When Australian filmmaker Warwick Thornton first wrote the screenplay for “The New Boy” years ago, he knew it was a beautiful story, but he also sensed he didn’t yet fully understand the tale he hoped to tell.
In the film, Thornton, whose friend Cate Blanchett later joined to act and produce, envisioned a Catholic orphanage for young Aboriginal boys in a remote part of Australia during the war years of the 1940s. The boys arrive from one culture with its traditions and beliefs, and leave with new teachings and tenets instilled in them.
The story begins as a new boy is delivered to the orphanage late on night. As he is taught the ways of the Catholic Church in the days that follow, he grows fascinated by a large crucifix in the chapel even as he holds tightly onto his Indigenous roots and the supernatural elements his own faith contains.
Cate Blanchett as Sister Eileen and Aswan Reid as the New Boy in writer-director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton’s new film “The New Boy,” which arrives in theaters on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Vertical) Director Warwick Thornton and actress Cate Blanchett attend a photo call for their film “The New Boy” at the 76th annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals on May 19, 2023 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images) When a young aboriginal boy played by Aswan Reid arrives at a remote Australian orphanage in the 1940s, he and a renegade nun played by Cate Blanchett find their different faiths tested in writer-director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton’s new film “The New Boy,” which arrives in theaters on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Vertical) Actor Aswan Reid and director Warwick Thornton attend the premiere of their film “The New Boy” during the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. It opens in the United States on Friday, May 23, 2025. (Photo by Sonia Recchia/Getty Images) Cate Blanchett as Sister Eileen in writer-director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton’s new film “The New Boy,” which arrives in theaters on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Vertical) Director Warwick Thornton and Cate Blanchett walk the red carpet at the 76th Annual Cannes Film Festival at Palais des Festivals on May 19, 2023 in Cannes, France. Their film, “The New Boy,” was part of the festival then. It opens in the United States on Friday May 23, 2025 (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images) Aswan Reid as the New Boy in writer-director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton’s new film “The New Boy,” which arrives in theaters on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Vertical) Deborah Mailman as Sister Mum with Wayne Blair as George in writer-director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton’s new film “The New Boy,” which arrives in theaters on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Vertical) Cate Blanchett as Sister Eileen in writer-director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton’s new film “The New Boy,” which arrives in theaters on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Vertical) The Australian drama “The New Boy” was nominated for 12 Australian Academy of Creative and Television Arts Awards, winning winning three. Seen here, left to right, are actresses Cate Blanchett and Deborah Mailman, writer-director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton, actor Aswan Reid, producer Kath Shelper and actor Wayne Blair. The film gets its United States release on Friday, May 23, 2025. (Photo by Chris Hyde/Getty Images for AFI) Aswan Reid as the New Boy in writer-director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton’s new film “The New Boy,” which arrives in theaters on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Vertical) Cate Blanchett as Sister Eileen and Aswan Reid as the New Boy in writer-director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton’s new film “The New Boy,” which arrives in theaters on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Vertical) Show Caption1 of 12Cate Blanchett as Sister Eileen and Aswan Reid as the New Boy in writer-director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton’s new film “The New Boy,” which arrives in theaters on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Vertical) Expand“It’s slightly personal, because the first time I’d seen Jesus on a cross was when I was 12,” says Thornton, himself an Aboriginal Australian, on a recent video call with Blanchett. “I was sent to a monastic Benedictine boarding school, and I’d sort of seen pictures of the bloke up there, but I’d never seen a life-sized personal one in a church.
“So the first time I walked into a church, I completely missed the mass because I was just staring at this bloke up there being tortured, waiting for him to blink,” he says. “It kind of scared the hell out of me.”
Thornton says he never really understood the Christianity taught by the Catholic brothers, but then his own Indigenous spirituality presented him with unknowable mysteries, too.
“That’s what’s exciting about it, in a strange way,” he says. “If you don’t understand it, it’s much more fun.”
Each new draft ended up in his sock drawer, Thornton says, until one of his late-night lockdown phone calls with Blanchett unlocked something, leading to the release of “The New Boy” in limited theaters on Friday, May 16.
“We were talking about ‘life’s too short, hey, let’s do something together,’” Thornton begins.
“We were just chatting about everything, as people had the space and inclination to do during the pandemic,” Blanchett says, taking over the story. “We had these sort of longform, no cameras on, have a bottle of wine conversations.
“And then you said – he just threw it away – ‘I’ve got something, I was going to send it to you, and you can just burn it if you don’t like it,’” Blanchett says, laughing. “I read it, and, I mean, the world was so present, the atmosphere so present. I loved it.
“But I said to Warwick, there’s nothing for me to do,” she continues. “Then Andrew (Upton), my partner, said, ‘What if the priest was a nun?’ That seemed to set something off in you, Warwick, this whole dimension.
“You’d kept saying, ‘I can see the poster,’” Blanchett says of Thornton’s fear that an image of the priest with the boy might give the wrong idea to moviegoers. “Even if we cast the most kind – even if we cast Sam Neill – a priest with his hand on an Indigenous boy’s shoulder sends alarm bells, rightly so, into an audience’s mind.”
Finding the ‘New Boy’
With Blanchett as Sister Eileen, the nun secretly running the orphanage in the absence of any priest, Deborah Mailman as Sister Mum and Wayne Blair as George, the orphanage handyman, all the major parts were cast. Except for the most important one, that of the character only ever known as the New Boy.
“We were all quietly having conniptions,” Blanchett says of concerns about finding an Indigenous child actor who could handle the challenging part. “What if we didn’t find the New Boy?
“There wouldn’t have been a film,” she says. “He’s in every frame, and the spirit of that actor was absolutely vital.”
The New Boy is seen as a sort of wild child when he is unceremoniously deposited at the orphanage in the middle of the night. Sisters Eileen and Sister Mum treat him with love and affection, helping him grow comfortable in his new home. George teaches him how to do the farm chores that all the boys are expected to perform.
And after a few bumps and bruises, the other orphan boys, all of them also Indigenous, though now comfortable in the shirts and sandals the New Boy eschews, also take him into their fold.
Still, the New Boy and his ways remain as much a mystery as his new community is to him. At night, he sleeps beneath his cot in the communal barracks, and conjures a spark of light – real or imagined, the film leaves that to viewers – that floats and darts around him, comforting him in his new home.
“I remember getting an email from Warwick, and he just said, ‘Shut the front gate, we found him,’” Blanchett says of her first awareness of Aswan Reid, who was 10 or 11 at the time and had never before acted. “I thought maybe that’s partly his relief and desperation. And then I met Aswan, and he is so charismatic.
“And watching him, the speed with which – having never been on a film set, having never been off-country – the speed with which he learned the process,” she says. “What it meant to hit your mark, how you worked with the dolly grip, about being in focus and out of focus. Just watching him, within a matter of days, learn how to use a frame was astonishing.
“He has such an intense curiosity and intelligence and spirit – and it wasn’t easy,” Blanchett says. “What was so beautiful was watching this little band of brothers [Reid and his fellow child actors] form so that when there were times where he had to get up well before dawn, there would always be one of the other boys get up with him, and make sure he had breakfast and travel with him so he was never by himself.”
Faiths collide
With Blanchett as Sister Eileen, filming began with a feminine point of view that felt much more visceral, Blanchett says.
“It’s about absent fathers, which is so alive,” she says of both the missing priest at the orphanage and missing fathers of its wards. “I think in any religion, but particularly one with an Indigenous lens on it, what happens when the male models are degraded, and what burden do the women have to bear? I found that very poignant, actually, and –
” – it scared the hell out of me,” Thornton interjects. “The only connection I had to the priest, because I don’t know enough about Catholicism or Christianity, is that he was a male. Suddenly, we make it a female. Now it’s completely scared the hell out of me.”
But that was fine, he adds. Actually great.
“I love going into films with absolute fear or characters and discovery,” Thornton says. “That’s very special for me to go to that place, and I have no idea, and that’s exciting.”
While on its surface, “The New Boy” is about the collision of different kinds of faith, it’s actually more about the inevitable and centuries-old clash between Indigenous people and others who arrived as colonizers.
“I didn’t want to go into it with that sort of worthy kind of victimization,” Thornton says. “It’s just this natural progression of what happens as colonization travels the world.
“If you imagine a field of wheat, that it’s been planted by a colonizer, and there’s these native sort of weeds in between the wheat,” he says, laughing. “It’s a terrible, terrible notion to call us Indigenous people weeds, but we get colonized by this wheat and then the harvesters come through and you don’t even see us.
“It’s kind of putting us on the map,” Thornton continues. “Like, we are there as well, and that’s kind of the bigger picture for me. I was never really like, ‘A certain power wins.’ I really didn’t want to go there even though Christianity kind of does win.
“It was more about saying that we were here, and we are here, and we still have special magic.”
An empathetic eye
As a White Australian who grew up familiar with Christianity, if not particularly religious, Blanchett came to Sister Eileen with empathy for her decisions, if not endorsement of her actions.
“One of the things I found interesting about Sister Eileen, there’s a war going on,” she says of both World War II and the struggle between Australia’s Indigenous and non-native populations then and now. “And the inevitability of that particular machine, particularly if you’re a young Indigenous child, is that you will be eaten up by it.
“So trying to stave off that inevitability, she’s shut the outside world out, and sort of willfully created this anxious sort of innocence,” she says. “And she’s fostered this innocence that the inevitability of the world won’t happen.
“I think she’s desperate for a miracle, and that was something I found very moving,” Blanchett says of Sister Eileen’s desire to save the orphaned boys in every sense of the word. “I think she’s alive to the miracle of the new boy, but really sort of fearful of the change that he represents. Ultimately, when she’s asked to attempt to fly, she’s profoundly mortal.”
“The New Boy” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, followed by its release in Australia, where it became one of the most acclaimed films of that year. Aswan Reid won best actor at the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards, where the film earned a total of 12 nominations.
Blanchett, Blair and Mailman were each nominated in acting categories, with Mailman winning for best supporting actress. Thornton received nominations for directing, screenplay and cinematography. He won the AACTA Award for the latter category, a well-deserved honor, for “The New Boy” is a gorgeously shot film, mixing painterly vistas of rural Australian wheatfields with intimate chiaroscuro scenes inside the orphanage.
“I started off with cinematography, so I still shoot my own films,” says Thornton, who also won the prestigious Gold Frog for best cinematography at the 2023 Camerimage, the prestigious international cinematography awards.
“The funniest thing about this film is that I pitched to everyone earlier and they all asked, ‘What’s it going to look like?’” he says. “I’d say it looks like ‘Days of Heaven,’” [The 1978 Terrence Malick film was beautifully set and shot amid its own endless wheatfields.]
“The irony is, I’ve never seen ‘Days of Heaven,’” Thornton says, laughing. “Everyone needs to see an image, and they need to put it in the box and tie it in a bow so they understand it. Well, the box was empty for me, but I gave them an image.
“Hey, I lied and I survived,” he says. “It’s a strange, strange way to live.”
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