DANIELLE MACDONALD

Tremendously talented, whip-smart funny and refreshingly real: the in-demand actress of Patti Cake$ fame is changing the face of Hollywood, and she’s got us cheering from our seats

Girl drops out of university to pursue her dream of becoming an actress. Moves to Hollywood at 18 and lives on her savings in a run-down apartment bathed in the red and blue glow of police lights at night. Audition after audition, until one day she lands the part of “Cashier” in a short film directed by Rachel Weisz and – roll montage – she is being lauded at Cannes. Variety names her one to watch. Jennifer Aniston calls, wanting her for the lead. Standing ovation at Sundance, Golden Globes, credits play.

It’s a terrible Lifetime movie. Or the amazing real life of Danielle Macdonald, the Sydney-born actress who’s gone from obscurity to suddenly everywhere following a breakout performance in the independent film Patti Cake$ last year. Now 26, Macdonald has been toiling in Hollywood for nearly a decade, her self-belief unwavering through the early years of rejection, living pay cheque to pay cheque and landing parts in projects that never got made.

“A lot of surviving in LA is just focus and perseverance,” she says over juice at a cafe on Sydney’s northern beaches, where she grew up and has returned for a few days, between finishing Bird Box, a Netflix series starring Sandra Bullock and John Malkovich, and starting on the film Paradise Hills, alongside Emma Roberts, in Barcelona. “You have to believe it’s going to happen, because if you don’t, why are you there? There was one year that I didn’t book a single job, but I had this stubborn faith of like, ‘Okay, I’ve booked before, I’ll book again.’ And the next year, Patti Cake$ happened.”

Macdonald credits that self-confidence to her parents, who enrolled her in weekend performing-arts classes when she was 13 and didn’t insist on a something-to-fall-back-on career option before she tried acting. “My mum is an accountant and she was like, ‘Do not be an accountant, go be an actor,’” she says. “That helped me more than anything else, because even if it seemed impossible, I had their support to go off and pursue my crazy dream.”

Usually, there’s an element of luck and timing to an actor’s success, but Macdonald didn’t wait for either, preferring to rely on continuous self-development. “You can’t just sit there,” she says. “You have to be working so you’re prepared when that luck comes along.”

To play the eponymous Patti Cake$, an underprivileged white girl trying to escape her gritty Jersey existence by becoming a hiphop artist, Macdonald spent two years learning to rap, without knowing if the film would even get made. “I’d never done any rap before – I didn’t know that world at all,” she admits. “The whole film kind of depended on me being able to make it seem real and natural, which was really scary, but I’d worked enough by then that I was ready to play a lead.” Even more impressive, director Geremy Jasper would often rewrite songs the night before filming, meaning Macdonald would be performing them for the first time the day of.

After Patti Cake$, she was tapped for a part in the dark neonazi drama Skin, and the titular role in Dumplin’, the story of an overweight teen who enters a pageant to get the attention of her former beauty queen mother, played by Aniston. But starting out, Macdonald, who, in passing describes herself as “a plus-size actress”, never set her sights on starring roles. In the acting classes she took early on in LA, she says, “We’d be made to typecast each other. I’d always be told, ‘Oh, you’re the funny best friend, the nerdy girl, the girl who gets bullied.’ But I never felt that was a bad thing. It was about being realistic and knowing what to go for, so I felt like, ‘Okay, that’s what I look like, [so] I’ll play supporting roles.’”

Success on such a high level – coming so swiftly after so long – is something she’s still working out. “It’s so surreal and bizarre,” admits Macdonald, who won an Australians In Film Breakthrough Award last year. “Nothing else in my life has changed. I have the same apartment and the same friends who treat me no differently, but then I was at the Golden Globes after-party and Emma Watson introduced herself to me and I was just fan-girling so hard and trying not to be weird.” Perhaps it should be mentioned that Aniston’s number is on her phone. “I know, I know,” she concedes. “I realise that is weird. My life is so normal, but then it’s so not normal.”

Getting to work alongside women who are industry veterans has been inspiring. If actresses have a reputation as vacuous or vain or vague, “I have never met that person,” she says. “Females in the entertainment industry are some of the most bad-ass women I’ve ever met – incredibly intelligent, strong-willed, powerful women [who] deal with rejection and criticism every day.”

To be working in Hollywood in this moment, too, is automatically to be part of a revolution across an industry Macdonald describes as “institutionally biased against women”. “I’ve been fortunate to work with only good people, but you hear stories, so when people actually speak out, I think that’s incredible. It’s forcing change because no-one [can] get away with that behaviour anymore.”

There’s a feeling of mobilisation on the ground, Macdonald explains. “We want to make sure that women and generations to come don’t have to experience that,” she says, referring not only to actresses, but also “women in other industries who wouldn’t be able to support their families if they didn’t endure the abuse they’re getting. That needs to change and hopefully it will.”

Feeling, all at once, emotional, invigorated and lucky, the only question is what Macdonald will do next. “I don’t have an actual list, but I just want to do one of everything – action, sci-fi, theatre,” she says. “I love that women are buying scripts and getting them made. The concept of directing is overwhelming to me, but you never know. There are so many things I want to check off.”

But one thing is for sure: the mark she wants to make on the industry. “There are roles for everybody. Everybody has a story worth telling, and everybody should be represented. I’d love to represent that.”