“I’m really into fate,” Joseph Zada tells me. “You know what I mean?”
How could he not be? The 21-year-old Australian actor is fresh off acting in a pair of star-making performances, first as Cal Trask in Netflix’s East of Eden mini-series and then as young Haymitch Abernathy in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, out Nov. 20. On both counts, Zada has the spectacular privilege—and burden—of taking the baton from Hollywood legends.
Of course, there’s the living one: Woody Harrelson, the original Haymitch, who seduced audiences with his gravelly drawl and half-empty bottle in the first four Hunger Games movies. Then there’s the dead one, James Dean, the first actor to receive a posthumous Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Cal in Elia Kazan’s 1955 adaptation of the Steinbeck classic. It’s a legacy, in other words, that most people could never live up to.
But Zada isn’t most people. “I think that everything’s laid out for me,” he says. “I’ve got a lot of trust in where I’m going.”
We’re speaking on Zoom on a Saturday afternoon while he’s in Nova Scotia filming season two of the Prime Video thriller We Were Liars. His bleached curls are still wet from the shower, and he has a habit of shifting in his seat, looking out of frame and back again, sparkling even through a laptop screen.
“I think that everything’s laid out for me. I’ve got a lot of trust in where I’m going.”
Afterward, I have the feeling that I’ve just met someone who has that lightning in a bottle people talk about, someone who will soon be too famous to ever talk to me again.
He’s not worried about that part of the equation. “You never make anything very special when you’re trying to pander to other people,” he says.
Zada was born into a family of actors. His father, Jeremy Cumpston, starred in an Australian hospital drama called All Saints, and both his older and younger brothers are in the business, too. At one point during our conversation, his brother, River, who’s visiting for the weekend, enters the room. “Sorry, that’s my little brother,” he says. “I’ve just set him up with my accent coach.”
“You never make anything very special when you’re trying to pander to other people,”
Zada and his brother aren’t locked into a bitter generational rivalry like the Trask sons, but his experience of brotherhood certainly shaped his portrayal of Cal—along with a mix of literary and cinematic inspirations. One of Zada’s favorite novels is The Catcher in the Rye, so his Cal also contains elements of Holden Caulfield. Finding those notes of darkness without forcing them was critical to his process.
“I don’t think my family is like that family at all,” he assures me with a laugh. “But there are things that relate to everybody’s families.”
One of the lasting refrains from East of Eden is the biblical phrase,“Thou mayest.” Fate is one thing, the story goes; it’s what you do with it that matters. Toward the end of our conversation, I ask Zada if he’s drained from the past year of constant work—whether he’d like to maintain this pace or slow down to a more manageable cadence.
He smiles. “No, I’m ready to double it.” Thou mayest, indeed.
Photography by Drew Jarrett
Styling by Alexander Roth
Grooming by Amy Komorowski
Set Design by Erin Lynn Welsh
Photography Assistance by Liam McKeon
Pre-order your copy of the 2026 Artists on Artists issue, featuring Zada, here.
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