Odessa Young
Odessa Young is an actor, born 1998.
Two Australian films released in 2015 did the work that a decade of auditions usually does. Young had come up on the Nine Network drama Tricky Business, working since her early teens, and then Looking for Grace and The Daughter landed in the same year, the second of them winning her the AACTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Her part in The Daughter is called Hedvig, which tells you which Ibsen it is built from and how much weight a teenager was being asked to carry.
She has spent the years since playing young women under observation. Rose in Shirley is a newlywed being studied by a novelist who wants her for material. Jane Fairchild in Mothering Sunday is a maid moving through a house that barely registers her. Frannie Goldsmith in The Stand has to hold a whole plague epic together by not overplaying it. The common trick is stillness: she gives very little away and makes you lean in for the rest.
The recent run is wider and much less kind to her characters: the vengeful satire of Assassination Nation, Martha Ratliff in The Staircase, a young woman on the wrong side of an American extremist thriller in The Order, Sal in Manodrome. 2025 alone brought The Damned, Black Rabbit, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Faye Romano in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. That is a lot of load-bearing work for an actor still this early on, and very little of it repeats.
Movies (12)
TV (6)
Where to start with Odessa Young
The strongest case for her is Shirley, because the film hands her a genuine adversary and she refuses to shrink: Rose arrives as a houseguest and finishes as the person doing the reading of everyone else. Follow it with Mothering Sunday, which asks her to hold long stretches of screen with almost no dialogue, and then The Daughter, the 2015 film that got everyone's attention in the first place.
The Stand is the biggest showcase and the least efficient one, so come to it once you already like her. Assassination Nation is the loudest thing she has done and earns its place on the pivot from prey to something far angrier. Manodrome and The Order are both small parts in men's stories, well played, and neither is the place to begin.