I would argue it’s near impossible to look good on a video call—something the majority of us were disheartened to discover during the pandemic—but even via a grainy video, Josh Heuston manages to look strikingly attractive. We’re talking to each other from different time zones; Josh is in Los Angeles where it’s early evening, and I’m sitting in my sunny study on a 30-degree Melbourne afternoon.
On Wednesday, he’ll return to Australia, but a consistent home base isn’t something he has right now—instead, he jumps between cities, going wherever the film or television projects he’s working on require him to be. His days sound packed, which doesn’t surprise me—he’s been in hot demand lately. In 2022, the Sri Lankan-Australian actor and model became known around the world thanks to a starring role as Dusty Reid in Netflix’s hit series Heartbreak High, and he’s about to grace our screens again with a leading role in the much-anticipated show Dune: Prophecy (more on that later). Thanks to his Disney prince-esque good looks, he’s also the latest Australian actor to ascend to heartthrob status, following in the footsteps of the Hemsworths and Elordis before him.
Being classified as a heartthrob, I put to him, must be a peculiar experience. You can’t call yourself a heartthrob, of course—it’s something that others, generally women and teenage girls and journalists like me, bestow on someone. In Josh’s case, while the adoration has come thick and fast since Heartbreak High, it’s something he tries not to focus on too much. “In terms of the heartthrob thing, I don’t know. I feel like there’s no real way to …” he starts, before trailing off. “I kind of just go with the flow with that … for lack of better words, everyone in my personal life would rip me a new one if I kind of went along with that. You know what I mean?” he laughs.
That demographic includes his two sisters. Born and raised in Western Sydney, Josh is the eldest of three. Having spent most of his life surrounded by women, he tells me it’s played a pivotal role in shaping him as a person. “In my life there’s my mum, first of all – that’s a lot of people’s first role model in terms of women – and then my grandma. I have a very close relationship with her, and then my two sisters.” He says these relationships—in particular the dynamic he has with his younger sisters—keep his feet firmly on the ground. “The support network that I’m lucky enough to have, from my sisters and my parents and my friends, it’s pretty comfortable. So that’s kind of my fallback whenever I do something that progresses to another level. In between each thing, I try and carve out some time to go back to Australia and just chill. I go home and my little sisters just tell me I’m annoying. Their perception of me has never changed. I go home and they’re like, ‘Just f**k off, Josh!’” he laughs.”
Josh graduated from Macquarie University in 2019 with a double major—a bachelor of science in biomolecular science and a bachelor of commerce. But so far, he hasn’t had much time to put his impressive-sounding qualification to use. At age 18, he was scouted at an event where he was working as a waiter. Years of being booked and busy followed, modelling for highfashion labels like Louis Vuitton and Gucci and sitting front row at fashion weeks around the world. But it was a role in a music video in 2017—alongside model and YouTuber (and former girlfriend) Cartia Mallan—which gave him the acting bug and led to him taking up acting classes. A few years of modelling and auditioning followed, before he landed a role in Netflix’s Dive Club in 2020. Then, in 2021, his first ‘big’ break came in the form of a five-second cameo in Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder.
While his scene was a blink-and-you’ll-miss it moment—he plays a character aptly titled Zeus’ Pretty Boy who gracefully collapses at the sight of Thor’s nudity—working on a film of that scale left an indelible mark on him. Of this early acting experience, he says: “You definitely pick up some tricks of the trade. From how they use cameras to what they do with text, you see stuff like that. I was there on and off for two months, but in reality, I’m in it for a few seconds.” Despite the briefness of the cameo, he feels lucky to have been in the presence of heavyweight Australian actors like Chris Hemsworth and Russell Crowe. “Seeing someone like Russell Crowe work was amazing. Gladiator’s pretty topical right now with the second one coming out, and I love that film. And being around two Australian actors that have gone to that level of success, watching them do their thing—it was just a masterclass really.”
If finding yourself on set with two of Australia’s biggest acting exports so early on in your career sounds like a pinch-me moment, that’s because it was.
“I remember talking to Chris and he’s in his costume and I’m just in this sparkling gold toga and I’m like, ‘What’s going on? I have no idea what’s going on.’ I’m just talking to Chris Hemsworth, wearing sandals and a toga out the front of Fox Studios,” he says, chuckling at the absurdity of the anecdote.
It was his role as Dusty Reid in the Heartbreak High reboot later that year that propelled him to an entirely new level of stardom. The series, set in a high school in Sydney, shot to Netflix’s number one spot in Australia in its first week, and made the top 10 list in 45 countries around the world.
While his lived experience as an Australian teenager helped inform the role of Dusty, his recent role in Dune: Prophecy required a different level of preparation. The show, set 10,000 years before the events of Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 and 2024 Dune films, follows sisters Tula and Valya Harkonnen as they establish the powerful Bene Gesserit sect. He describes landing the role in Dune: Prophecy as “the easiest audition process I’ve ever had … I wish every single job was like that”. Impressively, he learnt how to do the British accent for his role on YouTube the night before the audition (celebrities—they’re just like us!). “I’d done American accent training, but I hadn’t really done too much British. So then to get it good enough for the audition, I was literally just watching people like Tom Hiddleston on YouTube, and mimicking them,” he laughs.
Last-minute accent tutorials aside, the prep work that went into playing Constantine Corrino, an illegitimate prince, was extensive. “I looked into the history of a lot of other families [with complicated princes], like Prince Harry. I read his book Spare … I also looked into the Indian class system to see how that operates, because Constantine kind of goes between the upper ranks of the imperium and the lower ranks when he goes and starts partying with other people. I was trying to find a few places to get bits and pieces from.”
He tells me he always tries to deepen his understanding of the characters he plays by imagining what they were like as children, and Constantine was no different. “I feel like a lot of the reason why people behave the way that they do is either from a childhood trauma or some sort of insecurity. I build the framework of what happened and then how they react to that. Like Constantine, for example, tries to soothe a lot of his internal issues with whatever vice he can get his hands on, whether it be drugs, sex or alcohol, he tries to find something to feed that. Same thing with Dusty, he did a very similar thing. But yeah, I try to find the emotions within it because I feel like a lot of the time, people that do lash out or do have these sort of emotions, it does come from somewhere like that.”
He readily admits, though, that being on a set of this scale—and with such a high calibre of actors—was an intimidating experience. Luckily for Josh, revered British actress Emily Watson helped him soothe his first-day jitters. “When I was nervous on my first day of filming, she could see me just walking out in front of my tent, pacing, and saying my lines to myself. And she went over and got a tennis ball from props. And then she was like, ‘Come on.’ And we’d just play handball in front of the tent and we’d say our lines,” he shares, clearly still struck by her kindness months later. “It was the first scene you see me in that has dialogue—that’s the first scene that we filmed. So I was first up on the chopping block, which is why I was freaking out. But yeah, we just played handball for like half an hour while we waited for lighting,” he laughs. He describes Emily as “a dream”, noting that out of all the people he’s worked with, she tops the list of ones he’d like to act alongside again.
It’s clear he takes his craft seriously. Instead of coasting on his heartthrob coat-tails, he looks to be following a path paved by young male actors like Timothée Chalamet, Paul Mescal and Jacob Elordi, who’ve each made a name for themselves in recent years playing complicated new-age men. But when I ask him if he sees himself following the trajectory of someone like Jacob, another hugely successful Australian actor who made the jump from teen drama to the big screen, he’s quick to tell me he’s focusing on actors who are much further down the line career-wise.
“Jacob’s doing really, really well and he’s killing it. But I feel like in terms of careers I’d like to emulate, I look more towards, I don’t know, your Ryan Goslings or your Brad Pitts or anyone quite a few generations above me. Even your Al Pacinos or [Robert] De Niros or Leos, like they all have insane careers with incredible filmography. And if I can get anything close to that, that’s kind of a win, you know?” If anything, in terms of Australian actors, the late Heath Ledger is more aligned with the type of work he envisions himself doing. “If I can do something 10% as good as Heath, then that’s a good place to be. Yeah, he was incredible.”
With Dune: Prophecy out on now and a leading role in Australian horror-thriller Dangerous Animals due for release next year (not to mention a potential role in the third season of Heartbreak High, although when I ask if Dusty’s returning, he tells me, smiling, that “that’s the million dollar question!”) there’s a lot for Josh to look forward to.
But I want to know if a rom-com is ever on the cards for him—as do, I imagine, many women the world over. “I actually definitely would do a rom-com. I was talking to my team earlier and I was saying I’d like to do one because it’d be fun and it would be lighthearted,” he shares, much to my delight as a diehard rom-com fan.
“The recent Sydney Sweeney one, Anyone But You—I thought that was really fun. I went to the cinema to watch that with my little sisters and they loved that.” It seems the aforementioned real talk from his sisters is working too, because as we’re wrapping up our chat, he earnestly tells me that he’s just happy to be working and “happy to be doing this”. “I hope everyone likes the show, basically. I’m super proud of what we’ve made, so that’s the main thing for me.”
Photographed by Bananas Clarke; Creative Direction & Styling by Patrick Zaczkiewicz; Grooming by Cherry Cheung.
Feature image fashion: Jacket, COS. Sneakers, Golden Goose.
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This article originally appeared in Issue 03 of Cosmopolitan Australia. Get your copy and subscribe to future issues here.
