The prodigious Felix Cameron
After beating out Hollywood veterans for the 2024 Best Actor Logie for his breakout performance in 'Boy Swallows Universe', Felix Cameron has been named a Rising Star by the Casting Guild of Australia. Needless to say, the 15-year-old is only just getting started
By 
THERE IS A MASSIVE BILLBOARD of Felix Cameron in the middle of Sydney. Four storeys up on the side of a building facing a busy Haymarket intersection, it shows a close-up of his face. Warmly lit and holding a red telephone to his ear, he looks frustrated on the receiving end.
If you’ve seen the 15-year old actor in the Netflix-produced Australian hit Boy Swallows Universe, you’d recognise the image on the billboard has been taken from an important moment in the series. It’s quite a suspenseful scene: (spoiler, though I implore you go and watch it) Cameron’s character Eli had just run away from the hospital only to find his home deserted. In search for answers, he goes back into a secret room under the house, which he discovered with his older brother Gus (Lee Tiger Halley), where they suspected their step-father Lyle (Travis Fimmel) was hiding drugs. A dial-up phone in the underground room rings, which, mysteriously, isn’t connected to anything at all. Eli hears an older man on the other end, who asks him cryptic questions.
The suspense in that scene boils down to the expression on the face of the show’s unbelievably precocious breakout star. The font on that billboard in Sydney tells you everything you need to know about Cameron: in a bold font under his face, it reads, “THIS KID CAN ACT”.
Since the show premiered at the beginning of the year, it’s gone on to become highly celebrated by fans of the novel it’s based on (written by Trent Dalton and published in 2018), as well as new fans who’ve been swayed to read the book after binging the series. On the streaming platform, Boy Swallows Universe joins an unofficial new wave of Australian-produced work, introducing local stories to a global audience, and our homegrown talent with it.
To no surprise, then, as part of Boy Swallows Universe‘s sweep at the 2024 Logies in August, Cameron took home two of the statuettes: one for Best New Talent, and the marquee award for Actor in a Drama. In the latter category, his fellow nominees included screen veterans decades his senior, from Hugo Weaving to Robin Collins, Sam Reid, and Simon Baker (also nominated for Boy Swallows Universe playing Eli’s father Robert).
But as he went up on stage to accept the night’s most anticipated award, all Cameron kept thinking was, “You can’t really see people very well because the lights are so bright,” he tells me. “You think it’s just you and then you start to see faces, and you realise there’s a lot of cameras and it’s not just me . . . there’s a lot of people, so don’t fuck this up and don’t cry this time!”
In an acceptance speech thanking his siblings and parents, he held back tears behind his trademark curls, but it only endeared him to the country even more. It seems, then, there’s only one way Cameron’s trajectory will go. But as he explains, it’s a profession he surprisingly fell into accidentally.
At the age of 10, with interests elsewhere in footy and cricket (“I wasn’t watching movies or famous actors . . . [cricket] makes me happy even when skies are grey”), Cameron was discovered from a general audition to play the son of Naomi Watts and Andrew Lincoln in Penguin Bloom (2020). The film follows the Bloom family as Samantha (Watts) and her children nurse a magpie back to health in a metaphor for learning how to live with her own handicap disability.
With two titles now under his belt – which have seen him in naturalistic and dramatic roles – in a short amount of years, it seems the genre comes naturally to the young actor. But in what he’d like to work on next, he dreams of action comedies with, he says simply, “projects with a great script,” even fantasising working with Matt Damon one day. “He’s a great actor and seems like a good human.”
With a clear eye for what he wants and unbridled natural talent, there’s no question just how far his star will go. And the Logies jury aren’t the only ones who believe this – earlier this month, Cameron was nominated for the prestigious Casting Guild of Australia Rising Star award.
But with awards and accolades like a Logie already on his mantle, it means a lot to him have these qualities recognised, especially when it’s coming from the Casting Guild of Australia.
The list of past winners is illustrious – one that boasts alumni the likes of House of the Dragon‘s Milly Alcock, 13 Reasons Why’s Katherine Langford, and Olivia DeJonge, who played Priscilla in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. “It means a lot because it comes from people in the industry,” he says of the nomination (his Boy Swallows Universe on screen brother, Halley, is also in this year’s cohort). “They know me very well, seeing my audition tapes all the time and even being able to work with them in the later stages of casting,” he adds of the agents that make up the CGA.
The poise of a natural leading man. Indeed, he is just getting started.
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