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26th Aug 2019
You can learn a lot about a person from first impressions. Having met Australian actress Ashleigh Cummings numerous times – on screen at least – I’m intrigued to meet the woman behind the myriad complex characters she’s embodied. There is the engaging but emotionally scarred Pippa in her upcoming feature The Goldfinch; the gifted young artist who discovers supernatural abilities in the new US television series NOS4A2; the abducted, terrorised but iron-willed schoolgirl Vicki in the Australian psychological horror Hounds of Love, and teenager Debbie in the television remake of the Australian coming-of-age novel Puberty Blues.
When I finally meet Cummings herself she takes one look at the hand I’ve extended and instead grabs me in a bear hug. It speaks volumes about this warm, passionate young woman, who proves to be an entertaining, fascinating and thoughtful conversationalist whose own stories take us from a childhood in Saudi Arabia to Sydney, running away to Los Angeles aged 14; the uncomfortable relationship she’s had with the shiny world of Hollywood and the regular periods she spends living off the grid with African tribes.
But first to The Goldfinch, Cummings’s breakthrough film, an adaptation of Donna Tartt’s cult, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel directed by Brooklyn’s John Crowley, in which she stars alongside Nicole Kidman, Ansel Elgort and Sarah Paulson. The film follows young Theodore Decker, whose life is changed irrevocably during a visit to the Met with his mother, who is killed when a terrorist bombs the museum. Cummings plays the small but seminal role of Pippa, a girl with titian hair who is standing next to Theo, absorbed in Carel Fabritius’s painting The Goldfinch when the bomb detonates, leaving them with a bittersweet bond they will share forever.
The film, which premieres at the Toronto Film Festival in September, was shot in New York, Albuquerque and Amsterdam, and despite her relatively minor role, Cummings was regularly on set.
“It was my first American job and I got to sit back and observe the process. I’ve been really lucky to play the leads a lot and there’s a lot of pressure that comes with that, but with The Goldfinch, I was just excited to [watch].” Working on a film with Kidman was a memorable experience for the 26-year-old, and although the pair didn’t share any scenes their calls often intersected. “Nicole Kidman is someone I’ve looked up to since I was very young and I’ve had lots of parallels with her life – I went to her school [Sydney’s North Sydney Girls High] briefly, her father was my first-ever psychologist and she’s just such a phenomenal, magical actress.”
Cummings is in the middle of an international publicity tour for The Goldfinch, the culmination of a particularly busy period shooting the 10-part series NOS4A2 (pronounced ‘Nosferatu’) on Rhode Island, during which she flew back to Melbourne for just 21 hours for her scenes in the feature film adaptation of the television series, Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears. So Cummings is relishing being back in Sydney for a whole 10 days to spend time with her family and 15-year old poodle.
“As desperate as I was to leave home early on, now I’m desperate to come back. I get more homesick as I get older,” she says.
It is an insightful comment from Cummings, who spent a lot of her youth running away in search of what ultimately proved to be herself. There is no denying Cummings had an unconventional childhood, by Australian standards at least. She was born in the Saudi Arabian port city of Jeddah to father Mike, a radiologist, and mother Cheryl, a sonographer. The couple had travelled to Saudi Arabia in search of adventure and that’s exactly what they found, each ultimately working for the country’s king and queen respectively, with the family, including Cummings’s younger sister and brother, living in a gated community in Riyadh until she was 12.
It was a lively, stimulating but dangerous experience and the children were restricted from leaving the compound, except to travel. It was in Riyadh that Cummings got her first taste for performance, when a fellow Australian founded a performance group that rehearsed and performed covertly, given the strict rules of the presiding Sharia law.
“It was a little bubble of bliss and magic, the heartbeat of our time there in many ways, [because] we were dealing with tough subject matter – mortality – and were at the centre of a lot of violence with the so-called War on Terror,” Cummings says.
Not long after her school was bombed, Cummings’s father received a tip-off that things were about to get dangerously volatile, and two days later the family left on a ‘holiday’, never to return. “It was a wild and enriching and colourful time but ended up having a lot of trauma attached to it and we didn’t really [talk] about it until recently,” says Cummings, adding she is grateful to her parents for giving her such a rich start to life.
Assimilating into a new world in a private girls’ school in Sydney’s north was understandably challenging and Cummings found herself grappling to make sense of it all. “I’d been dealing with the fact we could die at any moment, then came here and was in the playground with friends talking about what brand of ballet shoes they had and I struggled with that.” She poured her energy into two things: schoolwork and dancing, spending around 30 hours a week learning ballet and contemporary dance at Brent Street Academy; or studying.
Photographed by Hugh Stewart, styled by Kate Darvill, Vogue Australia, September 2019.
“It wasn’t sustainable, I put lots of pressure on myself. Then at 14 I decided I was independent and ready to leave.” Pooling the money she’d earned babysitting, through various dance awards and her first film role in Razzle Dazzle (2007), Cummings bought a return airfare to Los Angeles. Her parents were justifiably shocked, but recognising her mind was made up and given she had Brent Street contacts in the US, they acquiesced.
“I felt like I was suffocating,” Cummings says. “I think my parents would have preferred my rebellion to be alcohol and short skirts but I think they knew it was something I really needed to do for myself.”
For three months she travelled between LA, New York and Washington and on her return abandoned dance for acting, enrolling in a one-year diploma of film, which she juggled with schoolwork. She never returned to live with her parents, instead boarding at a nearby school which supported her unconventional routine, one that now included shooting the film adaptation of John Marsden’s award-winning book series Tomorrow, When the War Began.
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“I was struggling to figure out where I fitted in and although I think my parents would have preferred I live with them, they’ve always supported any decisions I felt I needed to make, and at that time I felt I needed to live independently. I’ve always had their love and they’ve always had mine; I’m so fortunate.”
That film earned her a 2010 AFI nomination for best young actor and she has never looked back – from Puberty Blues to the mini-series Gallipoli and a regular role as Dorothy ‘Dot’ Williams on Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. She approached writer-director Ben Young’s script Hounds of Love (2016) with a degree of uncertainty given its subject matter, which deals with a suburban couple who abduct, rape and murder schoolgirls (all off-screen). What is undoubtedly horrific subject matter was in Young’s hands a masterful insight into power and vulnerability, with Cummings’s steely character ultimately outwitting them.
“I definitely struggled emotionally knowing on a literal and metaphoric level that every day women went through these things. Every day I’d have to go to the little bay near where I was staying and wash off, and my boyfriend said I’d often call him crying, but I don’t remember that.” Her performance earned her the Fedeora best actress award at the Venice film festival, while Variety hailed her acting as “fearless”. The day after filming wrapped she flew to New Zealand for the road-trip comedy Pork Pie, a remake of the Kiwi classic. It was a welcome change of pace.
In 2016 Cummings was awarded the coveted Heath Ledger Scholarship, which included two scholarships, to the Stella Adler Academy of Acting and Theatre and the Ivana Chubbuck Studio, both in LA. She has been regularly in demand ever since. “With acting you’re constantly being challenged by new stimuli and environments.
I love exercising my empathy muscle, I love learning new skills through my character,” she says, pointing out the research she did for her Pork Pie character Keira, an animal rights activist, ultimately led to her and her Australian actor partner Aaron Jakubenko becoming vegetarians. It also set her on the path to emerging as the eco-warrior she is today, a philosophy she lives by.
“I don’t buy any new clothes; I don’t wear make-up, except for auditions; and still have my sister’s make-up from years ago.” While publicity shoots and film openings require a certain dress code, Cummings says she is fortunate enough to have a supportive team: her Australian stylist founded sustainable fashion magazine The Frontlash; and her hair and make-up artists are both dedicated to sustainable and ethical beauty. “It can be tricky, because you can feel like you’re being a diva, but this is something that matters to me more than people being upset with me.”
Her concern about environmental sustainability has been further enhanced by her regular trips to Africa living with various tribes (she invests in carbon offset schemes to compensate for the damage from air travel). Since she was 19, Cummings has variously lived with a Berber tribe in the Sahara, worked in a chimpanzee orphanage in the Zambian jungle – what she calls ‘voluntourism’ – and, at 23, lived for months with a Maasai tribe in Kenya. “It’s all off the grid, no electricity, no running water, nothing for miles and miles.”
While her base is Los Angeles, where she and Jakubenko own an apartment, she says it’s mostly rented out as she travels constantly for work. The couple has been together four years. “We’re rarely together but we make it work; we’re really great at communicating and talk every day.”
Although Cummings’s acting career is shining brightly she is equally passionate about other interests – writing for eco magazines and volunteering among them. She sheepishly admits to regularly quitting acting, but feels she’s finally found a place of acceptance.
“I always quit acting, and my agent says: ‘Okay, cool, we’ll talk on Monday.’ But I have so many passions in the world and always feel I should be on the ground and making changes that are tangible. And I also had a deeply complex relationship with feeling I was good at acting, because it’s something I care so deeply about. But now I know my worth isn’t tied up with my work. It took a lot of work to get to that!” she says, laughing. “But I can’t tell you enough why I love acting, and I do love that I can use this platform to impact change. And storytelling! Connecting with people through that is pretty special.”
The Goldfinch is released nationally on September 26. NOS4A2 streams on Amazon Prime.
This article originally appeared in Vogue Australia’s September 2019 issue.