Beyond Graceland: Olivia DeJonge, our rising star in Hollywood
Olivia DeJonge has blossomed from promising child actor to star of the silver screen as Priscilla Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. And as part of a new vanguard of talented Australians taking on Hollywood, she’s on the cusp of even bigger things.
Words by TESS DE VIVIE DE RÉGIE. Photographed by JESS RUBY JAMES. Styled by JILLIAN DAVISON
WHEN OLIVIA DEJONGE was just 12 years old, she won Best Actress at the West Australian Screen Awards for her role in the 2011 short film Good Pretender. The performance also served as an epiphany for DeJonge’s parents, who realised their daughter’s passion for acting was no short-lived childhood infatuation. “I remember crying on the way home [from filming],” she recalls. “In later years, my parents were like, ‘That’s when we knew [acting] was what you really wanted to do’. I had just spent a week with a bunch of adults saying lines and waiting for cameras to be set up and I wept like a baby and was so upset for days because it was over.”
That little girl could only have dreamed where acting would eventually take her: namely, playing Priscilla Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic Elvis, for which she won the AACTA Award for Best Supporting Actress.
DeJonge’s Instagram showcases a charmed life of awards ceremonies and opening nights — yet, in conversation, she is down-to-earth and funny. She’s midway through a story from her time on Elvis when there’s a chirping off-screen. “Sorry, that’s my bird!” she laughs. (Her budgie, Luni, continues to make his presence known intermittently throughout the interview.)
She’s Zooming from her home in Melbourne, where she has been relaxing after filming the upcoming miniseries The Narrow Road to the Deep North, based on Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel and helmed by fellow Australians Jacob Elordi and Odessa Young. The plot centres on a war hero (Elordi) who embarks on an extramarital affair with his uncle’s wife (Young), with DeJonge playing the wife of Elordi’s character.
“I’d known [Jacob] for a couple of years beforehand and we had heaps of mutual friends,” she says of her high-flying co-star, hot on the heels of his performances in Euphoria, Saltburn and Priscilla. “I had so much fun on that job. Watching Odessa and Jacob, working with Justin [Kurzel, the Australian director] … They were all passionate about what we were making and that always translates to what we see on screen.”
Last year proved to be a strange period in DeJonge’s life, with the long-running SAG-AFTRA strike receiving frequent mentions in our conversation. “It was a hard time,” she shares, saying she leaned on a supportive network of peers who were also navigating the uncertainty. “Every couple of weeks we would call each other and be like, ‘Did you just have a mental breakdown?’ ‘Yeah, I just had a mental breakdown.’ ‘Are you all right?’ ‘I’m fine now but check in in another month’. At the time I thought, Is this ever going to end? Are we ever going to recover?” Things are returning to normal, but slowly. “I would say only in the last couple of weeks have we really gotten back into the swing of things,” she says. “[The strike] was very necessary, but it was hard on everybody.”
Playing Priscilla Presley in Elvis was always going to be a turning point in DeJonge’s career. The film was a blockbuster, generating a cool US$288 million (AU$414 million) at the box office. “Being thrown into a big movie like that — I’d done nothing like it before,” she says. “Getting through that experience made me feel a lot sturdier on my own two feet.”
The film’s production, conducted around a complicated set of pandemic restrictions, followed by a glitzy promotional tour, made for a whirlwind of emotions for the young actor. The premieres were star-studded affairs, with three generations of the Presley family (Priscilla, her late daughter, Lisa Marie, and granddaughter, Riley Keough) represented. “I don’t think [the excitement surrounding the film] really hit us while we were shooting,” she says. “[I] definitely felt the heat once it came out. It took us all a while to come down off the high.”
Having fangirled over Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) as a teenager, it was an unmissable opportunity for the actor to work with the famed director on Elvis. “Baz is such a magician — he throws you in the deep end and you come out of it very changed as an actor,” DeJonge says. She describes Luhrmann’s sets as being akin to a bunch of drama kids all hanging out together. “Everybody’s welcome and everybody’s having a good time.”
The early life of Priscilla Presley has proved fertile ground for filmmakers to plough of late, first via Elvis and more recently in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla. As DeJonge puts it: “We only got little pieces of this woman who had captured Elvis’ heart. That made her very enigmatic and out of reach.” While many would feel nervous about playing a living person on screen, DeJonge remained level-headed. “You have to remind yourself that it’s an artistic interpretation of somebody’s experience,” she says.
Priscilla herself was full of praise for the depiction. “It meant a lot to get [her] recognition and kindness,” DeJonge shares. During a side-by-side interview of DeJonge and Priscilla on Good Morning America in June 2022, Priscilla conceded that while it was “so strange” to see an actress re-enact her young-adult life on screen, she was “so happy that [DeJonge] was sensitive and that she was caring” in her portrayal.
Of the Australians in Hollywood right now, DeJonge figures in a particularly stellar crop: Margot Robbie springs to mind, as does Angourie Rice, who reprised Lindsay Lohan’s role as Cady Heron in this year’s reboot of noughties classic Mean Girls. According to DeJonge, Australian actors form a very tight-knit group. “I don’t think I’ve not gotten along with any Aussie that I’ve worked with,” she reflects. (At this point, Luni the budgie chimes in once again. “He always does this at the most obnoxious times. I’ll be doing a really important self-tape and he’ll just decide to start popping off.”)
She’s particularly close to Odessa Young, whom she’s known since they were both 17. They both had roles in the TV miniseries The Staircase (2022), which dramatises the real-life case of crime writer Michael Peterson (Colin Firth), who is accused of murdering his wife Kathleen (Toni Collette) after she’s found dead at the bottom of the staircase in their Durham, North Carolina home.
“Colin is great — he’s so much fun, so easy to be around,” says DeJonge. “And Toni is such an Australian icon. I definitely felt a little starstruck.” The show’s director, Antonio Campos, would throw barbecues at his house, with cast members Juliette Binoche and Parker Posey also in attendance: “It was unreal,” she recounts. “I just couldn’t believe how lucky I was to be there.”
It was on The Staircase that DeJonge struck up a friendship with Game of Thrones alumna Sophie Turner. There are obvious parallels between the pair’s careers, with both having worked extensively as actors in their teens, but their bond extends beyond their shared trajectories. “We get along not [just] because we’re actors,” says DeJonge. “Sophie is just a great gal. The three of us — Odessa, Soph and I — were able to spend so much time together [during filming]. They’re lifelong friendships that I hold near and dear to my heart [and that] I’m very protective over.”
When I’m ON SET, I feel like I’m AT HOME
Although she declined to comment on the subject, it’s because of Turner that DeJonge is now part of Taylor Swift’s starry orbit: she has been snapped with the famously private megastar at dinner in New York as well as at a Kansas City Chiefs game supporting Swift’s American footballer beau, Travis Kelce.
It is perhaps partly thanks to having friends in the industry that DeJonge can navigate the cut-throat world of Hollywood with such grace. “I have been told ‘no’ about 90 per cent more than I’ve been told ‘yes’ — it comes with the territory,” she says. “It’s helpful to have friends who do what you do because there’s that mutual understanding of being told ‘no’ repeatedly.” While DeJonge sometimes struggled with competition at the beginning of her career, she has since realised that envy is, in her words, “ultimately unhelpful. When [my friends] get a role, it’s like a win for me. We all work so hard.
“When I’m on a set, I feel like I’m at home,” DeJonge continues, which she credits, in part, to embarking on her career so young. Born in Melbourne and raised in Perth, she has been steeped in acting since childhood, beginning with local-radio voiceovers and TV ads from the age of eight. Bypassing the well trodden path of Australian actors finding fame via local soaps, DeJonge’s fledgling years in the industry saw her feature in horror and thriller films The Sisterhood of Night and Better Watch Out. In her teens, she worked extensively in television both domestically and abroad: she was cast as a girl in witness protection in the 2015 ABC miniseries Hiding and the love interest of a young Shakespeare for TNT’s Will in 2017. M. Night Shyamalan handpicked her at 17 to front horror film The Visit (2015); while her classmates were sitting their Year 12 exams, DeJonge was walking the movie’s red carpet. “It’s strange that I was doing school and [working] at the same time,” she reflects. “If you asked me now to study six subjects and do my job, I would say there’s absolutely no way.”
Pre-Elvis, DeJonge was perhaps best known for her role in Netflix’s teen mystery The Society, playing a young woman experiencing abuse at the hands of her boyfriend. The Society was filmed when she was 19 and DeJonge remains close to her former cast members to this day. “The girls on The Society all feel like my college friends now,” she says. “We’re all young actors. I’ve been lucky to pick up some really great [friends over] the years.”
DeJonge is still so young. Born in 1998, she is unequivocally Gen Z — yet she is already keenly aware of Hollywood’s deeply rooted ageism. “There’s a lot of pressure around ‘an end’,” she says — she keeps hearing how roles dry up for women by their early thirties. “Which is absolutely ridiculous,” she says. “Write more interesting roles!” In an industry where youth reigns supreme, it is a reality that has weighed on her mind, especially having now reached her mid-twenties. But, she says, “it’s a waste of energy to sit and simmer in that mentality”.
Wrapped up with expectations about achieving career milestones before a certain age is the idea of the ‘big break’ — a pressure that’s tempered by the appreciation DeJonge has for her craft, independent of external markers of success. “The older I’ve got, it’s become less about chasing that ‘big break’ and more about having film-making experiences that fill my cup,” she says.
She becomes emotional while relating an anecdote from the last day on The Narrow Road to the Deep North. “I was sitting in the makeup chair, and I started crying, silently weeping, because it was over.” Her love for film-making — the “camaraderie, the process and the experience” — is palpable.
The OLDER I’ve got, it’s become LESS about CHASING that ‘BIG BREAK‘ and more about having film-making EXPERIENCES that FILL my CUP.
When quizzed about a role she dreams of playing one day, there’s little hesitation: DeJonge is a period-drama devotee. “Get me in a corset, get me running around a field,” she laughs. “That’s something I would just love to do.” Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen is a particular favourite, a “guilty pleasure” she rewatches every few months.
Recently, she has been contemplating getting involved with the production side of things. “[Acting] is quite a control-less job [that] requires a lot of waiting around, waiting to be told yes or no,” she explains. “A lot of actors long to have a bit more control.” She doesn’t know yet exactly what that might look like, but it’s something she’s curious to explore. Also in the works is the film The Trasher — about the trash magnate and mobster said to have been the real-life inspiration behind Tony Soprano — where she’ll appear alongside Stranger Things’ David Harbour and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son, Cooper.
After spending a long stretch of 2023 abroad, DeJonge is relishing being back on Australian soil. She’s been cooking a lot (chicken karaage is a current go-to) and devouring books, citing Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History (2019) as a particularly thought-provoking read. It is a period of, as she puts it, “domesticating” herself.
“I watch movies all the time, I think about movies all the time — don’t get me wrong, it’s in me 24/7,” she says. “But it’s so important to partake in life outside of [acting]. It ultimately serves the job.”
HAIR BY Rory Rice. MAKEUP BY Gillian Campbell. SET STYLIST Natalie Turnbull.
This article originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR Australia/New Zealand. Get your copy here.
