Odessa Young

Odessa Young is an Australian actress born on January 11, 1998, in Sydney, who built a reputation in her early twenties for taking on roles that most performers her age would sidestep — morally fractured characters, stories soaked in violence or grief, projects that don't exactly promise easy viewing. She came up through Australian television before pivoting decisively toward American independent film, and that pivot turned out to be the right call at the right moment.

The role that genuinely changed things for Young was Jade in Ari Aster's debut feature Hereditary — a small part, but the kind that gets you noticed when the film itself becomes a reference point for an entire generation of horror fans. Then came her lead performance in Josephine Decker's Shirley (2019), opposite Elisabeth Moss, where she played Rose, a young faculty wife slowly drawn into the psychological orbit of horror writer Shirley Jackson. What's striking about that performance is how Young holds her own against Moss in every scene — she doesn't shrink, doesn't overplay, just lets the discomfort accumulate. The film earned strong notices on the festival circuit, and Young's work in it demonstrated something that's become a through-line in her career: she's drawn to stories about women whose interiority is being either suppressed or weaponized by the people around them.

She's worked in genre-adjacent spaces more than once — Shirley sits somewhere between psychological drama and something darker, and her earlier work in the Australian thriller Looking for Grace (2015) showed an instinct for naturalism that she's carried forward. Hard to say if that's a conscious strategy or just the gravitational pull of interesting scripts, but either way it's produced a filmography that doesn't repeat itself much. She appeared in the TV adaptation of Flowers in the Attic and in the Amazon series The Society (2019), where she played Allie Pressman, a teenager thrust into a Lord of the Flies scenario after her town's adults mysteriously vanish. The Society ran one season before Netflix — wait, Amazon — cancelled it despite a second season having already been ordered, which remains one of the more frustrating streaming-era cancellations for fans who'd invested in the show's ensemble dynamics.

Her most recent screen credit brings her into significantly darker territory. The Damned, a 2024 horror film directed by Thordur Palsson, cast Young in a lead role set against a bleak Icelandic landscape — a period piece involving a shipwreck and the moral catastrophe that follows. The Damned is the kind of project that fits Young's pattern almost too neatly: isolated setting, ethical collapse, a character who has to carry enormous weight across a largely wordless visual register. Whether the film reaches the audiences it deserves is partly a distribution question, but as a performance showcase it confirms that Young isn't coasting.

She's in her mid-twenties now. Still early, genuinely. The range she's shown across projects as tonally different as The Society and The Damned suggests an actress who's thinking carefully about what she takes on — not chasing franchise work, not disappearing into prestige television for a decade, but staying in the space where independent film and genre overlap. That's a harder path commercially, but it tends to produce the more durable careers.