Phoebe Tonkin, the long detour from Cleo Sertori to Frances Bell

She spent fourteen years playing witches, mermaids and werewolves before Australia gave her the role that finally let her play a person. The AACTA win was almost twenty years in the making — and the next bet, this time, she is producing herself.

For most of her twenties, Phoebe Tonkin moved through supernatural franchises with a kind of suspended poise — present, polished, unmistakably the lead, but always one decision away from the work she actually wanted. The mermaid show was a global hit. The CW witches were popular. The vampire spin-off ran for five seasons and made her a recognisable face from Manila to Madrid. None of it, by her own quieter admission later, was the work she would still want to be talking about at thirty-five. So when she walked onstage at Home of the Arts on the Gold Coast to accept the AACTA Award for Best Lead Actress in a Drama Series — for a Brisbane-set Netflix limited series in which she plays a recovering heroin addict — it wasn’t only the performance that registered. It was the closing of a long argument with her own résumé.

She grew up in Mosman, on Sydney’s north shore, with the kind of childhood that tends to produce performers: classical ballet at four, hip-hop and tap soon after, then the Australian Theatre for Young People at the Wharf Theatre from age twelve. By the time Phoebe Jane Elizabeth Tonkin graduated from Queenwood School for Girls, she had already been cast as Cleo Sertori in H2O: Just Add Water, the Network Ten fantasy series that would air to a worldwide audience of more than 250 million across three seasons. She wasn’t a strong swimmer when she was hired. She learned.

That show was Phase One. Phase Two began with a one-way flight to Los Angeles, the Australian feature debut Tomorrow, When the War Began freshly behind her, and a CW pilot waiting. She was cast as Faye Chamberlain in The Secret Circle, and Variety put her on its “new faces to watch” list before the show was even cancelled. The CW kept her: she crossed over into The Vampire Diaries as Hayley, a werewolf with a complicated past, and from there into The Originals, where she carried the show across five seasons as Hayley Marshall — half mother, half werewolf-vampire hybrid, fully central. It was steady, prestigious-by-genre work. It was also, increasingly, a cage with a velvet lining.

The critical layer, the one Tonkin and her interviewers tend to circle without quite naming, is that the post-Originals years were not a smooth pivot. There was no immediate prestige drama waiting on the other side of the cage. She directed a short, Furlough, in 2016. She did the Emmy-winning SBS miniseries Safe Harbour, playing a doctor unmoored by a refugee-rescue gone wrong. She played Young Gwen across two seasons of Stan’s Australian science-fiction drama Bloom. She had a small role in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, which most audiences associate with Margot Robbie rather than the Australian actress in the bullfight sequence. None of these performances broke through in the way the supernatural years had. Cumulatively, though, they were the case she was building for the next casting director who would actually look at it.

That casting director was at Brouhaha Entertainment, and the script was Trent Dalton’s adaptation of his own novel. In Boy Swallows Universe, Tonkin plays Frances Bell, the mother of two boys growing up in 1980s Brisbane, the recovering-then-relapsing addict at the centre of a story that demands both bruised tenderness and the kind of quiet menace that doesn’t let the camera look away. Dalton himself, more generous than novelists usually are about adaptations, said her performance reminded him why he wrote the book in the first place. The 2024 Logie nomination came; the 2025 AACTA win followed; the show pulled a record twenty-two AACTA nominations in total. In the same window she was nominated again — Best Lead Actress in a Film — for the period drama Kid Snow, where critics generally treated her as the most interesting thing on a screen the rest of the film couldn’t quite match.

What she has done with that momentum is the part of the story still being written. The Dark Lake, a crime series adapted from Sarah Bailey’s novel, will be her first lead-and-executive-produce credit; she plays Detective Gemma Woodstock, a grieving mother investigating the murder of her high-school nemesis, and she is producing alongside the team that delivered Boy Swallows Universe. Two Years Later, an eight-part romantic dramedy for Paramount+ co-starring Brenton Thwaites, wrapped filming in Brisbane and is scheduled to stream this year — a tonal experiment, post-pandemic in setting, comedic in places, the sort of register she has rarely been hired in. Both are Australian-made. Both are anchored to the country she left at twenty-one and only in the last few years has begun to use as her primary creative base.

Off-camera, she married the art advisor and curator Bernard Lagrange at All Souls Church in Manhattan on 10 May 2025, in a custom Chanel couture gown — Chanel and Tiffany & Co. have been her two long-running brand partnerships, and her front-row appearances at Paris Fashion Week have made her, in the Australian press’s preferred phrase, a fashion fixture rather than a fashion item. Lagrange studied art history at Princeton and works at Sotheby’s, with an advisory role at Gagosian. The wedding party included Claire Holt, the friend she has now worked with on three separate shows; Teresa Palmer, with whom she co-founded the long-defunct wellness venture YourZenLife in 2012; Margot Robbie; and a guest list weighted heavily toward Australians who, like her, took the long way to becoming themselves.

The Dark Lake has yet to announce a release date. Two Years Later premieres on Paramount+ in 2026. What comes after that, on the evidence of the last three years, will be hers to commission as much as to perform.