Joseph Zada’s Been a Liar and the Next James Dean. Now He Has to Survive The Hunger Games

Joseph Zada didn’t know he’d soon be sharing a screen with Kieran Culkin until the rest of us found out too. Weeks ago, the 19-year-old Australian actor was tapped to star in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping as the younger version of Woody Harrelson’s Haymitch Abernathy. Zada was on a call with his publicity team when news broke that Culkin will play outlandish Hunger Games host Caesar Flickerman, a part originated by Stanley Tucci.

“I didn’t know it was confirmed,” Zada tells Vanity Fair. “I’ve been finding this stuff out through Instagram, and I’m the lead character.” He shakes his mop of curly blonde hair. “That’s ridiculous. Give me a heads-up!”

Being part of a huge franchise is fresh to Zada. But Sunrise on the Reaping is actually the third splashy adaptation he’s booked in the last year. Zada currently stars as tortured wealthy boy Johnny Sinclair Dennis in Prime Video’s We Were Liars, based on the popular YA novel about a Succession-esque family summering in Massachusetts. Next year, he’ll play Cal Trask—a part played by James Dean on film—in Netflix’s East of Eden. And after that, it’s off to the Hunger Games universe opposite industry heavyweights like Glenn Close, Ralph Fiennes, Elle Fanning, and Jesse Plemons.

“It’s weird. It’s really weird,” Zada says. “As long as I was acting, I was happy and I never really expected to get much attention for it. But I feel like my life kind of changed with [The Hunger Games] announcement. It’s a different world now. I’ve got to be a lot more careful about what I’m doing and saying, which is always a good thing. But it’s a little scary sometimes.”

Zada wasn’t interested in performing until his father, Jeremy Cumpston—a real-life doctor who later played an MD on Australian medical drama All Saints—encouraged his son to participate in a local production of Romeo and Juliet. “I’m not acting. Acting’s cringe,” an indignant teenaged Zada, then flunking out of his all-boys school in Sydney, thought at the time. But he entered stage left anyway and was a changed man by curtain call. Though he had the bug, finding an acting agent proved tricky: “No one would take me.”

Biding his time during the height of the pandemic, Zada wrote a brief film that he and his then girlfriend could present to her virtual acting class. A classmate’s mother walked by the Zoom screen and caught sight of Zada: “Who is that kid?” Zada recalled her wondering. “I want to be his agent.”

Zada booked his first major gig in September 2023: an Australian TV series called Invisible Boys based on a best-selling Holden Sheppard novel. Zada’s hair was still dyed blue for that role when he auditioned for We Were Liars. The Halifax set of that series is where Zada got the script for East of Eden, a gig that begot his Hunger Games tryout. “More or less, I’ve only auditioned for one other project,” since that streak, Zada says. “So it’s been so lucky that all these amazing projects have come up, slotting right in time.” To put it mildly: “I haven’t had a lot of time off work so far.”

Born Joseph Cumpston in 2005, Zada—who uses an older family name professionally—is the second-eldest in a tight-knit family of five siblings. Despite growing up thousands of miles away from Hollywood, he was raised in something of a showbiz brood: His father is a director as well as an actor, and his mother, Jessica Brentnall, is a film producer. But it was Zada’s older brother Hal, who has appeared in hit shows like The Walking Dead and Nine Perfect Strangers, whom he credits with really sparking his interest in acting at age 15.

Staging his older brother’s auditions became something of a family affair. “You’re supposed to film them against a white wall, but we always made a meal out of our auditions,” Zada says. “We’d make them into little movies—get costumes and have other actors. Our auditioning processes were our ways to learn about filmmaking.”

Zada spent hours in front of the TV receiving his own version of a film-school education. “My dad and I geek out so hard when we watch films. We’ll watch a two-hour movie and go for six hours, because we sit down there, rewind the scenes, and go, ‘Did you see that moment? Did you see that choice?’” Zada says. The 1986 coming-of-age classic Stand By Me, which he saw for the first time just as he was entering primary school, left a particularly lasting impression. “That’s my favorite film. River Phoenix is my favorite actor. I watch that movie four, five times a year,” Zada says. “Reminds me of hanging around with my little siblings and my mom.”

Phoenix, older brother of Joaquin and star of My Own Private Idaho—who died at age 23 of an overdose—is Zada’s personal acting hero. “I try to steal as much as I can from him,” he says, before listing his other inspirations: “Heath Ledger, he’s got a very special energy. [Timothée] Chalamet, I steal from him a little bit. Sam Rockwell, I’m trying to steal from right now—he’s dope. I just watched Seven Psychopaths. That movie is insane. Martin McDonagh—that’s the director I would die to work with. He’s my number one.” Others on his bucket list include Blue Valentine’s Derek Cianfrance, Aftersun’s Charlotte Wells, and Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel.

“I love looking at films, thinking about what was on the page and what the actor is doing and going, ‘How did he find that?’’” Zada says. “I love when I can’t figure it out. That’s my favorite thing. I find that with Meryl Streep—I can never figure out where she’s bringing stuff from.” It was a bit of kismet that Streep’s eldest daughter, Mamie Gummer, played Zada’s onscreen mother in We Were Liars. “And they’re so similar!” he says. “I don’t know if she’d be upset that I said that, but they are. Mamie is such a brilliant actress.”