There are days when Ioane Sa'ula can't quite believe how far he's come.
Days when it feels like just yesterday that he was picking oranges and onions with his siblings, lying in hospital with a busted leg, or trying out his voice in a school theatre.
But it's now six years since he burst onto our screens as Vince in the hit show Bump, a hit Australian comedy that landed at just the right place and time - during COVID-19 on the crest of the golden era of streaming television.
The show, focused around an inner-city family and an overachieving teenager who has a surprise baby, went viral and lasted for five seasons.
It also launched the unlikely career of this Samoan-Australian kid from Griffith, leading to stints in Heartbreak High and The Last King of the Cross, and a role in Hollywood action comedy The Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.
But it might never have happened.
Sitting in a quiet cafe in suburban Canberra on a weekday morning, he's an anonymous - if uncommonly good-looking - bloke nursing a coffee in gym gear.
It's a comfortable state; he moved to Casey in Gungahlin for his last two years of school, and can't imagine living anywhere else.
But he says his life could have been quite different if it weren't for a broken leg, thwarted sporting ambition, and a teacher who saw something in him nobody else had before.
One of six kids, he'd grown up playing footy, but broke his leg on the field when he was 14. A stint in hospital led to a staph infection, three months in hospital and eight surgeries.
For two years, he couldn't play any sport. But it was a teacher who encouraged him to turn in a different direction. She changed his life, and they still talk regularly.
"She got me doing public speaking and drama, and then led to the school musical at 16," he said.
The musical was The Addams Family and he was cast in the lead as Gomez. At the time, he couldn't even grow a moustache and had to draw one on every day, but it was a turning point.
"That's when I truly fell in love with the idea of becoming an actor," he says.
It's one thing to fall in love with an idea, but quite another to actually pursue it full throttle.
One of his brothers had moved to Canberra, and he decided to follow, choosing Gungahlin College for its acting program.
He also started following casting pages on Facebook, and attended a casting call for a movie by New Zealand actor-director Taika Waititi.
"Taika was shooting a movie in Hawaii, looking for Polynesian boys ... very specific and very niche," he says.
He did three auditions and didn't win the role. But a year later, the casting director contacted him and invited him to audition for Bump. The rest came naturally.
He said he'd only recently come to understand how lucky he was to book a job on his second audition.
He'd just turned 18, and had plenty to learn. For starters, he'd never even heard of Claudia Karvan, beloved Australian actor and co-creator of the show.
"I did my homework," he said, including watching her breakout hit movie, 1993's The Heartbreak Kid.
"And then, full-circle moment, I got to be in Heartbreak High," he said, although that came later.
Before that was the surreal experience of a Hollywood film set. The Fall Guy was shot in Cronulla in 2022 and 2023, and Sa'ula drank it all in.
He still doesn't know what, precisely, the casting director saw in his tape; COVID-19 had introduced the still-prevalent practice of sending in video, rather than auditioning in person.
"I look back at it now ... at how poorly executed I did things, but it got me the job," he said.
"It was a great experience for a 19-year-old to go onto a Hollywood film set and watch people like Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt work."
For the record, he said while he didn't have much direct involvement with Gosling, the mega-star was "very kind, he said my name, he said good morning every morning, so other than his work, he was a nice guy to me".
He's also set to star in a new TV drama on Stan, The F Ward, about medical interns in a busy city hospital.
He's appearing alongside British actor Anna Friel, as well as Dan Wyllie, Susie Porter, Jeremy Sims and a host of other Aussie names.
Filming of season one wrapped in November and the show screens in July.
In the interim, he said, he's lying low, keeping fit, hanging out with his old school mates, and waiting for new opportunities to come up.
His parents, both Samoan, met and got married in New Zealand. After starting a family, they migrated across the ditch, first to Sydney and then to Griffith, where there was already a large Polynesian community picking fruit.
"Dad moved down by himself to start picking oranges - it's a classic," he says.
"Once he established himself down there, he got the whole family over.
"I should go home more than I do. But I love Canberra too much - I think it's just a bigger Griffith."
He's also more focused than ever on his career, and intent on not being typecast; on the day we meet, he's in the midst of realising how poised he is to launch into something greater.
"I just felt like I just had sat down and thought about my career and thought about where I wanted to be and how I wanted to get there, and then thought no one else has really gone out there and done it to the extreme that I want it to be," he said.
"I think there are a lot of great actors out there, especially from Australia, that are of the same background, but I think I want to kind of go out, then do it bigger and greater."
In other words, he wants to be more than just a competent Australian-Samoan face on the screen.
He loves watching Denzel Washington, Matthew McConaughey and Tom Hardy - actors who can shapeshift, and not just physically. They're artists who can convey emotion through their eyes, and transform themselves from romantic comedy leads to serious dramatic stars.
He likes to learn from watching, and he's proud to have made his way to acting without the benefit of drama school.
"I think I'm a guy who draws from life experience and natural instincts, and I feel like if I were to go in to study, it's like they're teaching you how to act and stripping back that instinctual style.
"For me, it's experience at work."
And he's learning, he says, every day, whether it's where to find the light when appearing on camera, or how to conduct himself on a set. It helps to be working with seasoned pros like Anna Friel.
"She brought this professionalism onto set every day, which was pretty cool to watch," he said.
"Just being able to carry yourself on set and what you can and can't ask for, what you can and can't do, is pretty cool to watch, because she's come from a pretty big body of work."
