Wentworth actor talks about the decision to kill off the show’s main star.
Wentworth actor Pamela Rabe talks to Kerry Harvey about the decision to kill off the show’s main star and reveals what fans can expect when the prison series returns to TVNZ 2 this week.
“The prize is not being top dog. The prize is being in control of everything and everyone.” – Pamela Rabe
She plays one of the most reviled characters on television but Wentworth actress Pamela Rabe couldn’t be happier.
“I love it actually. I don’t have any problem with playing someone that’s hated so much because there are a lot of people who love to hate her as well,” she says of portraying Joan ‘The Freak’ Ferguson on the Australian prison drama.
“As long as they can tell the difference between the actor and the character, I’m happy.”
Rabe, one of Australia’s most highly regarded stage actors, was excited when she was asked to take on the role of the disgraced prison governor (portrayed in the original Prisoner series by Maggie Kirkpatrick).
However, she has taken the character to new levels.
When prison top dog Bea Smith (New Zealand’s Danielle Cormack) apparently met a shocking death at Ferguson’s hands in the final scenes of last season, Rabe – and the rest of the cast – were almost as shocked as viewers.
“We all found out very, very late. It was shocking, it was sad and then the flipside of that is that it was also very exhilarating,” Rabe reveals. “Full props to our producers and writers who can be brave enough to do something like that.”
Rabe says to kill off a hit drama’s lead actor is totally unexpected but, in
Wentworth’s case, also appropriate.
“The show takes place within a women’s prison environment – people die and people disappear, people get released, things change and so it was as exhilarating as it was surprising and sad.” One thing you can be sure of is that Ferguson will not take kindly to being manipulated by Bea and being held responsible for her death. “Bea Smith was in a place she was not allowed to be in and clearly knew how to provoke Joan into giving her what she really wanted,” Rabe says. “What eventuated was Bea’s death and Joan standing there with the murder weapon in her hand. Now she’s got the quest of trying to exonerate herself. “She is trying to save her skin in this environment where everyone wants her dead. If she’s going to achieve that she’s got to be in the general population of that prison and she has got to somehow keep any aggressors at bay. “She has a job to do and that is to terrify the bejesus out of everybody.” Rabe has no issue with the physical violence her character unleashes on those she considers her enemies, in particular Bea’s lover Allie Novak (Kate Jenkinson) who is intent on seeking her own revenge. It is, Rabe says, something not often seen on TV. “We rarely see any women, but particularly not women in their 50s, acting like this. For me, as a 57-year-old woman, I just felt it was fabulous,” she adds. “I’ve often been asked to play strong women and, occasionally, I’ve been asked to play strong, malevolent women. They’re often people who are not unlike Joan (was) when the character arrives in season two.
“They’re people who get other people to do their dirty work so they’re kind of quiet, still manipulators. However, because of the events that have happened in subsequent seasons of Wentworth, Joan has been required to adapt to the environment and it’s getting increasingly more physically dangerous and she’s having to reach into her bag to come up with strategies to maintain some kind of control and power.
“This involves her becoming more and more unhinged. She’s started to unmoor herself from the stabilising things in her life. She’s resorting more and more to pretty extraordinary physical attacks to achieve her objectives. She’s a terror.
“I think she wants to be the queen pin at any cost. The prize is not being top dog. The prize is being in control of everything and everyone.
“She is the rightful governor so if she cannot be sitting behind the governor’s desk she will be running that prison by whatever other means she can.”
You have been warned.