His father Chip Young, an American born in Missouri, was a well-known CBC broadcaster and children's book author, as well as composer of Canadian classic 'Honky The Christmas Goose',[4][5] while his mother is a nurse from Newcastle, Australia.

[8] International acclaim followed and Young was dubbed "the next Marlon Brando" in France and "the next Mel Gibson" in Hollywood but returned to Australia to support the local industry and focus on projects that he was more drawn to.

[9][10] He took the lead role in Australian arthouse noir film Broken Highway (1993), directed by pioneering female filmmaker Laurie McInnes, which screened in competition in Cannes[11] but received polarized reviews.

[12] Paul Cox's Exile was filmed soon after, described in Variety as "an ambitious, sometimes hallucinatory drama that tackles themes difficult to bring off successfully in the cinema".

"[17] After making Australian films River Street, Cosi, Hotel de Love and Paradise Road in quick succession, Young portrayed a starving Polish sculptor who spurns his lover Jessica Lange in US film Cousin Bette and as slacker desperado Buck in Under Heaven, a modern reworking of Henry James novel The Wings of the Dove.

[18] The early 2000s saw him starring as a traumatized Canadian soldier in War Bride, a German priest in Serenades, and smaller roles in The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course and a doctor in Cox's Molokai.

In 2004 he signed onto the Sydney Theatre Company production of Hedda Gabler as Cate Blanchett's tortured alcoholic lover Ejlert Lovberg.

"[30] Young mimed the hit song "Even Though I'm A Woman",[31] by the Australian female indie supergroup Seeker Lover Keeper, in the 2011 music video directed by Natalie Van Dungen.

[47] In 2023 he appeared in Christian Sparkes's thriller drama The King Tide as Beau, a doctor left essentially irrelevant after a child with mystical healing powers turns up in a village.