2 weeks ago
5
Actor Aud Mason-Hyde is no stranger to the film industry, (director Sophie Hyde and cinematographer/editor Bryan Mason are their parents, and they have acted in several Australian films), but before shooting their latest – their biggest to date – there were some serious nerves.
In Jimpa, they star alongside some big-hitters: Oscar winner Olivia Colman and stage and screen legend John Lithgow.
“I was shitting myself,” Mason-Hyde says when we talk on Zoom from Sydney where they’re performing in Virginia Gay’s theatre production Mama does Derby.
“Huge names – I was totally pissing my pants! Olivia came to Adelaide to do a week of rehearsal and I remember just pacing around the rehearsal room like, ‘Oh my god, she’s about to walk in. What am I gonna say? It’s Olivia Colman! Am I wearing the right thing? Am I a good enough actor to be here?’ Total imposter syndrome and all this … internal monologue.”
Then Colman walked in and immediately made a fart joke.
“It was completely disarming … totally humbling herself, taking the mickey out of herself,” says Mason-Hyde. “She’s a very smart person, very down to earth and doesn’t like a fuss being made over her. She’s the first to sort of cut herself down or make herself seem … small or unprepared.”
Jimpa is Adelaide-based director Sophie Hyde’s follow-up to Good Luck To You, Leo Grande. Co-written and directed by Hyde, it’s a deeply personal film, a queer family drama drawn largely from her own life.
Lithgow plays Jim, an HIV positive gay man and activist who left his wife and daughters behind in Adelaide to immerse himself in Amsterdam’s queer community. Jim is based on Hyde’s own late father, Jim Hyde, who moved to Sydney and Melbourne for similar reasons when Sophie was a child. (The real Jim died in 2018).
Colman is Hannah – a filmmaker trying to make a film about her father – who travels to Amsterdam with husband Harry (Daniel Henshall) and their trans, non-binary teenager, Frances, played by Aud, who is also trans and non-binary – and a teenager, albeit a couple of years older than 15-year-old Frances, at the time of filming in 2024. Yes, things get very meta.
On their way to Amsterdam, Frances tells Hannah and Harry that they want to live with Jimpa (the family nickname for Jim) for a year, to experience a bigger life than Adelaide can offer a young trans person.
Jimpa, which first gained attention at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, is a family drama on one hand, but also an exploration of intergenerational queer experience. Mason-Hyde explains that when their mother, Sophie, conceived of the film, the impetus was imagining what it would be like for the real-life Jim and Mason-Hyde to meet and discuss (and probably debate) their respective experiences of queerness.
“And more broadly, what would it look like for a gay man of the AIDS generation to have a discussion with a young non-binary trans person,” says Mason-Hyde. “That expanded and the film became much larger in scope and cast, but we were always really invested in representing intergenerational connection with their community and actually asking our queer communities here in Australia to talk to each other. Because it actually doesn’t matter if we don’t share a language, right?”
In the film, Jimpa, as provocative as he is loving, questions Frances’ use of pronouns, and self-identification as non-binary. “The words we use for our identities might be different, but the fact is, we’re living the same … set of experiences, we’re living in the same communities, we’re engaging with each other,” says Mason-Hyde.
Jimpa also has some coming-of-age moments, such as when Frances meets Isa (Zoe Love Smith), and has their first sexual encounter (something strongly encouraged by Jimpa).
Tricky enough on screen at the best of times, but surely even harder when your mum’s the director?
“For Zoe, it was a bit tentative,” Mason-Hyde says. “‘Oh, we’re going to shoot all these intimate scenes in front of your mum.’ But I had a conversation with her and she was like, ‘Actually, it made total sense.’ Mum and I are best friends, collaborators, we know almost exactly what the other one’s about to say. We really understand each other, so it was not as challenging as maybe you would think. I think doing the press has been more challenging, weirdly enough, but making it was a very beautiful time.”
While growing up in the film industry, and performing in many a school musical has helped Mason-Hyde feel at ease in front of cameras, they’ve always, it seems, had a self-confidence beyond their years. They have long identified as non-binary, even giving a TED Talk on the subject at the age of 12.
The 2018 talk, titled Toilets, Bowties, gender and me, has had more than 1.6 million views on YouTube, and Mason-Hyde, now 20, still gets messages about it.
“ I did Four Corners when I was 14, but no one contacts me about that! It’s such a blur, to be honest, doing it at that age. I didn’t really think about it at the time, but Mum was very careful about me wanting to do it, knowing that it would be in the world forever,” they say. “I think it’s such an artefact at the time in my life, such an artefact at that moment in time, for trans people in Australia, I’m really proud of it. Sometimes my friends are like, do you regret it yet? And I’m like no, I don’t regret it.”
In the 10-minute talk, Mason-Hyde discusses their fashion choices (they were big on bowties then), using public toilets and gender identity.
Have they seen changes in the intervening years? Are things better now for trans people? It’s complicated, Mason-Hyde says.
“It ebbs and flows. It can be very dangerous to be an openly trans person in the world right now – I think that to be trans seven years ago in Australia was easier than it is right now,” they say.
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO AUD MASON-HYDE
- Worst habit? I’ve become addicted to this geography app called Seterra. I’ve spent hours playing it and have 100 per cent correct guesses on all 193 UN Territories. I’m not being paid for this - it’s just that good.
- Greatest fear? Big sea creatures and also the threat of impending climate catastrophe.
- The line that stayed with you? “Anger is the precision of love; we fight so hard because we love so hard” - writer/performer Alok V Menon.
- Biggest regret? Selling my ticket to a Chappell Roan gig in Sydney a few years ago before she was famous. I don’t even remember what I did instead.
- Favourite book? Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto.
- The artwork/song you wish was yours? I Saw the TV Glow! I hope I get to make something with Jane Schoenbrun one day.
- If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? I would go back to meet the real Jimpa, my grandpa Jim, now as an adult. There’s so many eras of his life I would love to see, but I think I’d meet him in the 90s, when he had just won the first Rainbow Award for Leadership for his community health activism. We’d have fun I reckon.
Oddly enough, “over-representation” has made things worse. “Because we’ve had such a spotlight on us … there was a point in time where we were in this sweet spot of gaining some representation, some understanding, but it was still like … you sort of had to know of a trans person to really be talking about it,” Mason-Hyde says.
“And now, we’re this tiny minority of people, particularly trans kids, and yet we’re talked about all the time. There’s so much political conversation about us, and our whole world has been politicised when I think public opinion is actually probably quite pro-trans or just kind of neutral because most people who know a trans person are very chill about it because we’re just people. There are still huge amounts of people who are swayed by what the media and politics has to say about it. And we’re just ... we’re a political football in the cycle.”
Mason-Hyde remains politically engaged; in between acting gigs, they co-founded Transmedium, a trans-led arts organisation, with friend Claud Bailey, a filmmaker and youth advocate. They elevate trans youth stories, and produce a regular zine, Dreamlife, for trans youth.
“It’s all about liberation and justice, and putting into young trans people’s hands an actual print publication that’s like an artefact of our existence and our joy feels really important to me,” Mason-Hyde says.
They also run occasional workshops in high schools in Adelaide, where they’re based.
“And I get to meet all of these beautiful young trans and queer people who are out. It’s amazing. And they just get to be themselves. Even five years ago when I was in high school it wasn’t like that,” they say. “I was really the only one who was open about it – I ran the LGBTQ club at school and almost everyone in the club was closeted. The rate of progress has been so fast and so amazing and it’s pretty wonderful to see.”
It’s these kinds of moments that keep Mason-Hyde optimistic.
“It’s a weird mix, and it’s complex, but there’s a lot of community happening everywhere in Australia,” they say. “There are so many really joyful pockets – it’s a beautiful thing.”
Jimpa opens nationally on February 19
