This interview was conducted prior to the start of the SAG-AFTRA strike.
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 color (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 realizes 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!”
Debnam-Carey was home in Sydney s inner west in early 2021 when she first heard about Prime Video s adaptation of Holly Ringland s bestselling novel The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, about the legacy of intergenerational trauma. For the entirety of her 20s, Debnam-Carey has lives in LA while starring in two beloved cult shows, both post-apocalyptic and harrowing: The 100, about survivors of a nuclear apocalypse, and Fear the Walking Dead, a spin-off of the phenomenally popular zombie franchise The Walking Dead, which remains one of the most-watched television shows of the decade. At the end of the seventh season of Fear, Debnam-Carey s character met her end. For 10 years, she says, Fear had been her whole identity; she celebrated every birthday of her 20s at Comic-Con promoting the show. “I was like, I need to branch out. I need to reinvent, and feel fresh, and grow and challenge myself.” She was also, she admits, “desperate to come home.” Lost Flowers appeared before her like a miracle.
“Flower fields and the Australian bust, and the earth, and this sun-kissed farm girl coming-of-age in this challenging drama,” Debnam-Carey reels off. “It was just like: I need it. I want it. And it’s mine. And I’ve never had any feeling like this before.”
We’re sitting inside Sydney Modern’s restaurant, waiting for lunch to arrive. Debnam-Carey is an excellent date: bubbly, earnest, a bundle of bright, effervescent energy, clad comfortably in an oversized black suit from the Frankie Shop, hands jammed with golden rings. As a child, she says, she was strong-willed. “I knew what I liked. I knew what I didn’t like.” She smiles mischievously. “Focused. Perfectionist. Very determined.” These are all characteristics she still has today; the traits that drove her to excel in her studies at Newtown Performing Arts and led her to acting. She channeled that same determination into auditioning for the role of Alice in Lost Flowers, whose journey of self-discovery, set against the Australian outback and a history of family violence, is the backbone of the series. She was filming the final season of Fear “in a field in Texas” when she found out that she had won the role. “It felt like winning the lottery.”
“We underwent a massive search to find an actress who could embody this extraordinarily complex character of Alice,” shares producer Jodi Matterson, who alongside Bruna Papandrea is behind Lost Flowers. “When I saw [Alycia’s] first audition, she was a revelation. She effortlessly brought strength, vulnerability, and truth to the character.” Director Glendyn Ivin says that he “could tell she was ready for something different” after Fear. “We tested some pretty intense scenes, a lot of crying, and Alycia wasn’t afraid to commit. She moved me to tears. I loved that about her.”
Ringland’s original novel is beloved; both Matterson and Debnam-Carey are fans. There were “vivid scenes” the actor had held in her head since first reading the book. “[Alice] eating the peaches from the tin in the dusty dirt in the sundress with yellow printed flowers all over it,” she recounts. “When we shot that, it was really powerful for me.” Ringland says she was floored by Debnam-Carey’s performance. “She left me speechless,” the author admits. “There she was, Alice Hart, right in front of my eyes, exactly as I’d imagined and created her. Earthy, grounded, hopeful, strong, vulnerable, angry, and deeply traumatized, but still so full of inextinguishable light and an undimmed sense of wonder.” For Debnam-Carey, Lost Flowers is full of serendipity.
There’s the fact that her first ever role when she was just eight—in Rachel Ward’s short film Martha’s New Coat—was shot in the same town that served as the location for Thornfield, the flower farm belonging to Alice’s grandmother, played in the series by the legendary Sigourney Weaver. Or that she’s a “real flower nerd.” (An hour into our gallery excursion she reveals that she draws them as a mindfulness technique. “So on brand,” she says, rolling her eyes a little.) Or that as a teenager she was cast by Baz Luhrmann to appear in an “extraordinary tableau” he was staging of the Virgin Mary dragging Jesus Christ from the cross that would serve as an inspiration for a painting that would—bear with us—eventually hang inside the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong. (This, like most Baz Luhrmann stories, is so wild it can only be true.) The painter? Vincent Fantauzzo, none other than the multiple Archibald Prize-winning artist husband of Asher Keddie, Debnam-Carey’s co-star in Lost Flowers. “I told Asher ... you’re going to think I’m insane,” Debnam-Carey laughs, her face alive with the story. “And she was like, ‘We have the print in our house! And I didn’t realize it was you!’”
Debnam-Carey’s passion for the series radiates off her. She talks animatedly about filming in Alice Springs in the ancient gorges where her character eventually finds refuge. “The sunsets there are just unreal! You’re seeing these pink and purple streaks across the sky, and they’re mirrored in the watering hole,” she reminisces. “It was just magical.” Working with the tight-knit team in Australia’s Northern Territory was “wholesome”; cast and crew swimming together at lunch and firing up the barbecue. “It brought me back to when I was eight, filming Martha’s New Coat. It felt like the circus had come to town, and we’re all making a play together and we get to dress up and laugh and share ideas.” To handle Lost Flowers’s sensitive subject matter, Debnam-Carey spoke often with director Ivin about avoiding “trauma porn” and creating a safe environment for all on set. The actor swears by a routine of “taking a shower, trying to leave it there” to switch off after difficult scenes. (“There were days where Alycia would have to ‘cry’ all day on set and she would leave set totally drained but smiling,” Ivin marvels.) But she was also supported by her co-stars, led by Weaver as June, Alice’s forthright grandmother, Leah Purcell as June’s steadfast partner Twig, Tilda Cobham-Hervey as Alice’s mother Agnes, and Keddie as Agnes’s confidante Sally. “They’re all such powerhouses,” Debnam-Carey enthuses. The experience of making Lost Flowers in Australia continues to inspire Debnam-Carey: “I wanna work on a film back here,” she exclaims, declaring Sydney is her “soul home.” It’s a city full of family and friends, “really good food,” and swimming in the ocean. Whenever she comes home, she stays at her parents’ place in the inner west and sleeps in her childhood bedroom. It’s a humbling experience. (“Back again,” she laughs. “Still single.”)
Her goals for the future are clear: a period drama or “something a little bit more light and comedic, maybe.” But before all that, she grins, “I’m going to Italy.’’ She hasn’t had a proper holiday in 10 years; this month she is off to Puglia with a bunch of her girlfriends—her oldest mates from Sydney as well as newer ones from Hollywood—to celebrate her 30th birthday. “I’m buying a ridiculous wardrobe for it,” she says. “I’m on the Real Real all the time like, Mmhmm, I do need that Tom Ford for Gucci dress!” Debnam-Carey loves fashion. She is a friend of Dior and Cartier and name-checks ’90s Kate Moss and Carrie Bradshaw as her style icons. “I just want to eat pasta and drink wine and wear cute outfits,” she sums up, of her Italian birthday plans. “Is that too much to ask?”
But how is she feeling about turning 30? “I’m actually really excited,” she says. “I think my 20s were frantic ... fueled with so much of my own pressure and expectation of what I needed to achieve.” She’s learned to embrace “pockets of peace” and to trust in herself, especially after putting her hand up to direct an episode of Fear in her final season. “I used to feel so inadequate in rooms, like, Oh, they’re not gonna think I’m good enough,” Debnam-Carey muses. “I finally feel like I can check myself ... You do have the experience to back yourself up. You can trust your instincts. You do know what you’re doing.”
This article originally appeared on vogue.com.au. The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is on Prime Video from August 4.