bbey Lee is in the driver’s seat. We are in a car careening
around corners in one of Los Angeles’s rare thunderstorms,
and the city’s notorious traffic is not providing any reprieve.
“My car’s a mess, a bit like my life. Joking. Not really,”
Abbey Lee deadpans, as she apologetically moves aside
empty Starbucks coffee cups and crumpled receipts to
make more room. When I later tell this story to Riley
Keough, Abbey Lee’s best friend and co-star on the upcoming Mad Max: Fury
Road, she looks at me stricken. Her eyes widen. “Abbey thinks she’s the most
amazing driver, but she’s probably the worst most scary driver ever. She’s
terrifying,” she says laughing. “She doesn’t know this, but I very much avoid
driving in the car with her. She once said to me she thinks she’ll be in a bad car
accident one day, and I thought: ‘Oh, great!’”
The thought flitters by that should Keough’s worst-case scenario happen, the
newspaper headlines will read: “Gucci model in car accident”, and I’ll be relegated
to a footnote: “Passenger identity unknown”. Although she’s officially stepped away
from full-time modelling, her decade-long career in fashion has indelibly linked her
face to campaign imagery from Gucci to Chanel; she’s been on the cover of Vog u e
Australia seven times. “I keep getting asked about transitioning between modelling
and acting and I’m looking forward to that question dying off,” says Abbey Lee,
with reason. (“And you asked that earlier,” she adds crisply.) “I don’t see acting as
necessarily changing career paths. I’m going to sound like such a fucking wank,
but I found my calling, really, and that’s what I’ve been put on this earth to do.”
Other modes of creative self-expression she has explored have been art, music
and writing – at the moment she is working on a script. “I had always felt like
I was missing something until I booked the film, started shooting and thought:
‘This is exactly where I’m supposed to be in life.’”
As a teenager she also wrote poetry, until she lost one of her journals on set
while modelling. “It had such a huge impact, I was so scared. I was just petrified
about who had their hands on it. It really rattled me.” Today she still writes
emails to herself, still too unnerved to have physical evidence of her private work.
Her role in George Miller’s latest instalment of the apocalyptic Mad Max is the
first of a list of respectable film choices. She is due to start filming Neon Demon
with Nicolas Winding Refn, who wrote and directed Only God Forgives. The
slashie questions will fizzle off soon enough.One is MAKING HER OWN mark beyond her
Hollywood royalty STATUS, the other is one of
Australia’s most successful and intriguing expats.
Actresses, best FRIENDS, they share their story with
Zara Wong. Photographed by Nathaniel Goldberg.A
for the
Tw o
road
▲13 4 – MAY 2015
STYLIST: TOM VAN DORPE HAIR: TOMO JIDAI MAKE-UP: SALLY BRANKAMANICURE: YUKO TSUCHIHASHI SET DESIGN: ELI METCALF PRODUCTION: BRACHFELD NEW YORKALL PRICES APPROXIMATE DETAILS LAST PAGES