Alycia Debnam-Carey has an idea. We’ll go for a walk, she says, her Sydney “best kept secret”: the winding path from Bradleys Head to Chowder Bay, visions of the Harbour Bridge hovering around every corner. When we meet for this interview, the actor will have just landed in her hometown after the 14-hour flight from Los Angeles, her other hometown for the past decade. She’ll be jet-lagged!
She will want to walk! Except then she looks up the forecast. Bitterly cold rain, and a lot of it. This will not do. It is a long walk, maybe too long, actually, for an interview. (Even though, as I discover, Debnam-Carey has a lot of things to say.) “We would just be walking. For hours,” she laughs. We are not on the walk. Instead, we are at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, because this was Debnam-Carey’s other brilliant idea: the Archibald Prize is on. Wouldn’t that be nice on a rainy Thursday morning? As it turns out, lots of other people have had the exact same idea as Debnam-Carey. The Archibald Prize is packed. Though nobody seems to have clocked that the star of Fear the Walking Dead or next month’s The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, with three million Instagram followers hanging off her every post, is perusing the paintings among them.
Debnam-Carey says she doesn’t know much about the technicalities of art, but the fact is that she knows the only thing there is to know, which is that good art–the best art–is something that moves you. She looks for a long time at a portrait of the artist Atong Atem by Shevaun Wright and Sophia Hewson, who captured the painter, hauntingly still, in a landscape of her memories. She loves Kaylene Whiskey’s self-portrait, a riot of colour (and Dolly Parton). In the next room, we spot Laura Jones’s rendering of Claudia Karvan backstage at the Sydney Theatre Company. “How great is that green light?” Debnam-Carey enthuses, pointing out the shadow of neon falling across Karvan’s face.
“Now I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s backstage: it’s the spotlight.’” We reach the end of the exhibition and Debnam-Carey realises that we, the people, are the arbiters of the People’s Choice Award. She takes this task very seriously. “I feel like I need to do another whip around,” she notes gravely. Eventually, she settles on Whiskey’s painting and dutifully casts her vote. Debnam-Carey turns to me with a smile. “Well, wasn’t that a delight!”