Odessa Young Has a Hungry Heart, and a Starring Role in the Springsteen Biopic

Ask Odessa Young what she does for a living and she might not say she’s an actor. Especially when she’s doing this: chatting with a journalist over breakfast at the sceney Sunset Tower. Young is makeup free, wearing a simple white T-shirt, comfortable black pants, and some deli-cate jewelry. She’s been curled up in a booth by the pool, soaking up her last few hours in Los Angeles before going back to set—where she’ll feel like a real actor again.

Young has been acting professionally since she was 11 years old—and delivering daring work in art house dramas since her breakout performance in the bloody, provocative 2018 slasher Assassination Nation. “Odessa is fearless, gutsy, and raw,” says her Assassination costar Hari Nef. “She looks like an ingenue but doesn’t act like one. That contrast is magnetic.” Those projects have cast the native Australian opposite many of the internet’s current boyfriends, including Logan Lerman (in Shirley), Josh O’Connor (in Mothering Sunday), and Jacob Elordi (in The Narrow Road to the Deep North).

Next she’s playing Jeremy Allen White’s muse in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, out in October. As her first studio movie, it’s a major step up for Young—and a much bigger spotlight. “No longer an indie darling,” the 27-year-old says with a smirk.

As a chameleonic actor, she’s a bit uneasy with the idea of potentially getting a lot of attention for this role. Young admits she’s still navigating what the film could mean for her career—but intends to keep taking measured steps, as she has from the start. “Nothing has ever happened quickly for me, and I think that’s for a very good reason,” she says. “It means that I have become more and more solidified in what I actually want.”

The soundtrack to Young’s life is Bruce Springsteen. Though Young was raised in Sydney, her parents—her father is a musician and her mother is a writer—were big fans of The Boss. “When I listened to his music, I was hearing the story of my family,” she says. “So I had been completely and utterly obsessed with him for most of my life.”

After some success on Australian TV shows and films, Young dropped out of her performing arts high school. She moved to Los Angeles two days after her 18th birthday, living with her agent’s coworker’s assistant. “I was really young, and I felt older than I could feel ever again in my life,” she says. With that naivete comes the sort of confidence that’s only possible when you’re 18. “I had metal skin. There was nothing touching me.” She spent a few years in Los Angeles before moving to New York, where she still lives. But wherever she goes, Springsteen comes along. “Give me a scenario, I’ll give you a song,” Young says when asked about his influence on her. At one of her lower points, she listened to “Drive All Night” on repeat—but Springsteen’s 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town is her favorite.

When she heard that a Springsteen movie was in the works, Young told her agents to get her a role—any role at all. Though Young got an audition, she was pretty sure she botched the self-tape. “It’s corny, but there was nothing else that mattered in that moment,” she says.

In her despair, she escaped New York, renting a converted school bus for a weekend in New Jersey (which is, of course, Springsteen’s ancestral homeland). She also wrote director Scott Cooper a letter, revealing her lifelong connection to the musician. “I explained that it had been such a privilege to even make the tape in general and be a part of the audition process,” Young says. “I was so excited to see the movie no matter what happened, whether I was a part of it or not.”

A few weeks later, she was offered the part of Springsteen’s love interest. Single mom Faye is a fictional character, an amalgamation of some of the women in his life as he was writing his 1982 album Nebraska. “Her stillness and her ability to communicate volumes with her eyes are real strengths,” says Cooper of Young. “She can convey a whole spectrum of emotions—sorrow, defiance, hope—without saying a word.”

With her first studio movie, Young will have to accept aspects of being an actor she’s largely resisted so far: the press, the promotion, the commodification. “I find gifting suites just anxiety inducing. The junkets are so stressful,” she says. She’s somehow not even on Instagram: “I do think that it is a tool of warfare, basically, at this point in our existence.”

Though Young lives in the East Village with her husband, director David Raboy (they met on their 2019 movie The Giant), and dogs Slim Jim and Hank, her restlessness pulls her to a more nomadic lifestyle. “I’m probably not supposed to have a place that I live a hundred percent of the time,” she says. Luckily, she’s also an actor, with plenty of opportunities to travel for roles—provided she’s finally ready to call herself one.

Throughout: makeup products by Chanel; nail enamel by Dior Vernis. Hair, Bryce Scarlett; Makeup, Nina Park; Manicure, Eriishizu; Tailor, Cocomery. Sittings Editor: Annie Lavie. For details, go to VF.com/credits.