At the world premiere of No Country for Old Men at Cannes in 2007, American filmmakers Ethan and Joel Coen said they looked for Australian actors to portray tough guys in their film, because, as Joel Coen wryly put it, "they build 'em big down there".
This is certainly true of Sydney-siders Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman. And now there's a new batch of hunky Aussies coming through in Hollywood.
Just a year younger than Jackman, Jason Clarke is enjoying a career surge at the age of 45. A kind of Tom Hanks Everyman, he made his mark in Lawless (2012), Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and The Great Gatsby (2013), and paired up this year with 18-year-old fellow Australian Kodi Smit-McPhee to play an ape-friendly father-son duo in Matt Reeves' Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
The Queenslander also will be seen as New Zealand mountaineer Rob Hall in upcoming big-budget adventure film Everest, and is playing John Connor in Terminator: Genesis. Other ongoing projects include supporting roles in Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups, and Daniel Espinosa's Child 44, both due out in 2015.
Another Australian who has been rising rapidly of late is 24-year-old Brenton Thwaites. A surfer guy from Cairns, Queensland, who made his name on television's Sea Patrol and Home & Away, he was most recently seen in an extended cameo as Elle Fanning's prince in Maleficent.
Thwaites starred last year in Oculus, the small-budget horror movie voted best film runner-up in the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival's Midnight Madness section. "Even I was scared watching it," he says. This year, he's in independent sci-fi drama The Signal, which screened at Sundance. He's also got onto Entertainment Weekly's Hot List of stars of the US summer, in part because of the films awaiting release in which he has significant parts.