Odessa Young

Odessa Young is an Australian actress known for her performances across television, film, and theatre. She gained prominence through her early roles in the Nine Network drama series Tricky Business and the 2015 feature films Looking for Grace and The Daughter, establishing herself as a prominent talent in film and television.

Young grew up in Australia with her father, Adam, a musician, and her mother, Rachel, a writer. She began taking after-school acting classes at eleven years old and attended a performing arts high school in Sydney, where she took part in theatre productions. Two days after turning eighteen, she moved from Sydney to Los Angeles, California, before relocating two years later to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York.

Her professional acting career began at age eleven when she was cast through her drama teacher in the Australian children's show My Place. She subsequently appeared in television series such as Wonderland and Tricky Business before moving into feature films. In 2015, she played the title role in Looking for Grace alongside Radha Mitchell, and co-starred in The Daughter with Geoffrey Rush and Sam Neill after adjusting her audition to portray a less mature character.

For her performance in The Daughter, Young received critical acclaim, winning the 2016 AACTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role as well as a Best Actress award from the Australian Film Critics Association. In 2015, Elle Magazine dubbed her "Australia's brightest rising star." She went on to star as Genevieve in the 2017 web series High Life, earning the International Academy of Web Television Award for Best Lead Actress – Drama and Best Actress at the 2018 Vancouver Web Series Festival.

In 2018, Young starred in the films Assassination Nation and A Million Little Pieces. She made her off-Broadway debut that same year playing the radical Quinn in Days of Rage at the Tony Kiser Theater, followed by her role as Emily in The Mother at the Atlantic Theater Company in winter 2019. Her later film projects include playing Rose in Shirley (2020), Jane Fairchild in the British film Mothering Sunday (2021), and a role in Manodrome (2023).

On television, Young was cast in 2019 to star as Frannie in the miniseries adaptation of The Stand, which aired in 2020 featuring a new coda co-written by Stephen King. In 2020, she participated in a charity reading of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest for Acting for a Cause. Vogue named her one of six actors to watch in 2021. In June 2024, she was cast in the film Deliver Me from Nowhere, playing a love interest opposite Jeremy Allen White.