TAKING FLIGHT
Joining an illustrious cast in her latest film, willowy beauty Elizabeth Debicki is charmingly unaffected despite her soaring fame. By Sophie Tedmanson. Styled by Melissa Levy. Photographed by Hans Neumann.
Joining an illustrious cast in her latest film, Widows, willowy Australian beauty Elizabeth Debicki is charmingly unaffected despite her soaring fame.
Elizabeth Debicki is in the back of a car driving through London, her current home. She has just returned from the Toronto Film Festival, where her latest film, Widows, an all-female heist movie by revered director Steve McQueen, had its world premiere. Later she will fly to Italy to start shooting her next movie alongside Mick Jagger. Yes, Mick Jagger. “I mean, I’m not sure where to put that in my head,” she says laughingly of working with the Rolling Stone. “What do I do? Do I sit next to him at lunch? Do I bow down? I’m pretty excited!” It is easy to forget Debicki is still a relative newcomer, such has been her extraordinary trajectory from studying drama at the Victoria College of the Arts in Melbourne to the dizzying heights of the upper echelons of Hollywood. It has only been seven years since her film debut – a brief appearance in A Few Best Men, which was followed in quick succession by The Great Gatsby, The Man From U.N.K.L.E., Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Breath and TV’s The Night Manager and The Kettering Incident. And she is still only 28, although her maturity and calm demeanour makes her seem much older.
It is a transformative period for Debicki. For every actress there are certain roles that leave a lasting impact both professionally and personally. For Nicole Kidman, it was donning a fake nose to play Virginia Woolf in The Hours; for Naomi Watts it was as the Hollywood hopeful Betty in Mulholland Drive; for Cate Blanchett it was as Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth: The Golden Age; and for Margot Robbie it was Tonya Harding in I, Tonya. While Debicki’s turn as pro golfer Jordan Baker in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby catapulted her into the spotlight in 2013, her role as the Polish-born American widow and domestic violence victim Alice in Widows has left a deeper personal impact.
Twelve months earlier, on the Chicago film set of Widows, Debicki was shining among an impressive cast when Vogue visited. Oscar-winner Viola Davis walked in the room all confidence and wearing a Wonder Woman T-shirt (appropriate given her on and off-screen status as the group’s ring leader); action star Michelle Rodriguez had a sly swagger and amusing attitude; and Cynthia Erivo brought a bright-eyed excitement befitting her relative newcomer status. Upstairs in a grand ballroom, underneath the world’s largest stunning Tiffany glass dome, Colin Farrell was preparing his scene with Hollywood legend Robert Duvall, who was receiving direction from McQueen, the director behind the Oscar-winning 12 Years A Slave. Then there was Debicki, the Australian who stands out in any crowd because of her statuesque blonde beauty (she is 1.9 metres tall) and lights up any screen with her electrifying performances. She was all grace and clear focus.
McQueen had met Debicki briefly at a film premiere a few years ago, then was recommended to ask her to audition for Widows after hearing about the rave reviews of her performance in the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of The Maids, in which Debicki starred opposite Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert.
“There is no if, but, or maybe about it, when you are exceptional, people make exceptions, and Elizabeth Debicki is exceptional,” McQueen says.
“The sky is the limit with Elizabeth as far as where her career could go; she’s just exceptionally talented and she has the power to go wherever her character needs, and I’m not saying this lightly – I’ve worked with people like Michael Fassbender and, of course, Viola [Davis], and others of a certain kind of calibre people who I would say are great, and Elizabeth has that capability. How, why, I don’t know, but some people have it and other people don’t and she’s got it.”
Davis concurs, adding that Debicki is: “a great artist, very mature, has great instincts, completely transforms … she’s just one of those actresses you’ve got. Australia has got a lot of them – Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman – and she’s just up there with the greatest, and she’s also an awesome human being.”
For Debicki, creating Alice’s journey from traumatic abuse in a patriarchal world to finding her strength as a woman helped “give muscle” to her own self-doubts, just as she is herself finding her way up the Hollywood ladder. She admits her “muscle of confidence” around her work is getting stronger, and it helped relating to Alice’s Polish upbringing – Debicki was born in Paris to a Polish father and Australian mother, who were ballet dancers.
“I don’t have any connections to the abuse of Alice, but I do have experience on a deep, personal level of the understanding of the patriarchy of the Polish culture that she faces, and how oppressed women can be under that system,” she says. “I know how obnoxious and poisonous abuse and depression in all degrees can deeply affect a woman. I have seen that happen in many, many different ways, both extreme and not extreme. That’s why I did feel a connection with Alice, and I felt like I did know what that connection was between her and her husband.
“She was a really traumatic character to be dwelling in, so it was a heavy world to be in,” Debicki says. “And yet what happens to Alice throughout the film is so empowering, for a woman to actually find that she is worth something is such an enormous discovery, probably the most enormous that you can make as a human being. Even now she resonates. And I think that women are constantly going through examples of that … so many of us are going through versions of that all the time. I know that I have been going through versions of that in my life.
“When you’re an actor it can be so on the nose, you wonder: ‘Am I worthless? Did I do a good job? Do they want me? Is it good? Are people receiving it well?’ It’s so surface-level sometimes, so of course there are all the deep ripples of that in women’s lives because you know, we are deep creatures and can dwell under the surface, I think.”
I ask if she still suffers self-doubt, despite the calibre of projects she has worked on and acclaimed actors she has starred alongside.
“It’s interesting, because it’s almost like it exists in two separate universes that kind of go along almost parallel to each other,” she says. “There’s one where I feel this strength that is accumulated experiences from working with people and learning lessons, sometimes
“The sky is the limit with Elizabeth as far as where her career could go; she’s just exceptionally talented and she has the power to go wherever her character needs”
[learning] the hard way, which can be really terrifying … [but] then you achieve it and get to the other side and look back and think: ‘I did it’ and it takes a lot to really pat myself on the back for it.
“But on the creative side, as an artist going into a job, it is almost shockingly like day one every time. But I’m starting to appreciate that in a funny way; I’ve been starting to consolidate my feelings for a while now. The fear that exists around a job and diving back into a job is sort of a beautiful thing. It is like an engine under you. There are degrees of it, of course, that you don’t want to be debilitating. Like: I’m shooting a job in Italy in a week and it’s a job that I’m really excited about. Even this morning I woke up and felt huge gratitude that I am able to play this role and work with the great actors on it, and I’m completely stupid and on edge about it. It won’t be until I smash a few days out on set that I will feel a bit more like myself. But every job is like a new job, so they do go along like two separate paths: one is getting stronger around the work itself, and the other is still always like your first day at school, you don’t know where to sit or if you can do it. But I’m okay with it as well, because a lot of people that I know, love, respect and admire feel the same way, so it is like the world is completely insane but it also seems to be a shared experience, and I don’t mind it.”
She admits to suffering a little imposter syndrome – feeling like she is still treading water under the surface while outwardly pretending everything is fine (it helps being a good actress). “I guess how I feel about the core of Alice is about strength and weakness or feeling like you don’t have a voice in the world. But again, like I said, you might be worth something. You think someone’s career is this or that, but on the inside of life I always feel like a duck, or swan or whatever bird is sailing on the surface of the water, but madly underneath trying to figure out who I am or what I’m doing.” She then deadpans: “I will let you decide whether I’m the duck or swan …” Given her stature and elegance, it’s a no-brainer, and I offer that she is most definitely the swan. Debicki laughs: “Half duck, half swan!”
Debicki is one of those rare actors who has managed to keep her private life private. She is not on social media and doesn’t do selfies. Although she admits to taking one recently with Jacki Weaver, who plays her mother in Widows. “I had met Jacki before, we had been to a wedding together and all I knew of her was that she was an angel, the coolest woman of all time!
“I’ve always been a private person. I feel like the thing I want out in the world is my work and I’ve always believed – and it’s the way I approach my work – that me and the work are separate. I think that people with social media can blur it so beautifully, and I respect that, but it’s not really how I am and I just want the work to speak and people to receive it the way they will without anything influencing it. I just want people to know me for my work,” she says.
She has a reputation of being rather aloof, yet in person has a surprisingly dry, self-deprecating sense of humour and can she can hit the dance floor with the best of the party. I ask if the public has a different perception to the real Elizabeth Debicki.
“People often think I’m quite calm and confident, but we know that’s not the truth!” she says, laughing. “The other thing is people see what they need and want to see, and I’m fine for that to happen. I’ll just be that open canvas and people can project what they would like to … that’s the weird thing about our job as actors, we’re there for the projecting upon.”
Widows is in Australian cinemas on November 22.