'I Was In Shock When I Found Out I Got The Role'

Before being cast as Uriah Pedrad in Insurgent, the second film in the Divergent series, 23-year-old Keiynan Lonsdale had worked in Australian TV, most notably in the teen drama Dance Academy. However, Insurgent is his first US job. It’s the day after the film’s Sydney premiere and Lonsdale is still digesting. “It was pretty crazy, but my whole family was there to support and it was cool to watch it with an all-Australian audience and get that good vibe from everyone.”

To leave his hometown of Sydney for the US to work on a sci-fi film built on a huge fanbase sounds like it was a whirlwind experience for Lonsdale, who’s now actually living in LA. “I was in shock when I found out I got the role, obviously. And then as time was going along I was realising kind of what it all meant going forward and it’s been an amazing ride so far. I just feel very lucky overall.”

He was certainly thrown into the deep end in his first week of filming – “The first scene I shot was my biggest scene in the whole film, so that was crazy!” – but in joining a cast with big names such as Shailene Woodley, Octavia Spencer, Theo James, Jai Courtney, Naomi Watts, Kate Winslet, Miles Teller and Zoe Kravitz, Lonsdale found a more personal battle to overcome. “I think the most challenging thing in general during the shoot was being calm and being comfortable and believing in myself. You know, I basically stepped into a cast of star actors... I was trying to figure out how I could – not find my place, but like, where my work was, you know what I mean? Because it’s kind of intimidating. So that was my biggest challenge, to realise that I deserve to be there and that I had something to offer.”

And what does he think about this ongoing trend of dystopian young adult novels and films? “Divergent was the kind of movie that I went and saw before I knew about the audition just because I was like, ‘I’m definitely going to like this movie.’ [laughs] I like the idea of societies crumbling to pieces because of someone not conforming… which is why I always jump in and watch those films. It’s a genre that I’m a fan of.”

Though the current ubiquity of such narratives – the oppressed and the outsiders rising up against the corrupt authorities and gatekeepers of societal uniformity; see The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, The Giver, Snowpiercer – has resulted in them all being compared to one another in myriad thinkpieces, it’s nevertheless interesting to ponder why the genre’s so popular among young people. “The great thing about these films and these books is that it brings the topic and it brings the conversation about without you kind of realising, as a young reader… that it’s politics,” Lonsdale offers, “or that it can be inspired by that. But then it really does make you think – it really makes you question our society once you look into another society, and you question the kind of power that we have.”