Joseph Zada, Rebel Without a Pause

There’s an old bit of Hollywood lore about how James Dean got cast in East of Eden.

As the story goes, Dean’s first meeting with Elia Kazan at the Warner Brothers offices in New York was a total bust. The 23-year-old method actor spent most of it slumped in his chair, barely looking up, mumbling and fidgeting through the conversation — behaving pretty much exactly the way you’d expect James Dean to behave. Kazan was less than impressed.

As the meeting wound down, though, Dean asked if Kazan wanted to go for a ride on a motorcycle he had parked outside, and for some reason the middle-aged director said yes. What followed was a wild tear through midtown Manhattan, as Dean dodged cabs and weaved through traffic, Kazan clinging for dear life to Dean’s back. When it was over, the shaken filmmaker realized he’d found an actor every bit as reckless and impulsive as the character he was casting. He climbed off the bike and offered Dean the part of Cal Trask on the spot.

Seventy years later, casting Cal, East of Eden’s tormented, wayward son, has become considerably less life-threatening. In fact, Joseph Zada got the part with a Zoom call.

“It was like a get-to-know-you sort of thing,” the 21-year-old Australian says of his conversation with Kazan’s granddaughter, filmmaker Zoe Kazan, who cast Zada in Dean’s old role for her own version of East of Eden, a seven-part adaptation that arrives on Netflix Oct. 1. “She asked me about getting into acting, what I thought about acting. I think she was just trying to figure out if I had it in me.”

“Then,” he jokes, “I took her for a ride on a jet ski.”

Taking on a classic role once inhabited by a full-blown Hollywood icon is a daunting prospect for any young actor. Just ask Alec Baldwin, who once squeezed into a torn T-shirt to play Stanley Kowalski in a 1995 TV adaptation of Streetcar Named Desire, or Vince Vaughn, who went nuts trying to portray Norman Bates in Gus Van Sant’s 1998 Psycho remake. Neither of those performances made anyone forget about Marlon Brando or Anthony Perkins.

Playing younger incarnations of iconic screen characters has proven a much safer bet —Robert De Niro even won an Oscar for his twentysomething version of Brando’s Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. Luckily for Zada, he’s got one of those parts too. This November, he’ll be portraying 16-year-old Haymitch Abernathy in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, a prequel set decades before the character aged into Katniss and Peeta’s grouchy, alcoholic mentor. It’s the sort of high-profile franchise opportunity that can catapult a career from District 12 straight to the Capitol, even if nobody ends up forgetting Woody Harrelson.

Both parts — on top of his previous biggest role, playing one of the teenage cousins on Amazon’s 2025 psychological drama We Were Liars, a character Zada will be reprising in a prequel currently shooting in Canada — will obviously put the actor under an intense spotlight this fall. Comparisons will be inevitable. Expectations will be brutal. But one of the great advantages of being a talented young actor first breaking into Hollywood is that, like Dean on a motorcycle, there’s a tendency toward fearlessness.

“Everyone is like, ‘You’re stepping into Woody’s shoes,’” Zada says on a Zoom call from Canada, sounding not the least bit haunted by the ghosts of movie stars past. “No, I’m not. These are my characters and my movies — not James’, not Woody’s. I’m stepping into my own fucking shoes.”

Zada is not his given name. Until he changed it three years ago, when he turned 18, it was Joseph Cumpston.

“Zada was my grandmother’s name,” he explains the rebranding, tracing his ancestral lineage to his great-great-grandfather, Kahn Zada. “He came over from Afghanistan during the First World War and built the first mosque in Australia. I just loved the name — there’s a power to it. I’m convincing my siblings to change too. We all want to stick together as a family and make films together. It’d be awesome for us to have a production company under the same name.”

There are four of those siblings and every one of them is an actor — or likely will be at some point soon.

His older brother Hal, 27, has assembled an impressive list of screen credits of his own, with roles in The Walking Dead: World Beyond and Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers. His younger brother, River, had a small part in the 2024 Australian drama Just a Farmer, while his younger sister is currently modeling, always a potential acting gateway. The youngest is only 11, “so he’s just playing video games and surfing all day,” says Zada, sounding confident he too will end up joining the family business.

Zada’s father is, unsurprisingly, also an actor — with a day job as a physician. In fact, Jeremy Cumpston is relatively well-known in Australia for playing a fictional nurse on a popular Aussie medical drama that ran in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Zada’s parents divorced when he was five, but his mother is in the business, too, producing Australian films and TV shows.

Not surprisingly, watching movies was something of a family obsession growing up in Sydney. “We had a hundred DVDs and they would just go on rotation,” Zada says. “That’s kind of what we spent all our time doing. Every night, we’d put on a movie. Stand by Me was on constantly — River Phoenix is one of my favorite actors. Drop Dead Fred was influential. Ponyo — I think I watched that a hundred times.”

He started acting at 14, but against his will.

At the time, he was on the verge of flunking out of high school, mostly because he wasn’t bothering to go. “I hated, hated school,” he says. His parents took it in stride. “It’s a weird thing to say — and it turned out lucky — but they were very happy with me doing whatever I wanted.”

But one day while he was loafing in his room, his father popped in and dumped four scenes from Romeo and Juliet onto his bed. A family friend was mounting a stage production. If Zada wanted to continue playing hooky, his father told him, he’d have to help out by playing one of the parts.

“I went into it kicking and screaming,” Zada recalls. “I was not going to get on stage and embarrass myself.” Despite his best efforts, though, he caught the bug. “I would go to rehearsals trying to convince myself that I wasn’t enjoying it. But the truth was, I was very much enjoying myself.”

From then on, high school didn’t stand a chance. Zada continued blowing off classes as he pursued auditions and small roles in Aussie TV projects like The Speedway Murders and Total Control. He missed so much classwork, he got kicked out of private school, re-enrolled in public school, then dropped out of that a month before graduation. “In my last four weeks I was given an ultimatum by the principal during a sit down with my mum,” he recalls. “I had to come to school every single day, or they couldn’t legally finish me. But I had a final callback the next week and I just looked at my mum and I was like, ‘I’m leaving.’ And she just said, ‘Yeah.’”

That final callback was for Invisible Boys, a TV drama about gay teenagers dealing with being closeted during Australia’s 2017 same-sex-marriage plebiscite. Zada landed one of the starring roles, a rebellious young punk rocker who gets outed on social media. And he literally hasn’t stopped working since, rolling from one part straight into the next.

While still shooting Boys, he auditioned for We Were Liars, Amazon’s adaptation of E. Lockhart’s 2014 YA bestseller about the Sinclairs, a wealthy Kennedy-esque brood misbehaving on a private island near Martha’s Vineyard. Zada nabbed a major role as Johnny — the cool, cocky, charming cousin, who, as the story eventually reveals, also happens to be dead — and flew to Nova Scotia for his first brush with a big American production.

“It was nuts, fucking nuts,” he says. “Just the amount of money and the amount of people and the amount that was at stake. To put it in perspective, I was getting paid more per episode on We Were Liars than I was getting paid for the entire [run] of Invisible Boys.”

He’s likely getting paid handsomely for the second season he’s shooting in Canada right now, a prequel set in 1999 about the previous generation of misbehaving Sinclairs — although how Zada’s dead Johnny will fit into its plot is too convoluted to get into here. (“Basically, they’re merging two timelines…”)

It was while shooting the first season of Liars, in 2024, that Zada had that Zoom with Zoe Kazan — she’d been impressed by a self-tape audition Zada had sent in — about playing Cal Trask in her East of Eden redo.

“I knew this role could change someone’s life, so I wanted to see how much of what he’d done on the tape was a performance and how much was himself,” Kazan explains why she invited Zada to Zoom. “I remember asking him who his favorite actors were, and he said River Phoenix and Heath Ledger. And I said to him, ‘Okay, JoJo, you have to start liking actors who made it past 28. If we put you in this role, we are not repeating history. I want you to start looking at actors who made it into middle age.’”

Zada must have agreed, because as soon as Liars wrapped, he found himself flying to New Zealand to star opposite Florence Pugh and Christopher Abbott, among a slew of others, in a role so steeped in Hollywood mythos it might make even Alec Baldwin think twice about taking it on.

“Zoe begged me not to watch the original film,” Zada says. “She was like, ‘Do not watch!’ She said it so many times. I was like, ‘Okay, okay, I get it.’”

It was good advice. The 1955 drama wasn’t merely James Dean’s first major appearance on film — it was the birth of a whole new species of screen teen. Before Eden, adolescence in movies mostly meant malt shops and varsity sweaters and Andy Hardy puttering around in a jalopy. Dean blew all that up with a single twitchy performance, reinventing the on-screen teenager as a moody, brooding, alienated outsider, an archetype that’s stuck to this day. The fact that he died in a Porsche crash just months after the film opened only makes the turn seem all the more mythic.

No pressure, JoJo.

Still, this is not your granddaddy’s East of Eden — not even Zoe Kazan’s — but a whole new telling of John Steinbeck’s epic family saga. Unlike Elia Kazan’s loose adaptation, which focused only on the last part of the novel — Cal’s struggle with sibling rivalry and daddy issues set against the backdrop of looming World War One — Zoe’s more faithful version explores the full sweeping, generational drama, going back to Cal’s grandfather, Cyrus Trask, in the aftermath of the Civil War.

“When I saw the movie after I read the book, I was surprised that so much of what I loved about the novel wasn’t in the film,” Kazan explains her approach to the material. “I felt like, well, somebody has to make the thing I saw in my head.”

The expansive scope of the series means that Zada’s character doesn’t make an appearance until the final two episodes, but it also gives him a different-enough part in a different-enough narrative to make comparisons with his predecessor in the role difficult. At the very least, it spares Zada the awkwardness of having to deliver any of Dean’s old dialogue.

“I saw the similarities, the same angst and need for approval,” Zada says of Dean’s performance in the original, which he watched the day the Netflix series wrapped. “But it’s such a different story with such a different feel. It wasn’t the East of Eden we were making.”

As usual, Zada was in the middle of shooting Eden when he landed his next gig, although this one took a bit more than a Zoom call to cinch. Indeed, winning the role of young Haymitch Abernathy was something of a Hunger Games all its own.

“They wanted us to do improvised auditions,” Zada recalls. “There was no script, no sides, no book. You were just supposed to do a monologue to the camera and show them your idea of what young Haymitch would be like.”

Zada over-delivered. He spent two weeks writing four scenes for a self-tape, then flew back home to Sydney to shoot it with his brother and father. “We found different locations, I got costumes, we even got a drone,” he says.

He delved even deeper after he signed for the part. “For about two straight months, I became obsessed with getting Woody down,” he says. “I watched everything. I watched White Men Can’t Jump like ten times. I got his voice, the walk, the feel, the energy, the cadence of his speech.”

But then, when shooting started in Spain in the summer of 2025, Zada decided to chuck all that preparation and take a totally different tack. “The challenge I set for myself was to be the opposite of Woody’s character — make him happy, optimistic, caring — and then find a way to get to where he would eventually wind up.”

It was only after he’d shot Hunger Games that Zada met the original Haymitch. He found himself sitting next to Harrelson at a dinner party — and proceeded to totally blank on all the research he’d done. “We chatted and he asked me questions about myself and told me stories,” Zada remembers. “But everything I knew about him just went out of my mind. I couldn’t think of any questions. I forgot everything I wanted to ask him.”

The next couple of months are going to put Zada in just about everyone’s feeds, introducing him not just to an army of younger Hunger Games fans but also to an older slice of the audience whose reading habits lean more towards Nobel laureates than Suzanne Collins. Whether by accident or design, he’s positioned himself, at 21, at a particularly advantageous intersection of the four quadrants, somewhere between franchise heartthrob and serious dramatic actor.

“He could be the biggest movie star in the world if he decided that’s what he wants to be,” Kazan predicts.

Meantime, Zada will have the opportunity to do something he hasn’t had much time for lately — get a life.

When he finishes shooting in Canada, he’ll fly back to Sydney and spend the Australian summer — winter back in the States — with his family, as well as the girl he’s been dating since last December. “Her name is Polly and she’s not an actress,” he says. “She doesn’t much care for the business which is perfect for me. Because she’s helped me relax and not think about work so much.”

After that, he’ll be relocating to L.A. sometime early in 2027. “Runyon Canyon maybe,” he muses. “Silver Lake? I don’t know yet. But my reps are eager for me to move and for someone from Australia L.A. feels like Movie World. It’s got literally everything I could possibly want.”

Except, as it happens, a job. Ironically, just as Zada is about to become a full-blown star, he finds himself without a job for the first time in three years. For once, he has no idea what he’ll be doing next.’