’
Words by PATTY HUNTINGTON. Photography by DARREN MCDONALD. Styling by JILLIAN DAVISON
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.
Glendyn Ivin’s Emmy Award-winning 2018 limited series Safe Harbour (about a group of friends who encounter a boat of asylum seekers while sailing and respond in a way that has devastating consequences) provided a career turning point (or “monumental shift”, as she calls it), after which she began exploring more serious subject matter.
But Boy Swallows Universe takes Tonkin to a particularly raw and vulnerable place. According to Dalton, who consulted on the show’s development and was present on the set, some of Tonkin’s most harrowing moments on film were edited out. Specifically, a scene from the first episode in which Frankie’s partner Lyle (played by Vikings star Travis Fimmel) locks her in a bedroom for a week and forces her to go cold turkey. “It’s primal, it’s filled with power and rage and it’s a side of Phoebe Tonkin that I don’t think the world has ever seen. It was that intense they were worried we were going to be too shocking; that’s where she’s gone – the full extent of the darkness,” says Dalton, on whom the lead character, Eli Bell, is based (played superbly by Felix Cameron and later, Zac Burgess).
Dalton was so moved by Tonkin’s performance in the series, he sent her a heartfelt message thanking her for the “gift” she had given his family. Her performance had, he said, allowed his own teenage daughters to come to terms with the traumas their family had survived — a period he refers to as “The Blip”. He tears up as he reads out the message he wrote to her, from his phone: “I didn’t fully appreciate the things that that role would ask of you, the power in it and the pain in it. I mean, I wrote those things and I saw a damn lot of those things first-hand in the real world, but I never thought someone could ever capture those things so truly and so correctly, that took so much freaking salt and guts and spirit and heart and compassion and love and craft. Thanks forever.”
It’s PRIMAL, it’s filled with POWER and RAGE and it’s a side of PHOEBE Tonkin that I don’t think the WORLD has ever SEEN
At 34, Tonkin finds herself on the other side of a career inflection point she spent much of the past decade dreading. Let’s call it the Hollywood Biological Clock. “This idea in Hollywood that female actors after 30 were kind of sent to pasture,” she explains. “In my early twenties there was this fear that like, Oh my God, I’ve got to do all these things because I’ve only got eight years left.” She adds: “I turned 32 and was just like, This is the best! Those ages between 26 to 30 are really difficult. I felt so lost. I felt like I had to prove myself a lot. And it’s such a cliché but I think after 30 you just stop caring so much about what other people think and you’re allowed to be yourself more.
“What is really nice about entering this phase is not feeling like I have to play the ingénue or the girlfriend . . . there’s this deep world of female characters that I think I’ve always known I could play, but it’s harder to prove to an audience [who might think], Oh, isn’t that the girl who works with Chanel and was a mermaid and a vampire? It’s definitely hard to get yourself out of a [typecasting] box, even though I’m so grateful for playing those roles when I was younger. I hope Boy Swallows Universe will show people that I’m capable of more than just supernatural worlds.”
The motto of Tonkin’s alma mata, the century-old all-girls school Queenwood, in Mosman, is Per Aspera ad Astra — Through struggles to the stars. Tonkin’s parents raised her and younger sister Abby to be conscious of the struggles of others and the importance of acts of service and “giving back”. She recalls: “They travelled a lot and they were always making us aware of the hardships that other little kids face and that we were so incredibly privileged by being able even just to go to bed at night and wake up to a fridge full of food.”
A shy child, Tonkin found her way to the Australian Theatre For Young People (ATYP), as did so many other Sydney teens-turned-Hollywood stars before her — Nicole Kidman, Toni Collette, Rose Byrne, Rebel Wilson, Aden Young, Abbie Cornish. “There was this sort of secret life that I lived,” she says of her ATYP years, which provided a creative release from the peer pressure and stress of school and ultimately put her in front of casting directors. At 16, she landed the role of Cleo Sertori in Network Ten’s teen soap H2O: Just Add Water — about a trio of teenagers who transform into mermaids — which has since been broadcast in 120 markets. “I auditioned a week before I was 16, got the job on the Monday and got told off on the Thursday [by then Queenwood headmistress Kem Bray] that my school uniform was too short and I couldn’t return until it was lengthened,” she recalls. “That was my last day of high school. I went to Queensland that very weekend and was in acting and swimming training from the Monday onwards.” She adds: “I’m sorry, Miss Bray. I never got to lower that skirt.”
She spent the next three years “living a little bit of a Hannah Montana life”, bouncing between Sydney and Queensland to shoot three seasons of H20, earning an AFI nomination in 2008 for Best Lead Actress in a Television Drama. Then came roles in Packed to the Rafters and Home and Away before heading to her first pilot season in Los Angeles in early 2011.
“To look back at myself at that age with compassion, it’s so crazy now to think about being 19 or 20 and just landing in Los Angeles not really knowing anyone and going to auditions. I was catching the bus; there was no Uber at the time. We barely had iPhones. It was overwhelming,” she says. “I have so many Australian actress friends now that I met back then. We really stuck together because we were all little kids. We couldn’t even get into bars. You were kind of throwing paint at the wall.”
She was cast as Faye Chamberlain in The CW Network’s one-season-only teen-witch drama The Secret Circle, later graduating to roles in two other CW fantasy series — The Vampire Diaries and its spinoff, The Originals, shooting 86 episodes of the latter from 2013 to 2018. Par for the course with cracking the small screen big time is having to navigate the Hollywood red carpet — an arena in which Tonkin freely admits she struggled at first.
“I look back at that time, and there were some pretty horrendous moments,” she says. Case in point: an ultra-short Hervé Léger bandage dress and leather jacket worn to the premiere of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part I in Los Angeles in November 2011, a look her sister Abby apparently teases her about to this day.
“It’s her favourite photo to reference — it was so short,” she laughs (one can only imagine the thoughts of Miss Bray on the matter). “My boobs are out. It was such a bad look. There was pressure to look kind of sexy, with Megan Fox and Victoria’s Secret [models] and all these beautiful women that I wanted to look like.”
Thanks to an ambassadorship with Chanel that began in 2018, Tonkin has since been enveloped in the world of haute couture, which has seen her in Chanel on the red carpet and front row at Chanel couture and ready-to-wear shows the world over. “I always call it ‘the Chanel summer camp’,” she says of the latter, where she gets to hang out with other Chanel ambassadors, some of whom, like Margot Robbie and Margaret Qualley, are friends. “You won’t see someone for months and then suddenly everyone sees each other in Paris or Miami or wherever the show is at the time.”
Tonkin is part of the latest wave of the so-called Gumleaf Mafia — Australian actors who’ve made their mark in Hollywood as far back as 1909 in the shape of the little-known South Australian-born actor and director J.P. McGowan, followed by Errol Flynn, Frank Thring, Peter Finch and Sir Robert Helpmann, before a veritable tsunami of names hit in the ’90s.
“There was a sweet moment last year when there was this cluster of amazing projects that came out with all these actors that I really did grow up with — Margot was the lead in Babylon; Ryan Corr was in House of the Dragon with Milly Alcock; Markella Kavenagh was in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power; Sam Reid was doing Interview with a Vampire,” Tonkin notes. “Joel Edgerton, Rose Byrne, Heath Ledger . . . they all came up together in their late teens and their early twenties. So, it’s really cool now to have my own version of that. There are so many of us that were doing the audition circuit and went through difficult times and times we weren’t working. I feel really honoured to have grown up with so many people who are now doing so well.”
Looking ahead, Tonkin has a bucket list of Australian directors she would like to work with that includes Jane Campion, Justin Kurzel, Mirrah Foulkes, David Michôd and Thomas M. Wright. She’s also keen to take on more serious subject matter.
“I would love to do more films that highlight different parts of the world, different communities and shed light on people that don’t necessarily have their stories told all the time,” says Tonkin, who reveals she’s also now toying with adding ‘producer’ to her résumé, buoyed by the success of other Australian actors who’ve stepped behind the camera, including Kidman and Robbie, whose LuckyChap Entertainment produced the billion-dollar Barbie blockbuster.
“I think what Margot Robbie has done with LuckyChap is inspiring so many other actresses and actors,” Tonkin says. “We’re sometimes at the mercy of other people and it’s very hard and a very powerless feeling. But the longer I’m in this industry, I do feel I have more of a voice to advocate for the stories that I want to be telling.”
Hair by Michele McQuillan; Makeup by Vic Baron; Nails by Cindy Vellis.
This article originally appeared in the January 2024 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR Australia/New Zealand. Get your copy here.
