Wowsers…I have not updated this website in ages. But, I am back! It’s now 2019, and my last post was at the end of 2017. To bring you up to speed, I headed home to Melbourne for the first half of 2018. I’d been out of Australia for over a decade and was feeling a real need to go back and reconnect to my people and land…and what a nourishing trip it was.

On returning to LA a number of diverse, fun, beautiful, interesting and challenging opportunities presented with jobs booked.

First, there was a small (don’t blink!) but fantastic role in a Mercedes car commercial. I played an aristocratic lady. Talk about fun in those costumes!

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Then came a print job for Toyota in the Bay area – Oakland.

A truly lovely surprise next; a director I had worked with on a stage production a couple of years back recommended me to their friend who was shooting a comedy pilot and needed someone to play the kooky, dog loving room-mate. The apartment we shot in was covered in all sorts of combat “weaponry”, as the tenant was an expert in this field, and it became a most unusual background to the scene. The first cut of this project is complete and I’m excited to check it out, hopefully soon.

The next project involved virtual reality (VR) and is not something I can share too much about, but I played the mother of a young man having a psychotic episode. It was a really challenging role in it’s intensity, but also the technicality of working in this medium. Instead of delivering lines to a scene partner, at times I was talking to the cameraman, his torso strapped in a dozen or more cameras to capture 360 footage and an earwig (ear piece) was where I could hear my scene partner’s lines being delivered.

The last project for 2018 was a career highlight, an immersive theatre production called “Theatre Macabre”. I was not super familiar with this world of entertainment, but let me tell you, it was a huge scale production set over two stories of a large historic building complete with 3 ballrooms, grand staircases, a myriad of side rooms, smaller staircases, a large foyer, and on. Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, who shot to fame when he directed the “Saw” film franchise, this guy was extraordinary in his ability to bring something so complex and multifaceted to life in the way he did. Set at the turn of the 19th century and based on a real life ‘macabre’ show that ran in Paris for 70 years (!) from the late 1800’s, with 38 cast members, 10 different story ‘tracks’, and timing that needed to be incredibly precise as every half hour (for 6-7 hours a night) a new audience began their journey. Each audience member was set on a different story line track, and along the course would meet the characters of that thread, and were commissioned to assist them, disclose personal or narrative related information, etc. I played an undercover British countess disguised as a French gypsy, my sister and I both insane and hiding in the world of “Theatre Macabre”. There is so much I could say about my experience, from the extraordinary roles I was given, the challenges of playing someone insane and suicidal, the probing that my character was required to do that involved asking people about death and loss and the harrowing stories people bravely shared, to the incredible people I worked with, the beauty of the costumes, the bands that played hypnotic and wonderful music as a soundtrack every night, the celebrities that came through and Patrick Neil Harris joining our cast one night and helping to “strangle and kill” my character, but not before sharing some intimate time in the darkness of a closet I had retreated to. We worked our tits off, and the crowds loved it. It felt a bit like climbing Everest, and when I got to the top, boy oh boy, was the view sublime!

The end of the year finished up beautifully, booking one last project, an indie feature called ‘Sid’s Lake’, a psychological thriller, playing an elitist counselor. We shot this project in February this year and I was thrilled to have several wonderfully meaty scenes. The kind that you can really sink your teeth into, that required my character and the lead to get into a sort of mind war, as he came to me for counselling, initially under his father’s orders and then voluntarily. I had a great time! This project is now in post production and I’m keeping fingers crossed for a successful onward journey.