Where There Is Heart, There Will Be A Home
Jake Austin
“I don’t know; I just love London too much. I found myself here.”
What begins as an interview quickly dissolves into two people trading stories about the same chaotic industry. He mentions, almost as an aside, that he originally wanted to be a producer before discovering how much a producer's job actually demands, at which point directing looked far more appealing. For now, here's everything worth knowing about Jake: he's a filmmaker, he's oddly punctual, and he loves dogs. Then he speaks again, and his accent proves impossible to place.
At one point I mistake his accent for Irish, which, once I know the real story, is a spectacular misjudgment even by my standards. Jake was born in Melbourne, raised between there and Sydney, then moved to Los Angeles too young to have much say in it. The plan was to stay for two years. It became sixteen.
Ask Jake where he's from, and the instinct is Australia. Ask him what home actually felt like, though, and the answer is LA, the Valley, Studio City, a childhood spent a few streets from the CBS studios. His accent settled into something mostly American. It's a lovely little contradiction: an Australian answer, an American voice, a London life, all belonging to the same person, worn without any of the confusion you'd expect.
Jake Austin
Losing the Nest
“I know I was kind of pushed out of the nest, and I didn’t get to jump, but, you know, at least I landed on my feet.”
He compares LA to Sydney, sunshine, an unhurried ease, something of the "surfer dude stoner town" about it. Outside the pub window, it's naturally pouring rain. Film was simply part of the furniture growing up; many of his parents' friends worked as crew, and Studio City gave him an early, ordinary closeness to filmmaking, long before it was something he actually wanted.
For now, he wants to make a point about LA: it's a genuinely boring city, in his view, unless you grew up there. No pub culture, no pint with mates on a random Tuesday, suburban, sprawling, entirely dependent on the car. I offer my own contribution, entirely unprompted: I turned up mildly scandalised that the walk from the Tube took twelve minutes. Jake finds this genuinely funny. To someone raised in a city built around the car, that's basically a luxury.
But the longer Jake talks about LA, the more the place itself seems to matter less than the small handful of people he shared it with.
Jake's family growing up was small and close: mum, dad, sister. His Australian extended family weren't especially happy about the move to LA, and when I ask whether he missed having that wider family around, his honest answer is yes and no. He didn't know anything different. Four people felt more than sufficient, because they were all he'd ever known.
"It's about to get morbid," Jake warns gently, and the pub's whole tone shifts with him.
He was seventeen when his dad passed away, already, by any measure, an unfairly hard age to be handed something so heavy. He describes a kind of resentment, life finding new ways to knock him down. He, his mum and his sister all grieved differently, differently enough that for a while they struggled to understand each other's version of it. The line that stays with me longest from the whole afternoon is this: he had lost his father, but his mum had lost the love of her life. It's hard, he says quietly, to look outward when you're that deep in your own grief.
Grief wasn't the only thing upended. Their whole future in America had been tied to his dad's visa; when Trump was elected and the rules changed, his sister, through sheer luck, won the green card lottery and got to stay. Jake and his mum went back to Melbourne, grieving and not always getting along. She eventually settled in Vietnam; he moved to Sydney, grew restless, and ended up in London instead. (His mum now lives in Morocco with a boyfriend twenty years her junior, cheerfully named Speedy, a detail so good Jake himself insisted I keep it in.)
Jake describes the whole thing as being pushed from the nest, rather than choosing to jump. He was the first of his LA friends to really leave. But, in his own words, he landed on his feet, even if that initially meant six weeks on the sofa of Callum, a friend met almost by accident when his sister was visiting London: born in Chelsea, moved to LA as a kid, sent back at twenty, practically Jake's own story in reverse. Six weeks quietly became six months, before Jake got a proper work visa, purely, as he puts it with a grin, "to contribute to society."
It's also around this point that Jake meets Sam Larner, one of the first real friendships he makes in London, and one that will matter far more than either of them yet knows.
Jake Austin
Three Days, Then Nine Months
“I suppose there’s always, like, the nerves about going to meet someone that could potentially be the love of your life.”
Jake happened to meet his wife, Yasmin, due to a spectacularly bad date attended by his friend, Sam - one that ended with the pair of them sitting at Sam's kitchen table in near-total silence, with nothing left to say to each other. I gently point out that, given what happened next, it can't have gone that badly. He laughs and doesn't disagree.
Jake, freshly out of a long relationship, gave her his number on the promise she'd set him up with someone. Months later, out of nowhere, an unknown number sent Jake photos of Yasmin, Yasmin's friend, knowing her relationship was ending, quietly making good on her word. They went on a first date. It went well. The only problem: Jake was flying to Australia in three days for a visa appointment.
They agreed to stay in touch. Then COVID reared its ugly head, and Jake was stuck in Australia for nine months. What followed was nine months of FaceTime and phone calls, timed around whatever the time difference would allow. The question worth asking is this: after nine months of talking to someone almost entirely through a screen, does it feel natural when you finally meet, or have you just built someone up in your head?
Jake admits there were nerves, the specific, tender kind that come with meeting someone who might be the love of your life. But because the calls had been so consistent, meeting again, he says, simply felt natural.
Once his visa came through and the first Covid restrictions lifted, Jake flew straight back to the UK. From there, the story gathers momentum: London, a year dating, a year living together, engaged the year after, with the engagement party held in the very pub we're sitting in now. Five years after their first date, they married a year and a half ago now
Jake Austin
An Entirely New Family
“Oh my God, that’s the most upsetting thing, is the fact that they were never in a room together. They’re like the same person.”
— Jake, talking about his dad and Raj.
Knowing that Yasmin was undoubtedly the love of his life, Jake had a plan for the proposal, a home-cooked meal, every stop pulled out. Instead, nervous, he had a few drinks to steady himself and simply did it there and then, getting down on one knee behind Yasmin at the sink.
That's precisely the moment a Brazilian housemate walked in, with a woman he'd just met at the party. Neither noticed Jake, frozen mid-proposal. The ring was quickly pocketed, five minutes of awkward small talk followed, and Jake tried again, this time Yasmin noticed; there were the inevitable tears of happiness, and an irrefutable yes. Moments later, something that sounded like applause came from elsewhere in the flat. But alas, it was not applause. It was the housemate and his new companion in the neighbouring bedroom, entirely unaware they'd just soundtracked a proposal. Jake tells this bit, laughing so hard he can barely finish it, and honestly, so am I.
Marrying Yasmin also meant marrying into her family, and for Jake, whose own childhood unit had been small and tight, that was a real adjustment, one he still regards with something close to wonder. Yasmin's family is large and Indian, and Jake describes the whole thing as overwhelming in the best way: warm, welcoming, unlike anything he'd known growing up. Her dad started calling him son almost immediately. Their wedding included a mehndi two days before, henna, saris, though Yasmin didn't want an entirely traditional Indian wedding, and her family were completely fine with that.
What matters more than the details of the day is what Jake found on the other side of it: a father-in-law he's grown genuinely close to. He tells me, quietly, that he wishes his own dad and his father-in-law could have met, both cheeky, both silver-tongued, both natural salesmen. He thinks they'd have got on brilliantly, and there's a small ache under the way he says it. A boy raised in a small, close family, who lost one of its four central people at seventeen, went on to marry into a huge one, and found in his father-in-law something that quietly fills a little of the space his own dad left behind.
However, Yasmin's friend, who technically started this whole chain of events, wasn't at the wedding; the friendship soured as Yasmin got older, and it ended messily at a party. Jake holds no real bitterness. His view is that people come into your life for certain reasons, and a relationship doesn't need to be permanent to permanently change what comes after it. She left. What she made possible didn't.
Back, finally, to where the conversation started: what does Jake actually do? He wants to direct. Directing, reliably, doesn't pay rent. So he works as a 1st AD, the person whose job, put simply, is to keep a film set running to schedule (a Herculean task for the vast majority of productions), which is exactly the job that gave him "on time is late" as a personal creed. His first professional gig also introduced him to Elliot, an actor, producer and writer he's worked with on almost everything since, the start of a theme he keeps returning to: you work with people you like, and then you simply keep working with them.
Everyone has worked for free at some point; his own first payment, memorably, was a PS5 rather than an actual paycheque, in exchange for what he calls, with real fondness for how naive it sounds now, "great experience and exposure."
Yasmin, notably, isn't in the film industry herself; she works remotely in sales, selling cardboard boxes, but she's persuasive on the phone and has ended up helping on Jake's projects far more than either of them expected. One of the industry's most valuable qualifications appears on no CV at all: whether you can drive. It's not the size of your résumé, Jake tells me; it's the size of your car boot, and how much production equipment you are willing to squeeze in.
That skill led to Yasmin's worst night on set: a five-p.m.-to-five-a.m. shoot at Chatham Docks, sent to Brixton for food, then Kent, then home an actor, except the address was wrong; it should have been Wimbledon, and nobody mentioned that was the producer's mistake. She arrived two hours late with Sri Lankan food to a starving crew, and was greeted with, "Did you go to Sri Lanka to pick it up?" Yasmin put the food down, got back in the car, and left. Being married to the director, it seems, comes with no nepo-privileges. They're all friends again now, close enough that Yasmin later gave Jake a framed map of her accidental route that night, which he still shows people, laughing every time.
Published 01 October 2026
Written by Lydia Stansbury · Photography by Vittoria Avigliano
Jake Austin
Where Is Home?
“I do, you know, for all intents and purposes, consider myself a Londoner now.”
By the end of the afternoon, we've circled back to where we started: where is Jake actually from?
Australia is still his knee-jerk answer. LA is still, in some real sense, woven into who he is, a large part of his soul, by his own admission, never quite left. He's still close with his LA friends. But he feels no real pull to go back. His wife is here. His friends are here. The people he makes films with are here. An entirely new family, one he never saw coming, is here too.
Home, for Jake, seems to have stopped being a place and become instead a chain of people who kept quietly showing up for him. Callum gave him a sofa. Sam gave him a friendship group. A wonderfully bad first date connected Sam to one of Yasmin's friends. That friend connected Jake to Yasmin. Yasmin connected him to a father-in-law who now fills a little of the space his own dad left. Elliot, and a small, generous army of collaborators and favours owed, connected him to a career he's still building. Some of these people stayed. Some didn't. But each of them moved him somewhere, and he seems genuinely grateful for it all, even the parts that hurt.
Jake didn't so much leave the nest as get pushed from it, but he landed on his feet. Somewhere between a sofa he was meant to sleep on for six weeks, a first date three days before a flight to Australia, nine months of FaceTime, an interrupted proposal, and a career held together by favour and goodwill, London stopped being somewhere Jake had ended up and quietly became home.
It's still tipping it down as we leave. Jake, for his part, doesn't seem to mind at all - a true Londoner, it seems.
Published 01 October 2026
Written by Lydia Stansbury · Photography by Vittoria Avigliano