On a warmish Wednesday evening early in the year, Paul Mescal was celebrating his birthday and everybody seemed to know. The Irish actor, famous for his neckchain and his leading role in Normal People, was in Sydney, Australia, for a new film, and the word was spreading. He was photographed running in Centennial Park. He was sighted at Tamarama Beach. He popped into an inner-city pub.

But on the list of stars now working in Australia, Mescal – in Sydney for a musical film adaptation of Carmen – is comfortably mid-level. Thanks to its relative freedom from Covid-19 and associated restrictions, Australia – blessed with diverse locations, sunny weather and a ready-made film infrastructure – has become Hollywood Down Under.

Here for the latest instalment of Marvel’s Thor franchise are Natalie Portman, Matt Damon, Tessa Thompson, Chris Pratt, Christian Bale, the New Zealand director Taika Waititi and the Australian star Chris Hemsworth. Fellow Australian Isla Fisher and her husband, Sacha Baron Cohen, have relocated their family to Sydney, where the pair first met 20 years ago. Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban came back too.

Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton were in the country earlier in the year to film Three Thousand Years of Longing. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson just wrapped in Queensland for the sitcom Young Rock. Zac Efron moved for the lifestyle first, then let the projects follow.

When the news came on Wednesday that George Clooney and Julia Roberts would soon be joining their peers in the sun, the film’s title was as apt as A Star is Born, as subtle as Sharknado. It’s called Ticket to Paradise.

‘Like a time machine’

The areas that these stars flock to – Byron Bay, Queensland’s Gold Coast, Sydney – are beach-fringed and beautiful. They are also Covid-free. New South Wales, the most populous state in Australia, has gone 54 days without a community-acquired case of the virus, and Queensland has racked up 64. California, meanwhile, recorded 3,518 new cases on Thursday and 268 deaths.

Many of the stars have quarantined in luxury mansions or rolling country estates, with special exemptions that let them skip the hotels and state police and instead hire private security to enforce their isolation. As of this month, Efron was living in a “luxurious yet dated” four-bedroom property in the “Spanish-mission style” in Sydney, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Damon, when he arrived in January, reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on private doctors, hospital-grade cleaning and guards, and issued a public statement saying he was determined to help keep Covid out and maintain Australia’s reputation as “the lucky country”.

As Broadway shows shuttered and the studios of Hollywood lay under lock and key, filming in Australia has been a surreal experience for both sides of the equation. Portman told the chatshow host Jimmy Kimmel that Australia was “like a time-machine”, an alien, upside down world where “all the trees are different” and “there’s multicoloured parrots flying around like pigeons”.

On the Gold Coast, state-of-the-art film studios are hosting Clooney and Roberts for their romcom, and the nearby hinterland will stand in for Thailand’s Chiang Rai province. In Sydney, Waititi has been filming the Marvel epic seemingly everywhere – at Fox Studios, at Centennial Park and on golf courses.

For many residents, the frenzy has focused on the mundanity of faraway stars caught in the middle of everyday Australian life.

A shot of the cast of Thor holding an umbrella from Bunnings Warehouse, a beloved Australian home and garden emporium, sent many minds into overdrive. Paparazzi shots of Portman wielding a trolley on an escalator at a shopping centre were treated like modern art.

“Natalie Portman stocks up on a trolley full of vegetables,” was the headline in the Daily Mail Australia, with the simplicity of a Raymond Carver short story. “Natalie Portman and I buy the same brand of hummus from woolies,” said one Twitter user.

The list of big projects filming in Sydney is long. Another Marvel film, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, starring Simu Liu and Awkwafina, recently wrapped up. And there are even more in the pipeline. Melissa McCarthy is filming a Netflix comedy, God’s Favourite Idiot, in regional New South Wales, while Ron Howard is shooting a film about the Thai cave rescue, called Thirteen Lives, in Queensland.

Blacklight, a racing film starring Liam Neeson, tore through the wide and frequently empty streets of Canberra, the nation’s “bush capital”, in January. Under the cover of night, expensive black Porsches were smashed together at high velocity below the Majura Parkway.

The Canberra Times reported that the producers loved the “quiet streets, nondescript cityscape and efficient approval processes”. Rather optimistically it declared this “[gave] hope to some the ACT [Australian Capital Territory] could be the new LA”.

But from the US west coast to the Australian east, one thing has remained constant. When Hemsworth, Damon, Cohen and Fisher dined together in Sydney’s eastern suburbs on Thursday, the paparazzi and gossip columnists were there waiting. As he left, Hemsworth had a particularly Australian message for them: “See ya, dickheads.”