There's a game we like to play here in the newsroom with people who claim to be from Canberra, and that game is called "but how Canberra are you, really?"
Actually I just made that up - it's not a game so much as a reflex. But there are certain tells when it comes to how much a person truly identifies with growing up in this fair city of ours.
Liv Hewson, for one, passes the test with flying colours. They're the real deal, as Canberra as you can get.
The actor known for Santa Clarita Diet on Netflix and the show Yellowjackets, who's currently gracing our screens in the edgy Australian crime thriller Treasure & Dirt and who regularly appears on LA red carpets, has fond memories of the Eddison skate park.
They grew up in Hughes, did Canberra Youth Theatre instead of uni or drama school, and misses the kangaroos on Red Hill.
Most telling of all, mention "awesome chips" and you'll get a fond reminiscence of eating "unbelievable chicken" from a very particular local chain at Woden Plaza.
Hewson is speaking to me via Zoom from Sydney, in the country to promote Treasure & Dirt, a show they list as a career highlight.
It's by now a familiar face, but only because I've been watching the show avidly. The character Hewson plays, Nell Buchanan, is a mesmerising kind of conundrum - ambitious, tightly wound and self-contained, as well as ethereally beautiful and compelling to watch.
It's tempting to think of this distinct onscreen presence as the result of both experience and a hard-won kind of self-knowledge.
Hewson is now 30, but came out as non-binary at just 16, well before the concept was part of everyday discourse. The last time The Canberra Times spoke to them about the transition, it was 2019 and the language around it - pronouns and terminology - was considered something of a conundrum. For some, it required serious thought and adjustment. Nowadays, it's almost de rigeur. Or is it?
When they first came out, Hewson says, they found themselves constantly explaining themselves.
"For a long time, I was walking through the world being the first non-binary person that the people I was speaking to had ever met, and I remember when I made the decision to come out more publicly, there was this interesting thing going on where, for me, I had already been explaining this to people for years, privately," they say.
"So in choosing to go public with it, I knew that there would be a certain degree of education that I was going to need to be a part of completing, or stuff that I was going to need to explain, and there was a degree of that for sure."
But somewhere along the way, there has been a shift.
"More often than not, people already knew what I was talking about when I said that I was non-binary. That was incredibly significant," they say.
"So I don't need to completely start from scratch with people anymore, which is great, and I think is indicative of real positive movement."
Meanwhile, four years ago Hewson underwent top surgery, and has since lived in a body in which they feel completely at ease - a novelty for someone who once struggled with a sense of identity.
I venture that this comes through in the way they carry themselves at formal events, with a striking fashion sense. Is this kind of confidence newfound, or a result of having access to stylists and fashion gurus?
Hewson is adamant that the surgery changed things drastically and for the better.
"My posture drastically improved and my relationship to exercise drastically improved and I just was so much more comfortable in my body on a day-to-day basis," they say.
"When you're physically comfortable, it's much easier to make honest decisions about what you do and do not like, right? If something doesn't feel right, it's just easy to tell because your baseline is feeling good. And so for me, it was very pleasurable to be able to get in touch with what feels comfortable for me ... to be able to think about clothes and my body as something that I enjoy."
Hewson is now based partly in the US, but wants to start returning habitually to make work in Australia.
"I've always thought that there's no reason for consistently interesting, strange, specific art to not come out of Australia, because we have all the ingredients here," they say.
"We have the crews here, the writers, the actors. We have all the talent, and it's often a matter of resources and time. So anything I can do to support the kinds of Australian stories that I selfishly want in the world as an audience member, anything I can do to be a part of making that happen, I'm thrilled to be able to do."
Still, getting to spend several months in Coober Pedy last year shooting the adaptation of Canberra author Chris Hammer's crime thriller was, they say, life-changing.
"I catch myself saying the kind of things about it that actors say all the time and are often encouraged to say," they say.
"But it's literally true. The people on this job became family to me. It was so creatively fulfilling and such a joy. I loved the crew that we were working with. I loved filming in South Australia. What we were able to build together is incredibly special to me. I'm so proud of it, and I am so stoked that it's out in the world. I'd love to do more of it."
It could well be a dream that comes true, as Treasure & Dirt is part of a series around the characters of Ivan Lucic (played by Michael Dorman) and Nell, two hardened detectives who find something in each other while solving complex cases - outback noir at its finest.
Hewson says from the outset, they knew the role was something special - "really distinct, really exciting, incredibly specific and strange in an exciting way".
The result is an almost Lynchian fever-dream of a thriller - all the usual ingredients are there, the Aussie larrikins, the parched landscape, the hidden secrets, but it's somehow set askew.
It's exactly the kind of story and scope Hewson is consistently drawn to.
"Anything that has a specificity of tone or a specificity of voice or place is is really important to me," they say.
"One of the things that drew me to Treasure & Dirt was that we very deliberately talked about using the archetypes of the Australian crime genre as a Trojan horse in order to take audiences to a place that they haven't necessarily been before, to bring audiences into a world that is ultimately going to take them by surprise, and I love doing that."
In the meantime, they hope to keep coming back, and especially to Canberra, which is still filled with scenes from the past.
"The bus shelters are the big ones for me," Hewson says.
"I didn't learn to drive until my mid-to-late 20s, in the states. I was a pedestrian and a public transport user exclusively in Canberra, so the bus shelters are always going to be very important to me."
And the city they grew up in is still the same, even while morphing from year to year.
"[It's] psychologically certainly not unheard of, to be getting older and to be seeing your hometown change structurally around you," they say.
"But there's a nostalgia element, of course, and it is interesting to watch somewhere change in scale quite quickly. I think of Canberra as being very small, and it's not looking so small anymore."
