ELIZABETH DEBICKI Woman on the Verge

THE 14TH RECIPIENT OF THE WOMEN IN FILM MAX MARA FACE OF THE FUTURE AWARD, ELIZABETH DEBICKI TALKS TO ZANETA CHENG ABOUT DEFINING HERSELF AS AN ACTRESS AND NAVIGATING AN INDUSTRY STILL GRAPPLING WITH ITS TREATMENT OF WOMEN

She’s pretty, don’t you think?” remarks a friend while we’re watching Widows one evening on holiday. I take a closer look at Alice, the abused and arguably most oppressed character in the critically acclaimed Steve McQueen heist movie. She’s shaped in the movie by the men she’s with and even by Viola Davis’s character Veronica. Alice is pretty in a delicate sort of way, but it’s hard to define because she is wan and her face more often than not communicates defeat.

I’m surprised because Alice’s face doesn’t trigger the competitiveness that a comment like that would usually summon. Perhaps it’s because I’m watching her in a scene where she’s staring at her tear-stained face in her vanity mirror, having just lost her abusive husband, and she’s being berated by her mother to pull herself together and to use her remaining femininity to go into prostitution. I don’t feel competitive so much as indignant.

Alice is more than her looks. Alice has to be more than her looks because she’s a victim of being blonde-haired, blue-eyed “pretty”.

Then something about her face clicks. It had been a few weeks since I met Elizabeth Debicki in Milan at Fashion Week, fresh from the announcement that Max Mara had awarded her its 2019 Women in Film Max Mara Face of the Future Award. At the time, she was impeccably dressed in the Italian brand, hair slicked back, face perfectly madeup – almost entirely unrecognisable from the listless blonde