Reddy to Rise
Playing music pioneer Helen Reddy gave Tilda Cobham-Hervey the confidence to push herself, writes Holly Byrnes
IF you’d met Tilda CobhamHervey five years ago, the delicate, fairy-like beauty was the furthest thing from a go-getting, feminist icon who would take her career in her hands and boldly shake up the world.
But such has been the evolution of the Adelaide-born actor – growing in confidence and into her craft – that she projects all the tenacity and self-assurance needed to play pioneering singer Helen Reddy in new Stan biopic I Am Woman.
And, she says, she has the role to thank for her newfound fortitude and sense of self, as she explored Reddy’s remarkable tale of endurance and empowerment.
It’s a success story made for a movie: winning her ticket to America on the talent show,
Bandstand, struggling to cover rent in New York and using up all but US$12 of her savings, before penning her only real hit that was enough to project the single mum to the top of the charts, and embraced as the anthem for the women’s movement worldwide.
“There’s so much about Helen’s life that’s really inspiring and I do think it’s really, deeply changed the way I think about the world,” Cobham-Hervey says from the Los Angeles home she shares with boyfriend and Hotel
Mumbai co- star Dev Patel.
“She really made me have to go and figure out the kind of woman I want to be and how I want to sit in the world. She was very brave and courageous and honest. She was a very authentic artist and I think I took away a lot of that from it.”
So timid is the 25-year- old at times that until recently she couldn’t be so brazen as to call herself an actor on official forms.
“I have written ‘actor’ on a form a few times now. For a long time, when you arrive in America, and you’d have to write your occupation, I’d be like ‘artist’ ... I just couldn’t write ‘actor’ but I’m getting there,” she says.
“I think I still find the idea of acting quite terrifying and I often ask myself why I’m doing it because it seems quite odd, against my character, to do this job. It really takes a lot to get up and go in there ... but I am getting more confident.”
She credits those around her with bolstering that backbone, as she’s landed one impressive credit after another.
There was Elizabeth Debicki and Matt Le Nevez in The
Kettering Incident [streaming, BINGE]; Pamela Rabe, Brendan Maclean and Kate Box in F*!#ing
Adelaide [streaming, ABC iView]; V1 - NTNE01Z01MA and Danielle Macdonald and Evan Peters in I Am Woman.
“I think that’s been the gift of getting to work with really great people and I feel like I’ve got so much more to learn and so grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given to keep playing and learning with very excellent people,” she enthuses.
Her collaboration with Australian director Unjoo Moon on I Am Woman was another blessing, she explains.
“I completely fell in love with the story and I was so shocked that I didn’t already know the story and that no one had made a movie about her already ... her story is so incredible.”
A scheduled brief introduction to Moon “ended up being three or four hours”.
Flying to LA to make her
first short film, as writer and director of A Field Guide to
Being A 12-Year- Old Girl, with a group of 12-year- old girls she’d been mentoring for months over Skype, she got a call to audition as she was boarding the plane.
“It was such great timing because I had been working with these girls and once I read this story, I felt it was one they needed to hear, that I needed to hear, that we all needed to hear ... this story about this strong, ambitious, passionate woman.”
Cobham-Hervey made the decision not to meet Reddy until after filming had wrapped, to keep some distance from her construction of the character.
But Reddy’s famous song played an almost daily part in getting her into the right headspace to tackle the project.
“It was a very short shoot and we had a lot to do in a very short amount of time,” CobhamHervey explains.
“Some days we’d be going through three different time zones ... so I’d be 48 in the morning and have this big emotional scene with my 18-yearold daughter. Then, a second later, I’d be in a gown doing a
’ 70s pop song, and the next minute, I’d just arrived in New York as a 23-year- old. Some days I’d be like, ‘ I can’t do this’ then you’d play I Am Woman and you’d get revved up and think, ‘Oh, yeah, I can, I can do anything ... let’s go again’. It’s a great song,” she says. i am woman stReaming fRom fRiday, stan