My Brilliant Career landed on Netflix on 13 August. It entered the Global Top 10 English TV chart at No. 4 — 3.1 million views, a top ten placing in fifty-four countries, No. 1 in Australia, 100 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes — and then went up. By its second week it was No. 2 globally, with 4.7 million views and a top ten placing in seventy-two countries. Max Mayer-Rayment plays the stockman Jim Reid across three of its six episodes.

Five months earlier he was on a soundstage in Sydney, aboard a US destroyer, shooting Greyhound 2 for Apple Studios opposite Tom Hanks.

Right now he is furnishing a new flat entirely off Marketplace. So far, a shaggy red rug.

He applied to drama school once, at nineteen, and didn't get in.

"I felt like I was a step behind everybody else for a long time," he says. "I think it put the dog in me. It gave me a reason to hold myself accountable — to find my own way and work hard, because I didn't know if it was possible or not."

His stepfather was a lighting designer, so the theatres of his childhood were buildings he knew from the wings. One night he sat in the front row of a play set among 1940s mobsters. "The actors were so good I couldn't comprehend it wasn't real," he says. "I felt like if I stepped out onto that stage I'd have walked straight into it."

What followed the rejection was the training, taken elsewhere and assembled himself: amateur theatre, student films, film school graduate productions, classes, private coaches — the unpaid ecosystem most actors pass through on the way to a conservatoire, treated instead as the conservatoire. Then an agent, whom he went and found himself. "I just emailed people. Cold emails.”.

He also grew up on the water: a house on an island you could only reach by boat, and later something a good deal larger — a yacht bought in Perth and sailed home across the top of Australia. He took the leg from Exmouth to Broome: five hundred nautical miles, under a week if the weather agrees.

It didn't. A storm stretched the passage to three weeks, most of it spent working into the weather. "One of the most intense experiences of my life," he says. "Forty-knot winds, ten-metre swells."

What stayed with him wasn't the danger. It was the boredom inside the danger — long stretches of watching instruments and doing nothing at all, on almost no sleep. "It's just you and the boat and the open ocean. A lot of stuff shows up."

He came off the boat and booked his first television role.

North Shore was not a small thing to start on. Six episodes, a crime thriller, written by Cold Feet creator Mike Bullen, directed by Gregor Jordan of Two Hands, with ‘Game of Thrones’ John Bradley and Joanne Froggatt, a Golden Globe winner for Downton Abbey, at the front of it. Mayer-Rayment played Tom Macklin in all six: son of Lloyd Macklin, boyfriend of the dead girl, centre of the mystery. Beach Road Pictures made it for Network 10 and Paramount+; ITV Studios sold it abroad.

The one he singles out is Bradley "He never reached for anything. His charm was undeniable and infectious in every scene he was in, even though he was solving a murder.” Two years later Netflix picked the series up. No. 1 in the United Kingdom. No. 1 in Australia.

Not long after was Unspoken, Damian Walshe-Howling's twenty-one-minute drama, took the International Grand Prize at Clermont-Ferrand in February 2025 — the largest short film festival in the world after Cannes. It's set in Sydney in 1979, as demonstrations for Croatian independence turn violent, and draws on the case of the Croatian Six, convicted on police evidence later shown to have been fabricated. Mayer-Rayment plays Jakov, the brother who is arrested.

Then a few months later, it’s opposite in every register: Saint Valentine, Vanessa Gazy's film about two isolated sisters and the American missionaries who knock on their door, world-premiered in the Dendy Awards at Sydney Film Festival and screened afterwards at Palm Springs International ShortFest. He plays one of the missionaries.

Another part of his childhood was spent on a farm on Australia's east coast, where there were horses. "Saddling up and jumping on my horse, my stepdad on his," he says. "Some of the most cherished memories I have."

Last year he was in South Australia's South East, shooting My Brilliant Career for Jungle Entertainment and Netflix — Liz Doran's reimagining of the Miles Franklin novel, with Philippa Northeast as Sybylla Melvyn. The South Australian Film Corporation calls it the biggest single season of television ever made in the state.

“I think people connect with it so much because Sybylla’s experiences are still so relevant today” he says. “Reading the book, her sharp wit, I really felt like Franklin was in our century. She had a gift”

He had ridden since childhood, and spent a month of training preparing for the role as the stockman.

"A lot of actors show up claiming they can ride a horse," he says — so nobody takes your word for it. By the shoot he was doing barrels, and brumby catches on camera. "I think everyone was a little shocked I could actually stay upright."

Mayer-Rayment plays Jim as the hero of his own story: a man who wants very much to be thought well of. It's his second job for Jungle, after Good Cop/Bad Cop.

Last January, a warship.

Greyhound 2 is a Playtone production for Apple Studios: Hanks writing and starring as he did on the 2020 original, Aaron Schneider back to direct, Stephen Graham and Elisabeth Shue reprising, the story carrying Captain Krause and his crew out of Normandy and into the Pacific. Mayer-Rayment is aboard the destroyer, in a substantial role, much of it opposite Hanks.

Nobody asked whether he could handle a boat. Pittwater wasn't on the résumé and the audition never went near it. The horses had come back visibly, a dozen years later, on a call sheet. The sea just turned up, uninvited, on a soundstage in Sydney.

Hollywood is, inevitably, part of the horizon. Mayer-Rayment now has a team in Los Angeles, which has been fielding enquiries about prospective US projects, including discussions surrounding a feature he can't yet talk about. It helps that he rides, knows boats, and is comfortable in physically demanding environments — a combination rarer than it sounds.

What he wants next isn't a bigger job so much as better company. "Making a film or a TV show is collaborative," he says. "There are a lot of people who inspire me and who I want to work with in the US." Los Angeles, he says, arrives pre-loaded with nostalgia — a city you've already seen a thousand times before you get there.

At home in Sydney, meanwhile, he is building a couch out of pallets a tile shop gave him for nothing. It is a work in progress.