By Dov Kornits
After scoring roles on TV’s Crazy Fun Park, Fires, Scrublands and High Country, and the feature film True Spirit, young Melbourne actor Stacy Clausen now gets three exciting new roles with Shiver, The Mosquito Bowl and Leviticus.
“My parents will tell you that I was born to perform,” young Australian actor Stacy Clausen tells FilmInk on the line from his home in Melbourne. “My mum always used to say, ‘Stacy Clausen, that’s an actor’s name. I see it. I see it.’ And she’s always put that vision in my head; that’s what I’m reaching for. I think I was born to perform, and no matter the pushback, I’ll always be chasing that.”
Twenty-year-old Stacy Clausen has been chasing his acting dreams for over five years now, and he’s certainly been getting results. He made his debut in 2019 in the cult TV series Preacher, co-created by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (The Studio). “That was my first ever role,” Clausen tells FilmInk. “It was my first audition ever. I was only on set for maybe three days or something like that. I played a little German boy. My hair was down to my shoulders and they straightened it out. I looked ridiculous. It was wild. At 12 years old, we were cutting off the main character’s penis or something like that. That was my job.”
After that decidedly wild start, things settled down somewhat for Stacy Clausen, but they certainly didn’t slow down. After the young actor’s not-so-auspicious screen debut, Clausen booked roles on the ABC drama Fires in 2021 and then on the popular children’s series Crazy Fun Park in 2023. The thrillers Scrublands and High Country both followed in 2026, and Clausen then got his first feature role in the 2023 Jessica Watson biopic True Spirit.
“Mum and dad put me in these performing arts classes where we did improv games,” Clausen explains to FilmInk of his beginnings in acting. “In year five and six, we’d write our own plays and we’d perform them for all the families across a bunch of schools. And then in about year seven, I joined an actual acting studio because those performing arts things didn’t continue into high school. And from there, I just kept working, and I ended up staying at that school all the way through year twelve. They had an agency attached to them, I joined them, and Preacher was the first audition that came through. I stuck at it, and it picked up pretty quick.”
Things are picking up at an even greater pace for Stacy Clausen now, with three exciting new projects in the works. There’s a supporting role in Shiver, a marauding shark movie from wildman director Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow, Violent Night), and another side part in the Netflix sports drama The Mosquito Bowl, which is directed by Peter Berg and stars Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Galitzine and Ray Nicholson. “We shot Shiver in Melbourne, and The Mosquito Bowl was shot in Queensland,” Clausen explains. “They’re both American productions, but shot here in Australia. With The Mosquito Bowl, I’m in and out pretty quickly, but with Shiver, I’m in a good chunk of it. I was on that set for about a month. That was an insane set…the biggest set I’ve ever been on. The things that they were building and what we were filming in was just ridiculous.”
Stacy Clausen’s biggest role comes in Leviticus, the latest production from Causeway Films, who have made a name for themselves by championing first-time feature filmmakers (The Philippou Brothers, Jennifer Kent, Goran Stolevski) who have made a mark with shorts. Their latest discovery is Adrian Chiarelli, who impressed with Touch (2014), Black Lips (2018) and Dwarf Planet (2020), and will now see his feature debut take its bow at The Sundance Film Festival. Unlike Shiver and The Mosquito Bowl, Leviticus is very much an Australian production. “There was a bunch of Americans and people from all over the world coming to work on both Shiver and The Mosquito Bowl, but Leviticus was a tight-knit Australian group,” Clausen explains. “Everyone knows each other in the local industry, and it’s so great to come to work with all your friends all the time.”
An unconventional meld of horror, romance and LGBTQI+ cinema, Leviticus follows two teenaged boys menaced by a mysterious entity in a small town. “It has these horror themes and these fantastical aspects about it, but it’s so real and so grounded and so touching,” Clausen offers. “That came from Adrian Chiarella. It’s partly his story, and it’s about where he grew up. You can feel him throughout the film. It’s so personal. That’s what makes it so great. It was a very unique script and something I hadn’t seen before.”
Clausen had very much a warm and nurturing relationship with Chiarella. “Adrian was more of a friend than anything, which is so great because he knew it was his first big thing,” the actor explains. “He was so willing to collaborate on everything and to take ideas from anyone to just help him. He was so caring. There were a lot of difficult scenes and we had to go to some really tough places, both mentally and physically. It’s the best set I’ve ever been on, and Adrian was definitely a big part of that.”
With Leviticus hopefully set to make a splash at Sundance, and agents repping him in the states after his work in Shiver and The Mosquito Bowl, Stacy Clausen is well and truly ready to take the next step. “My reps in the US are fantastic,” Clausen says with an audible smile. “They’re sorting me out for Sundance, and they’re hopefully going to make me look good. That’s all I can ask for really.”
Remember it…Stacy Clausen, that’s an actor’s name.
Leviticus, Shiver and The Mosquito Bowl will all release in 2026.
