Alyla Browne isn’t easily shaken. For her role as Charlotte, a young girl obsessed with a pet spider in Sting, she handled live cockroaches. She felt well-prepared, as the real-life former owner of a pet spider.
“It was a little jumping spider. They’re adorable. They follow you around the room with their big eyes and they look at you,” she tells MovieMaker. “I caught one in a nice way, just by picking it up, and I put it in a little terrarium with driftwood and I put soil on the base. That was actually before I knew about Sting. I just wanted a spider.”
She adds: “I had to let it go, but I’ll definitely come back to spider-owning in the future.”
14-Year-Old Alyla Browne Stars in Sting and Furiosa
For now, Browne’s schedule is a bit too packed for pet spiders. Besides starring in Sting, a horror-thriller from Kiah Roache-Turner, she’ll soon appear in George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga as the young version of the heroine first played by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road and played primarily in Furiosa by Anya Taylor-Joy.
Last year, Browne acted alongside Sigourney Weaver in the Prime Video series The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, and the year before that, she was in Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing along with Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton. In 2021, she played Nicole Kidman’s on-screen daughter in Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers.
Browne’s passion for acting can be traced back to her family’s move from Australia to the United States when she was six weeks old, after her father started a plastic-bottle recycling plant. Her two older sisters started taking acting classes at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, and Browne was intrigued.
“I wasn’t able to join because I was too young, so I was sad,” she says.
But her moment finally came when she reached the ripe old age of six, and her mother, Tiina, helped her start auditioning for small commercial roles through Australian casting service StarNow. First, she booked a few ads. Then, she got an agent and her first TV role on the Australian black comedy Mr Inbetween in 2019.
“My mum, I really couldn’t have done it without her,” she says. “Mum’s really ambitious for me and she believes that I can do it. With a mum that would be downgrading or not believing that I could be with CAA or that I could do amazing, massive projects, it would be much harder — but the fact that she believes that I can, it kind of has created for me this massive career.”
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Her role in Furiosa came out of working with Miller on his 2022 film Three Thousand Years of Longing, when she caught the attention of First Assistant Director P.J. Voeten.
“I can do the middle splits. They were changing lenses and I was doing stretches,” she says. “The First A.D. on Furiosa was also the First A.D. on Three Thousand, and PJ, was watching me doing splits, and then just went over to George and said, ‘I think she’s our Furiosa.’”
Besides bearing a striking resemblance to Taylor-Joy, Browne was also a fit for the apocalyptic action film because of her love of the outdoors. She developed it on her family’s farm on Australia’s Central Coast, where she enjoys riding horses, ziplining, and abseiling — the art of repelling down the side of a rock face on a rope.
“We have a 150-meter zipline there,” she says. “Doing horse riding and abseiling and zip lining and crazy stuff — running around a farm playing in the creek, playing in the dam… I think that kind of created my outdoorsy, crazy, able-to-do-stunts personality.”
Her other hobbies include surfing, roller skating, sewing, and teaching her dog and cat to do tricks. But above all, she loves the excitement of being on set, and dreams of writing and directing her own movies.
“When you go on set it’s just this frenzy of everyone’s opinions and everyone’s ideas and everyone’s kind of collaboration,” she says. “I definitely want to turn some of my stories into films.”
She’s already working on her own script about a post-apocalyptic film, but won’t reveal anything about the plot just yet.
“I won’t give away too much to make it more surprising when it comes out,” she smiles.
Sting is now in theaters from Well Go USA Entertainment. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga arrives in theaters May 24 from Warner Bros.
This story originally appeared in the Spring 2024 print edition of MovieMaker Magazine.
Mai Image: Alyla Browne. Photo Credit: Sally Flegg
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