When it comes to special skills, Elizabeth Debicki is filling up her résumé fast.
The actress recently added sheepshearing, a skill she learnt on location for our shoot. “It was very hard work,” she says with a grin. “They buck around and they’re really heavy.” Shooting on the remote Haddon Rig Merino Stud in country New South Wales was a treat. “I love the bush,” she proclaims. “I crave it.”
As a child growing up in Melbourne, she would often go for country drives and she still takes day trips out to Bendigo or Ballarat. “I haven’t been everywhere in the world, but I always think it’s the most beautiful place. The light is so extraordinary, the sunsets, the air and that gum-tree smell is so beautiful.”
The Sydney cafe where we meet for breakfast couldn’t be more different, and as Debicki walks through the door, hipsters enjoying their ristrettos pause. At over six feet tall, with blonde hair and luminous skin, she is elegantly striking. The 22-year-old embraces her height, sporting a dramatic long black vintage dress with a white flower print and shoulder pads, but appears unaware of the stir she is causing.
That striking athletic physique helped win her the part of a lifetime. Barely a year after graduating from the School of Performing Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, Debicki was cast in Baz Luhrmann’s eagerly anticipated The Great Gatsby as Jordan Baker, the love interest for the film’s narrator Nick Carraway and best friend to Gatsby’s great love, Daisy. She relished the role, finding Baker liberating to play. “She was really ballsy and incredibly dishonest and calculated, and all those things that in real life you try not to be,” she says. “Whatever happened to her to make her like that, she just went about everything in her own way and didn’t care what people thought.”
“It sounds clichéd to say it,
but he is a visionary –
and that’s an amazing thing
to come into contact with.”
Baker is also a professional golfer, an unusual career choice for women in the 1920s, and something Debicki feels was important to author F. Scott Fitzgerald. “It was a nod to the modern woman. She did what she wanted to do and she could make a lot of money from it. She didn’t need a man to buy her all those ridiculous jewels.”
Debicki had never played golf before, but trained hard in preparation for the role and discovered she had a good swing. “I had this lovely instructor, and I think he felt like I’d missed my calling. He was like: ‘Forget about this acting.’”
With Luhrmann and designer Catherine Martin’s legendary attention to detail, walking onto the set each day was astonishing. “[It was] a dream, really, as an actor to have something that’s so complete and detailed and made you really feel like you stepped into the book of that time.” On set she would often look up from rereading the novel to see the scene playing out before her eyes. “It was a feast.”
The otherwise eloquent Debicki pauses to find the best words to describe working with Luhrmann. “It sounds clichéd to say it, but he is a visionary – and that’s an amazing thing to come into contact with.” She had a similar experience with Martin. “CM is a genius,” she says. “It’s not very often that you meet people that you can genuinely say that about. But they both are.”
When asked what it feels like to be thrust into the spotlight, and what will surely be an international storm, Debicki demurs. “I just pretend that it isn’t coming. I have my theories about it, but you can’t really prepare for something when you’re not sure what it is.” Instead she wants to focus on her next project. She’s keeping details hush-hush for the moment, saying merely: “It’s nice to be here auditioning and working.”
And she’s not fazed by the news that Gatsby’s release date has been delayed by six months. In fact, she’s grateful for it, because the anticipation was all-consuming. “I think as soon as you let go of things like that, the universe gives you something else.” We can’t wait to see what that will be.
Published in Vogue Australia December 2012
WHY DON’T YOU READ:
Catherine Martin on designing Gatsby
Rooney Mara on the part of a lifetime
