Phoebe Tonkin – award-winning Australian actor, model and possessor of impossibly sharp cheekbones – is sitting in a car on a warm Sunday afternoon in New York.“I went to go see Rose Byrne’s play [Fallen Angels on Broadway] this afternoon,” she says over Zoom. “So, yes, I’m in the car outside. My friend’s having dinner, the traffic is so bad. It’s nice to have a little air-conditioned moment.”It’s quite the contrast from what Tonkin is here to talk about – her new TV show Two Years Later, in which she plays a woman, Emily, who – maybe! – finds love with a man, Ryan, she meets on a bus in Brisbane.Brenton Thwaites and Phoebe Tonkin in Two Years Later. Their characters decide to go on eight dates to decide if they should get married. They don’t know each other outside of the morning commute but Emily and Ryan (Brenton Thwaites) click as they trade theories about their fellow passengers and share carefully curated snippets about their lives. One morning – it’s set in the early days of COVID-19 – they bid their goodbyes, not knowing they wouldn’t see each other again for two years.When the lockdown lifts, a reluctant Emily is ordered back to the office, and she encounters Ryan again on the bus. Instead of their usual chit-chat, however, he has a radical proposal: marry him. Emily is intrigued and agrees to go on eight dates with Ryan to see if it could work.It’s a bold gambit – and, to be clear, you should probably always say no to any proposals, marriage or otherwise, on a bus – and the pair’s burgeoning relationship plays out over eight episodes, with Heather Mitchell and Roy Billing in support.Tonkin was hooked from the moment she read the script, which taps into Millennial anxiety and generational trauma, by Peter Bridges.“It was so unique in that it read like a play,” says Tonkin. “It was really about these two characters, and there was this beautiful love story that just felt so relatable in that we all kind of dealt with the loneliness and isolation of COVID, and the repercussions of what that did to everyone.“But at the same time it wasn’t a COVID show. It was [about] re-entering the world again and I just thought it was such a unique kind of love story, and a very honest love story, where it wasn’t like a romcom, it was an anti-romcom … where those first few dates – when you’re falling in love with someone, everything is so exciting and magical and romantic, and then you start getting to know someone and it can get ugly and messy and real.”Brenton Thwaites and Phoebe Tonkin in Two Years Later. In that respect, Two Years Later has a lot in common with fellow Australian shows such as Offspring and Colin from Accounts, with heroines who are complicated and prickly and not always interested in finding a happy ever after.“She was someone that was sort of a little bit lost,” says Tonkin. “And I thought that was quite interesting, to see this woman in her mid-30s, [because] a lot of the time when we see these characters who are trying to find who they are, they’re always in their 20s.“But I’d say, for the majority of people – it’s just not represented that much on film and television – your 30s are actually even more [confusing] because the stakes are a lot higher. In your 20s you can get away with trying different jobs and different degrees and travelling because that’s what you’re meant to do. But in your 30s you’re surrounded by people who are getting married and having kids and getting big promotions, and if you feel like you’re not in that place in your life you feel like you’re behind, so the stakes feel even higher.”Phoebe Tonkin as Frankie Bell, Gus and Eli’s mum, in Boy Swallows Universe. For Tonkin, her 30s have been anything but confused. After working steadily in her teens and 20s in local productions such as H20: Just Add Water, Packed to the Rafters and Tomorrow, When the War Began, and then in the US in the young-adult hits The Vampire Diaries and its spin-off The Originals, Tonkin has found a new gear in her 30s.She won the best lead actress award at the 2025 AACTA awards for her stunning work as Frankie Bell in Netflix’s mega-hit Boy Swallows Universe and received praise for another gritty performance in the homegrown boxing drama Kid Snow. She’s also set to star in and executive produce a new Australian drama, The Dark Lake, which is adapted from Sarah Bailey’s award-winning debut crime novel.Oh, and Tonkin was married last year, to New York art adviser Bernard Lagrange, in a black-tie wedding breathlessly covered by Vogue. (An event that wasn’t covered breathlessly by Vogue happened mid-interview, when my daughter interrupted, yelling about the cat eating her cereal. Tonkin, quite calmly, assured me all was fine.)Nevertheless, Tonkin refuses to be pigeonholed.“I don’t ever want to just make a project because it’s trying to, like, make a statement but there’s definitely certain roles that, like, if your character’s just there to serve the male character [or], I don’t know, just facilitating the male character’s story, then I’m not that interested,” says Tonkin.“Women are complicated, and women can be weak and strong and messy and put-together, and I don’t want to make statements with the characters I choose because I think it’s super interesting to explore every type of character. I would also like to think that the choices I’ve made have all been quite different, and I quite enjoy when people go, ‘Oh, I didn’t realise that was you’, or, ‘I didn’t know you were doing that’, and not just feel like I’m playing the same thing all the time.”Two Years Later streams on Paramount+ from June 4.Want more TV? 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