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Kate Mulvany is well placed to share her extraordinary talent with a wider audience.
Kate Mulvany discovered her vocation early in life and has gone on to win huge acclaim as an actor and writer in Australia. Now starring alongside Al Pacino in a new US drama, she’s well placed to share her extraordinary talent with a wider audience. By Jane Albert.
WHEN DESCRIBING KATE Mulvany it is impossible not to reach for a handful of adjectives, so varied is her career. Hollywood film and stage actor, playwright, adaptor and screenwriter are just a few ways you could describe the Western Australian native, professionally at least.
I have had the good fortune of knowing Mulvany for 14 years and can safely say ‘melodramatic’ is not a trait I would associate with her. So when she casually drops into the conversation that she’d recently had her throat cut open, you know they’re not the words of an attention-seeker, although when you consider the off-screen suffering this dignified woman has endured in life you wouldn’t begrudge her if they were. Rather, Mulvany is relating how she landed her lead role opposite Oscar-winner Al Pacino in the new Amazon Prime series Hunters, which debuted in February.
A survivor of childhood cancer (more on this later), Mulvany was rehearsing for the new Australian production of Ibsen’s An Enemy of
the People at Sydney’s Belvoir theatre in late 2018 when she noticed something unusual in her throat. Fearing the cancer had returned, her doctors ran a number of tests before happily concluding it was the result of a benign branchial cleft.
“Basically, it’s when your body retains the gills we’re conceived with. So I’m a fish or a mermaid! I am a Pisces, after all,” Mulvany muses with a twinkle. “But it gave everyone a big scare and we were so, so relieved. It still had to come out, so I had to have surgery and have my throat cut open.”
The play and ensuing surgery concluded what Mulvany admits was “a really big year that looked good on paper but was really, really stressful”. It included her Helpmann award-nominated adaptation of Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South and her adaptation of
Mary Stuart, both for the Sydney Theatre Company; co-writing the Foxtel series Upright, starring Mulvany’s old friend Tim Minchin, and rehearsing for the Foxtel original series drama Lambs of God alongside Essie Davis and The Handmaid’s Tale’s Ann Dowd. Most importantly, she was deeply mourning the death of her beloved father, Danny, who’d died in 2017.
Mulvany and her husband, actor Hamish Michael, slipped away for a rare holiday together, holing up in a ryokan in Japan, shutting out the outside world for a week to catch their breaths. Of course, it was during this week she received the offer of her career, via her agent in Los Angeles: to put down an audition tape for a leading role as Sister Harriet in the Jordan Peele-produced show Hunters.
“At that point Sister Harriet was covered in scars, so I really made the most of this slash across my neck. But I also said to Hamish: ‘Let’s do it in 15 minutes then go sightseeing, I don’t have a chance in hell of getting it.’”
As we now know, she landed the role, news she received during the Sydney season of her Helpmann award-winning performance in the astonishing one-woman show Every Brilliant Thing, a tragicomic play about a child coming to terms with her mother’s suicide. Within a month she and Michael had relocated to New York, where they happily created a new home for themselves in a Brooklyn brownstone in Fort Greene.
Inspired by real events, Hunters is created and co-written by showrunner David Weil, and details the lives of various ‘Nazi hunters’ in the late 1970s, groups which sought vigilante justice against numerous former Nazi officials and Holocaust persecutors who escaped the Nuremberg trials in Germany and were living secret lives with new identities in various countries.
“Sister Harriet is a British nun and ex-MI6, James Bond in a habit, who has a filthy mouth, smokes like a chimney, is quite cold and doesn’t suffer fools easily. She’s terrifying; it was brilliant,” says Mulvany delightedly. She is also the right hand to Pacino’s lead character Meyer, who heads up the eclectic Nazi hunters.
When I ask Mulvany if she’s worked with Pacino before, she bursts into uproarious laughter. “No! But I did have a picture of him on my wall growing up. I love him as an actor and if there’s a Pacino film, I’m there; I adore his choices,” she says, citing Dog
Day Afternoon and The Godfather films.
“I grew up with Sicilians, they adopted my dad, so Al was very familiar to me; not that he’s Sicilian [his parents are Italian], but there was a familiarity and safety with him, even when he’d do the most awful things on screen. To find myself beside him, performing with him … there were times when a lot of the cast would turn to each other and say: ‘Can you believe it?’ I thought I was going to get sacked the first month and a half I was there, because you’re surrounded by such extraordinary talent. Kudos to Amazon for taking a punt on an unknown Australian theatre actress.”
If it sounds like Mulvany is being unnecessarily modest, she’s not. Although Australian theatre-goers will be well familiar with Mulvany’s name, thanks to a long and celebrated local stage and screen career, the broader entertainment industry won’t have heard of her. Until now.
Locally, she is considered the hardest working person in theatre and television, and not without reason. On stage she has appeared in the titular, Helpmann award-winning role of Richard III for Bell Shakespeare; she performed in Macbeth and Julius Caesar, in addition to adapting Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones for Belvoir. Baz Luhrmann cast her as Mrs McKee in The Great Gatsby, where she got to have a pillow fight with Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway, while she has also
featured on the small screen in Underbelly, Secret City, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries
and Fighting Season.
Mulvany relishes the variety of working across stage and screen, but makes no secret of the fact there is one play of which she is fiercely proud: The Seed. Initially written by Mulvany as a novel, it debuted on stage at Belvoir in 2008 and is her family’s story.
Born in Geraldton, Western Australia, Mulvany was only three years old when she was diagnosed with Wilms’ tumour, a cancer of the kidneys caused by her father’s exposure to Agent Orange when he was conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War. She spent the next seven years of her life largely confined to a hospital bed, where she underwent lifesaving but →
“To find myself performing with Al Pacino… there were times when a lot of the cast would turn to each other and say: ‘Can you believe it?’”
crippling chemotherapy and radiotherapy that left a number of her organs and vertebrae irreparably damaged, while a number of her ribs had to be removed. If there was to be a golden lining, it was that during her years in hospital she discovered an uncanny talent for mimicry and a love of performance, a talent she pursued at school when she was finally in remission.
The ongoing downside is she was robbed of the chance to ever have children, and is in constant, debilitating pain. It is a sign of Mulvany’s extraordinary bravery and determination not to be defined by it that she has quietly endured this pain – even standing upright is agony – until she was cast as Richard III in late 2016 and decided to revert to her natural, crooked posture to play the cruel king who himself suffered scoliosis. She also made a decision to accept and embrace the fact she was disabled and is now a proud disability advocate.
But she was, and continues to be, angry with the hundreds of thousands of senseless deaths and ongoing defects and suffering caused by Agent Orange, generations later. She funnelled much of that anger into the writing of The Seed after gently coaxing her father Danny to open up about the war. She began when she was 20 and continued writing draft after draft, slowly drawing out more from her dad, who suffered PTSD and would ultimately succumb to oesophageal cancer, but not before he had a chance to see the multiaward-winning play that went on to tour nationally, with Mulvany performing her own character, Rose.
She has now adapted it to film along with producer Nicole O’Donohue and is also in the process of penning a TV series. Today Mulvany continues to campaign for the clearance of landmines and is a vocal supporter of affected communities in Southeast Asia. She says her father made no secret of how devastated he was that it was he who caused her physical suffering, but also how very proud she made him and her mother Glenys.
When he was nearing the end Mulvany flew back to Perth regularly, spending the better part of two months sleeping on his floor. “After we opened Richard III I flew back to see Dad and that was the last weekend I was ever going to see him. I knew that, he knew that, and his last words to me were still about Agent Orange and The Seed and how proud he was and how glad he was. For him in the last throes of cancer to still be grateful for that story to be told was amazing. He was my co-writer, he was my muse.”
As we sit chatting in Mulvany’s local Sydney cafe, a familiar face wanders up to order coffee. I recognise Hamish Michael instantly, having watched him deliver a brilliant performance the night before in the STC’s memorable production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane alongside Orange is the New Black’s Yael Stone and Noni Hazlehurst. The warmth and tenderness the couple feels for one another is palpable. They met in 2008 during a painfully dark time for Mulvany following the suicide of her then-partner, All Saints actor Mark Priestley, who had a long history of depression. She has always talked openly about Priestley and the special place reserved for him in her heart. In Michael she has clearly found a trusted and loving partner and the pair became engaged and subsequently eloped in New York in 2015 with Mulvany’s best friend and fellow actor Damon Herriman acting as ‘bridesman’.
And now it is 2020 and Mulvany is relishing the unusual scenario that sees her immediate future in the balance. If a second season of
Hunters goes ahead she’ll happily move abroad again, but if not she has plenty to be going on with. She will be shooting a secret film project later this year and she has recently finished a manuscript for an open commission from Washington’s Studio Theatre titled Sea
Wax Mad, based on a real life incident in 1986 in Cleveland, Ohio, when a balloon festival went disastrously wrong and 1.5 million balloons were released into the air, causing an eco-disaster.
“If a second season of Hunters happens I’ll be moving overseas again, I don’t know where, but I’m happily in the dark. And if it doesn’t I’ll be writing The Seed [TV series], working on my own main-stage theatre projects, a couple of commissions for other companies, and that will take up the year,” she says. “I’ve gone from Sister Harriet to being back at my desk, writing at home, cats at my feet. It’s lovely. After years of knowing where I am, when, it’s kinda nice to be powerless to it.”