‘Leviticus’: Meet Stacy Clausen & Joe Bird, the Standouts of Summer’s New Horror Romance
What To Know
- Stacy Clausen and Joe Bird star in the queer horror romance film Leviticus.
- The film hit theaters in the U.S. on June 19.
- Though Clausen and Bird are young, they’ve appeared in quite a few TV shows and movies.
Whether you’ve already seen Leviticus or you’re making plans to watch it, chances are you’re curious about the movie’s two leads, Stacy Clausen and Joe Bird. Though both young actors have a fair number of projects under their belts, the queer horror romance is a breakout moment for both of them.
Clausen and Bird play gay teenagers who face an evil entity that takes the form of the person they desire most. Bird’s character is Naim, who moves to a religiously conservative, Australian small town with his mother (Mia Wasikowska). Naim meets local boy Ryan (Clausen), and they fall for each other. When their feelings become more widely known, they’re cursed and forced to reject their desires.
But who are the actors behind the characters? Swooon has all the facts you need to know about Clausen and Bird as their stardom takes off.
How old are Stacy Clausen and Joe Bird?
Leviticus director Adrian Chiarella wanted to cast actors who were actually around Naim and Ryan’s age, per A-M Journal, and Bird and Clausen fit the bill. Bird is just 19 years old, while Clausen is 21.
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Where are Stacy Clausen and Joe Bird from?
Bird was born in Liverpool, England, but he’s based in Adelaide, Australia. Clausen is from Melbourne. “I was also lucky to have this film shot in and around my home city, so I could stay at home with family, which makes it a lot easier to jump out of the character when the day’s done,” Clausen told Numero Netherlands.
What have Stacy Clausen and Joe Bird been in before?
Bird is no horror newbie. At just 14 years old, he starred as Riley in Talk to Me, which earned him critical praise. In 2025, he appeared in the Australian drama Wolfram, and three years earlier, he appeared in a handful of episodes of First Day, an Australian children’s drama about a transgender girl. Bird’s first performance was in 2017’s Rabbit, a psychological thriller.
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“I think Naim is a completely different role to Riley [in Talk to Me], and I think what a lot of people maybe don’t realize is that I actually filmed a couple of other projects right before going back into horror,” Bird told A-M Journal. “Working on those projects, I learned so much because I’m working [in] a different genre, with different filmmakers and different producers [that] I brought into Leviticus.“
He continued, “I feel like my acting approach changes after every job, and it changes while I’m doing it, and so when I come to Leviticus it’s a very different role to Riley, in a sense that he’s not the reactive character, he’s not having prosthetics on his face all night – it’s a lot of the things he is observing, and the emotions have to go through him first to then go to the audience, because the film’s from his perspective. It’s also a thing that you can’t judge your character, and I think an approach I also took is not judging anyone else’s character, because a quality in Naim is that he understands people.”
Clausen has also been in the acting game for several years. He landed his first role in the supernatural series Preacher, and has had more TV appearances in Fires, Crazy Fun Park, Scrublands, and High Country. In terms of movies, he’s been in Netflix’s True Spirit and the shark movie Thrash.
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In an interview with Side-Note, Clausen discussed not acting in the horror genre prior to Leviticus. “I’m drawn to something that challenges me and pushes my abilities – it’s boring if we’re not being challenged. I seek out any script that pushes me beyond what I think I can do,” he said. “I’m also drawn to morally ambiguous characters – where the audience has to decide, based on their values, whether they like the person or not. People’s opinions going either way is really interesting to me.”
He’s set to appear in Netflix war drama Mosquito Bowl this year and upcoming sci-fi movie Shiver, which stars Keanu Reeves. They’re his first two international projects.
“There was some incredible cast across those two films that I got to train and work with, but I think I’m most excited about switching things up, getting to work in worlds that are completely new to me,” Clausen told Numero Netherlands. “They’re both massively different from Leviticus in tone, genre and character, so I was super excited to see how that would challenge me differently on set. I’m super into pushing myself into varied spaces, trying not to repeat the same thing, so Shiver and Mosquito Bowl really fulfilled me in that regard.”
Leviticus, In Theaters
