Wrong Girl, right actress
The Wrong Girl’s Kerry Armstrong tells Lindy Percival why she won’t give in to fear.
There are a few things you expect when you interview someone as well-known as Kerry Armstrong.
A lengthy list of no-go areas, offered up weeks in advance by a cagey publicist. An air of bored, I’ve-been-asked-that-a-milliontimes indifference from the subject herself. And a sense that, really, can we hurry things along because, frankly, there are far more important things to be doing.
What you don’t expect is to be greeted like an old chum, with a kiss on the cheek and a flurry of compliments: ‘‘your hair looks great’’, ‘‘I love that dress’’... The warmth that the Australian actress exudes on screen is there in spades in the flesh.
Within minutes, she’s asking me where I grew up, how many kids I have, what kind of dog... Which is weirdly fitting, because, even though we’re meeting for the first time, I feel as though I’ve known her for years. The woman who became a fixture in our lounge rooms via characters such as Heather Jelly in and Louisa Atherton in
has an authenticity that seems immediately familiar.
I ask her if being so recognisable presents its problems.
‘‘No, because I realised years ago that when people are excited when they see me, they’re not excited because they’re recognising me,’’ she says. ‘‘They’re more excited because they’re remembering themselves ... I probably came into their lounge rooms at a time in their lives when they felt safe, happy ... I’m just the company that was with them. The wonderful thing about being an actor is that usually people either love you or hate you, there’s not much in between.’’
She says she long ago stopped worrying about those in the latter camp.
‘‘When I was younger I used to go out of my way to get them on my side. Now I have enough respect to let people choose to do what they want ... I guess for me, my main audience, really, the ones I care about, are women who ... have grown up with me as themselves on screen. I have this sense that they’re watching.’’
They were certainly watching when Armstrong played the wronged wife in Ray Lawrence’s celebrated 2001 film Lantana.
They gave silent thanks when she uttered the line: ‘‘I like being this age. I like the lines around my eyes’’. And they cheered when she famously veered off script, telling her cheating husband, played by Anthony LaPaglia, to ‘‘get f...ed’’. Even Armstrong herself didn’t see that coming.
‘‘It just came out,’’ she recalls. ‘‘We were in the middle of the scene and I was taking the boys to school, and I hear this person, my husband, saying ‘we’ll talk about this when you get home tonight’, and the only thing that came out was ‘Get f...ed, I don’t even know if I’ll be here tonight’.’’ (Armstrong says LaPaglia took it on the chin, telling one shocked crew member: ‘‘My wife says that to me all the time.’’)
This month, Armstrong is again in our lounge rooms, playing a mother struggling to adjust to the growing independence of her disabled son in the second season of the Australian drama series The Wrong Girl.
As Mimi, Armstrong captures the bittersweet mix of pride and longing that throws every parent off-balance when their children leave home.
‘‘I think the dilemma of a mother trying to find her way after a divorce and after a child who’s had a terrible illness, that for me was a tremendously powerful part of the desire to do this,’’ she says. ‘‘The scene where my character and his are having a really strong argument and he’s asking her to let him go and she can’t was one of the most beautiful scenes that has been written.’’
Her fellow cast members were another drawcard, particularly Jessica Marais, who plays Armstrong’s daughter, the wrong girl of the title.
‘‘I just think she’s one of the most outstanding actors I’ve seen,’’ says Armstrong. ‘‘I’m collecting all these gorgeous actresses around Australia to be my daughters because [in real life] I had the three boys.’’
Armstrong’s boys – 27-year-old Sam and 21-year-old twins Jai and Cal – are, she says, ‘‘incredibly thoughtful and kind and intelligent and artistic young men’’. Her step-daughter, Shanti Gudgeon, writes for film and television.
Armstrong is conscious of the example she sets for her children. She had expected to be ‘‘settling down’’ by now, but instead is returning to the US, where she worked between 1981 and 1987, to develop a screenplay she has been writing for the past two years. And after her critically acclaimed directing debut in 2013, with The
Woolgatherer at La Mama, she is keen to combine more directing with acting, writing and producing.
‘‘I think your children want to see that you’ve still got a spirit of adventure in you,’’ she says. ‘‘I see now that if I push into the new way the world is and I do it with fear, then everyone around me stalls as well. If I push into the world with brave positivity, then that’s the only way to get through this period. Because otherwise I think that people are really stuck and really frightened. You know, we’ve got some bullies in the kindergarten that want to kill the rabbit and take the fruit plate.’’
Global bullies are not the only thing troubling Armstrong right now. She is angered by ‘‘that incredible glitch of wealth’’ that allows excess and homelessness to co-exist, and by Australia’s treatment of refugees. ‘‘Growing up in Australia, I could never have predicted the horror of what’s happening on Manus Island.’’
When I ask Armstrong to name her greatest fear for her sons’ generation, she says it is that ‘‘they’ll get tired of the damage’’ and ‘‘disillusioned by the news they’re being fed’’.
‘‘My biggest fear is that they’ll think that nobody cares,’’ she says. ‘‘My biggest hope is that they understand that their values matter. All three of them are deeply respectful and wanting to make the world a better place.’’
While the ‘‘kindergarten bullies’’ go about their business of threat and counter-threat, Armstrong looks ahead to the ‘‘amazing things’’ that will be achieved by the next generation. ‘‘I think they’re going to reconfigure the world.’’
She has arrived at this place of optimism following what she says ‘‘could be called a very untidy life’’ that has included relationship breakdowns, professional conflicts and personal grief, including the death of her first husband, Australian Crawl guitarist Brad Robinson. The fact that none of this is off-limits says a lot about Armstrong’s approach to life and art.
‘‘I think if you’re going around editing yourself, it must mean that there’s some areas of shame. I don’t want to live my life full of shame, I want to live my life full of forgiveness and I would like the people around me to know that I’ll forgive them too ...
‘‘Every time someone looks down their nose at me because I’ve been married more than once, I have to make sure that I maintain my dignity for every woman that hasn’t been lucky enough to meet someone who was kind enough or right enough for them.
‘‘The strangest thing about being in a costume that’s blonde and breasts and all that is that there’s no authority there. You’ve still got a kind of kewpie doll thing that goes on. So trapped in supposedly the wrong costume, supposedly the wrong circumstances, supposedly the wrong story, I’m incredibly aware that for all the luck I’ve had, if I can’t make that the most wonderful story, it’s me that’s the buffoon, not the people who would be judging me to be one.’’
The Wrong Girl, 10.55pm, Wednesdays from October 25, Three.