Alycia Debnam-Carey thinks I should see an astrologer. “Take it with a grain of salt,” she warns, Zooming from her Los Angeles home. This morning, she’s already been on a live morning show for her Netflix movie, It’s What’s Inside, and later today, she’s hosting girlfriends for a night-in. But this afternoon, Debnam-Carey’s aura is nothing but present as she echoes through the screen, tucking her brunette hair behind her ears and folding pearly hands before her.

“I’ve never done it before,” I remark. “Do it!” she laughs heartily, like wind chimes clinking against one another on a neighbor’s front porch. For some, banking destiny on the stars is unreliable. But the actor doesn’t mind getting a reading every now and then. She shrugs, simply, “Why not?”

“Some of the things they’ve said are amazing,” she says. “[But one time] I saw this astrologer because my friends were all desperate for some kind of guidance. I remember he was terrible.” The forecaster had recommended a single-and-ready- to-mingle Debnam-Carey to walk around a park and meet a man. “I was like, ‘Do you want me to die?’” she laughs again, wind chimes ringing.

For the skeptics in the room, not all of her readings have been inaccurate. “I’ve had astrologers since who have been quite spooky, right? Very intuitive. This one person was like, ‘You have a very signature mark on your life. The way you operate in the world has a signature taste.’” Whether it’s the way she gives people flowers, gifts, or notes, the astrologer had a premonition about Debnam-Carey, one that she takes with her to this very day. In this world, she leaves a mark wherever she flows—a mark that’s irrevocably, distinctly Alycia.

And it shows. Since moving to Hollywood from Sydney, Australia over a decade ago to pursue acting, Debnam-Carey has been at the helm of her own future, with or without a clairvoyant on her side. At 18 years old, her every move was followed by Next Stop Hollywood, a docuseries that charts the trajectory of Australian actors as they audition for pilot episodes in LA. Debnam-Carey, the youngest cast member on the show, was one of the first Next Stoppers to book a gig. Now, she has her sights set on the success of It’s What’s Inside, a sci-fi thriller about a group of friends who drudge up long-buried secrets and desires by playing a body-switching board game.

She didn’t quite expect to see the film, which she calls the “unexpected, little indie that could,” to go so far. While her team filmed the project two years ago, it made its global premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Three days after its screening, It’s What’s Inside became one of the largest sales in Sundance history when Netflix acquired it for a mind-bending $17 million. She says, holding her breath, “I think we were all waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Out of an eight-member ensemble, Debnam-Carey plays Nikki, a self-absorbed social media influencer. However, the process of getting into character was anything but vain: “Because we were all involved from the very beginning, it meant that we were all picking up little bits and pieces, and everyone was just really generous. I think if one person had too much of an ego, it probably wouldn’t have been so easy, but everyone was really game to play,” she adds.

Being “game to play” is a theme that has permeated the actor’s journey since the inception of her career. She got her American start after saying yes to the cultish horror, The Devil’s Hand, right after narrowly missing the lead in The Carrie Diaries (the prequel to the all-too-popular Sex and the City). Pretty soon, Debnam-Carey went on to accept even darker roles, including the popular Lexa, a commander in the post-apocalyptic CW series The 100. From there, she said yes to playing Alicia in Fear the Walking Dead, the prequel to The Walking Dead. On that set, she spent seven years coated in the things most people tend to squirm at: blood, sweat, and dirt. While the role was catalytic to her proliferating career, she can’t help but acknowledge that being on Fear came with the prospect of living in fear.

“I think it probably wasn’t until I was on Fear for a couple of years that I realized I haven’t come up for air. It had just been sort of like trying to keep my head above water,” she reflects, describing her worries about being forced into the inevitable Hollywood dystopian typecast. While she’s grateful for the show and her longtime fanbase, she also contends that she found herself in the crossroads of extremes: “I was very young. I had adjusted into a sort of fight or flight response a lot of the time,” she says, adding that her body started to meld fake apocalypse sets with her reality.

Fear can do that to a person. It is, after all, a feeling that has existed since the very moment anyone can remember, ingrained into the human psyche as instinct. Although her earliest memory of fear was loss (“You know, the idea of losing someone—this idea of something coming to an end?”), being afraid can happen anywhere, anytime. “[I was] feeling fearful of living in a state of transient life,” she meditates.

It’s hard to imagine walls built around the dynamism of Debnam-Carey, but the actor acknowledges that she built some of the brigades herself. Despite the exhilaration she felt while boarding the flight from Australia to the States all those years ago—leaving her family behind, not knowing if her career would actually take off—she kept an iron grip on her ideal life. “I have to prove I’m good before I can say I’m good,” she said at 18, sitting on camera for her first Next Stop Hollywood episode.

Lately, however, she’s beginning to wonder who or what she’s trying to prove. “This is now this point in my life where I don’t really know what it’s going to look like, but that’s probably the most exciting place to be, because if you planned the idea of what your life is supposed to look like, you’re always going to be comparing it to what it wasn’t,” she says, relinquishing control. “I think now it’s finally all open for exploration, and that’s really exciting. So for me, if anything, I’ve allowed myself to see the joy in that unknown. What am I doing? Who am I?”

Her most recent projects, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (where she plays Alice, an orphaned girl whose abusive father dies in a fire) and It’s What’s Inside are just some of the ways she has started letting go of fear. She admits that this softer approach is foreign, but she’s starting to find her groove: “Relaxing into actually what it is, and who you are and your truer self, that sense of being hums. It is morphing, because you’re not having to fight against yourself. I also want to be having a bit more fun.”

Recently, fun meant traveling to Australia for Samantha Strauss’ upcoming Apple Cider Vinegar, a Netflix limited series inspired by the real-life story of Belle Gibson, a disgraced Australian wellness influencer. Playing the Milla to Kaitlyn Dever’s Belle, Debnam-Carey is excited to take on a role as biting as the series’ namesake. “It’s got gumption and bite, and also a pop and a playfulness. It’s a really in-your-face kind of show,” she says.

Hence, the aforementioned walls are clearly ones Debnam-Carey is intent on tearing down. And luckily for her, her groundedness is so surprising that it disarms, with her casual ethereality practically bursting through her smile lines and swirling from her taupe lips.The young actor tries to not be encumbered by fear. Instead, she shifts perspective. That’s what optimists do, after all. Take, for example, days spent with the Fear cast scrubbing their hands, which were more often than not sticky and stained red from fake blood. Debnam-Carey tries not to watch the blood rush down the drain. Instead, she’s laughing at being lathered in men’s shaving cream—the makeup trailer’s special antidote to washing out red dye. “That’s the fastest way to get it off. I came out smelling like my dad,” she chimes.

Debnam-Carey, the self-prescribed sentimental type, holds onto memories like this. She’s romantic in that way. I point out the handwritten cards propped up on the desk behind her, which she turns around to proudly face. “Two of them are from mom. My mom does a lot of art and prints, and so every year she’ll make a beautiful card and print it, and then write a beautiful message on it. I, in turn, kind of do the same thing,” she explains, rustling below her to grab something. Now, she’s pulling out a dark green accordion diary and holding up other letters to the screen, flashing black-and-white images up against the camera.

Little cards, doodled flowers, phone numbers from people at parties, they’re all a part of that distinctive tactile Alycia-flair, the one her astrologer pointed out from the start. So, if she begins every project, every memory, every new chapter not with fear, but with an open and sacred sentimentality, where does she end? And where does she go next? 

She doesn’t entirely know. But she does have confidence in an “opportunity sparkle,” a phrase she once heard long ago. As she wonders where it came from, what she knows for sure is that her life’s milestones are defined by that sparkle. Holding branches while playing in her family’s backyard mango tree. Riding in the backseat of a car during an eight-hour family holiday down the coast. Seeing zombies run towards her on the Fear set for the first time. And, two years ago, rehearsing for It’s What’s Inside, knowing nothing of what’s to come but still giving into that ceaseless, sparkling feeling. Being on set, she knew it when she saw that faint, tingling glimmer: “It’s that intuition. Sometimes it comes in like the feeling of summer.” And even in a world of apathy, Debnam-Carey’s opportunity sparkle means she’s driving forward with a sense of bewilderment, not hopelessness.

So, where did that phrase come from—opportunity sparkle? In a dream, perhaps. Maybe someone said it on set. Or, maybe, it’s infused in a hallowed memory, like the night she begged her mother to play Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” as she twirled along the Sydney harbor. There must’ve been something in those twinkling lights, something hushed and holy about the glowing possibility of a “big, old, exciting, full world.” That could’ve been it. Or, who knows, maybe it was just another astrologer. 

Photographed by Ben Lamberty at Defacto Inc

Styled by John Tan

Written by Julia Zara

Hair: Marco Santini at Walter Schupfer Management

Makeup: Quinn Murphy at The Wall Group

Flaunt Film: Tyler Rabin and Jabari Browne

Sound Design: Lucas Doya

Location: Temple Bar

‍