Alycia Debnam-Carey has an idea. We'll go for a walk, she says, her Sydney “best kept secret”: the winding path from Bradleys Head to Chowder Bay, visions of the Harbour Bridge hovering around every corner. When we meet for this interview, the actor will have just landed in her hometown after the 14-hour flight from Los Angeles, her other hometown for the past decade. She'll be jet-lagged! She will want to walk! Except then she looks up the forecast. Bitterly cold rain, and a lot of it. This will not do. It is a long walk, maybe too long, actually, for an interview. (Even though, as I discover, Debnam-Carey has a lot of things to say.) “We would just be walking. For hours,” she laughs. We are not on the walk. Instead, we are at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, because this was Debnam-Carey's other brilliant idea: the Archibald Prize is on. Wouldn't that be nice on a rainy Thursday morning?
As it turns out, lots of other people have had the exact same idea as Debnam-Carey. The Archibald Prize is packed. Though nobody seems to have clocked that or next month's , with three million Instagram followers hanging off her every post, is perusing the paintings among them.
