Let’s get serious
AFTER A DECADE OF TICKLING FUNNY BONES, AUSTRALIA’S COMEDIC QUEEN CELIA PACQUOLA WANTS MORE DRAMATIC ROLES
Casting directors of Australia and the world take note: Celia Pacquola wants to get serious. The versatile performer is best known for her comedy work – in addition to being one of the country’s most gifted stand-ups, she’s also earned plaudits for beloved ABC TV shows Utopia and Rosehaven, as well as being a regular on Channel 10’s Have You Been Paying Attention.
But having tickled the nation’s funny bone on stage and screen for well over a decade, Pacquola is eager to broaden her horizons.
“I want to be in more dramas,” she confirms. “I’m available.”
It’s surprising she hasn’t already been offered more serious roles given that her first foray into drama in The Beautiful Lie (ABC’s 2015 reimagining of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina) earned her an AACTA Award for best supporting actress in a TV drama. At the time, she thought it might open the door to a whole new range of roles but six years later she’s still waiting and as eager as ever.
“For me, it was really dramatic and I loved it,” she says. “That was years ago and since then, I am desperate. I am begging. I want to do it again because I really, really enjoyed it. With that I was very lucky to be surrounded by really talented, established people like Sarah Snook, who is now in the biggest TV show of the moment. She was so generous and taught me how to act in that environment.
“It came on to Netflix recently so it’s had a new group of people looking at it. But I thought ‘this is it’ and it would lead to my Mare of Easttown kind of thing but it didn’t and I was forced to just slum it in comedy. I’m kidding – I obviously love comedy.”
Pacquola caught up with her former co-star Snook, who recently won a Golden Globe for her role in Succession, at last month’s AACTAs at the Sydney Opera House, and admits she didn’t quite know what to expect. Pacquola was up for four awards for Rosehaven but still geeked out just a little bit at how high Snook’s star has risen since they worked together on The Beautiful Lie.
“I’d like to think we’re friends from that and I know her – but I still did because a little part of you goes ‘is she going to be different, has Hollywood changed her?’,” Pacquola says. “But of course, it hasn’t. She’s exactly as delightful and friendly and funny and silly as she was the last time I saw her. I didn’t ask her to get me a role in it – but maybe I should have. Damn.”
Given her acting ambitions, Pacquola relished the chance to join the cast of comedy-drama Love Me, the first local production from streaming service Binge, which filmed in Melbourne last year. She was all-in to play the part of Sacha as soon as she knew the six-part series was to be directed by Emma Freeman (Stateless, The Newsreader) and adapted from the original Swedish show by Alison Bell, whom Pacquola knew from her work on Laid and Offspring.
While it’s a relatively straight part – the “sassy best friend giving straight-talking advice” to Bojana
Novakovic’s lead character Clara – and one she easily related to, Pacquola says she can’t resist the chance to inject a bit of humour.
“I can’t help myself but do jokes,” she says. “I am trying to be straight and it’s definitely a drama and I am being as real as possible – as you are with your best friends and talking about real stuff. They are workmates as well – she’s an anaesthesiologist – and people can often be quite dry when they work in these serious jobs. So she makes some jokes – I’m not a murderer or anything like that.”
Having worked in both genres, Pacquola says she doesn’t believe there’s any difference between comedic and dramatic acting, a point that was reinforced when she and co-creator and best mate Luke McGregor were casting Rosehaven. “Often we’d find that people would come into auditions knowing it’s a comedy and play it over the top and we were like ‘no, no, no – they are real people who happen to be in funny situations’,” she says.
While many comedians have struggled over the past two years since the coronavirus pandemic hit, Pacquola is grateful for the creative outlets she’s had.
In 2020, she shocked herself by winning reality-TV show Dancing with the Stars, and during the same year she and McGregor wrote the final season of Rosehaven. Last year, in addition to shooting Love Me during Melbourne’s extended lockdown, the Rosehaven comedy cast and crew holed up in the relative Covid-safety of Tasmania to film those episodes. Pacquola also made an SBS documentary on anxiety, something she has struggled with for years, and made a tentative return to stand-up as 2021 drew to a close.
She’s still coming to terms with the fact that Rosehaven has finished after five years, but is proud they finished on their own terms and on a high, resisting the temptation to have her and McGregor’s characters end up together.
“It’s sad, but I am really proud of it and Luke and I are still best friends. I will definitely work with him in the future and, who knows, when we’re broke in two years and we need it, we might bring out a Christmas film that’s a disaster.”
I want to be in more dramas. I’m available.