Unlike many actors who trace their career back to a specific revelatory moment in their childhood, Kelly says it was just something she always knew she wanted to do. Growing up in Sydney’s Inner West with parents who both worked as physios, her entry to performance was the Australian Girls Choir, which she joined aged five. “As part of the choir practice, we would do drama — I think it was like 10 minutes every week or something,” she recalls. “And I would think about what I was gonna do in those 10 minutes for the entire week. Like, I'd plan it. When I look back on it, there's so many examples of things like that from when I was little, but I don't specifically remember a particular thing that drove me into it. Like I did dance when I was little, but I know that the only part of the dancing that I cared about was the acting.”

Despite her growing ambition to pursue acting professionally, her parents insisted she finish school. “I was begging my parents to let me try and find an agent, which they weren't so keen on,” she says. “'Cause they were like, well, we don't know anything about that, we can't help you with it. We just want you to finish school. But I think they could probably see the glint in my eyes that I'd give everything else up.” As fate would have it, an agent attended her school production of Macbeth, saw her performance of Lady Macbeth and went on to sign Kelly. She began auditioning after school and had her university career cut short when she landed a part in Home & Away. “It does feel very fortuitous when I look back on it,” she admits. “I just try not to take it for granted.”

Kelly played Skye Peters on the iconic Australian soap for a year before roles in shorts and other series such as Dare Me began popping up. In 2021, she landed a role in the fictionalised retelling of the Tiger King saga, Joe vs. Carole, as Jamie Murdoch, Carole Baskin’s daughter, working opposite Kate McKinnon. While she was filming the series, she got an audition for a mysterious unnamed project led by Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B Weiss, along with Alexander Woo. (As the first major series that Benioff and Weiss have led since the blockbuster that was Thrones, expectations were high.) When Kelly submitted her self-tape, she had no idea what it was for, so when the showrunners called, she didn’t expect to hear she’d landed the role — she was mostly just trying to remain calm. “I was obsessed with Game of Thrones, like I used to watch it in class on my laptop,” she laughs. “I thought that it was going to be a chat, and they were going to tell me what to do for another audition. But instead they basically were like, ‘so when you get here and you start filming…’, which is crazy. So I was freaking out internally, trying to stay calm.”

For Kelly, it’s taught her not to take other work for granted, especially as she steps into a more hands-on role in the development of new projects. “It does make you appreciate the really small things,” she says. “It makes you appreciate the projects that don't have much money and that really have to hustle to get made. It does truly make me want to put a lot of time and energy into those sorts of things. And I hope that one day I'm in the position where I can push those things forward because I think that they're so important and I think that they're so vital to getting newer, younger performers and directors and writers into the scene. But we need these big projects to happen to allow those as well. For me it's about finding a nice equal balance between the two things.”

3 Body Problem is streaming now on Netflix.