Labour pains

Joy and heartache awaits Cheryl, and Ashleigh Cummings, as the latest season of Westside unfolds. Kerry Harvey reports.

Playing a pregnant teenager isn’t everyone’s idea of a dream role but Ashleigh Cummings (right) couldn’t have been happier about the situation her character Cheryl Miller found herself in at the start of season four of Westside.

“I’ve been wanting to be pregnant since I was about seven years old and I’ve been staving it off for years,” she says, laughing.

“I’m all about babies. I actually upset my parents, sending them a few pregnant pictures. I think they’re mortified.”

However, joy turned to tears at the end of last week’s second episode when Cheryl’s daughter, Helena, was stillborn. Cummings says she grieved the baby’s loss alongside her character.

“As an actor you create the baby and you create the future for it and then you have to let it go, so I felt like I was grieving for Helena a little bit which was somewhat strange,” she says. “I’d go home and I’d have to say, ‘She’s a fictional character’ but at the same time it’s hard to let go of that grief because you know that so many people go through it. I just have a lot of empathy for them. That kind of heartache exists in the world and I just hope that we can do them justice with this storyline.” Happily, by the end of the season, Cheryl will be pregnant again – this time with twins Van and Jethro – and Cummings will again be prepping for childbirth by watching videos of co-star Antonia Prebble giving birth as Loretta in Outrageous Fortune. The 25-year-old actor is relishing

her second season as the teenage incarnation of the Westie matriarch, a role played by Robyn Malcolm over six series of Outrageous Fortune.

An Australian, Cummings made her Westside debut towards the end of last season. She made a flying visit to New Zealand just before Christmas to film this year’s scenes before heading to the United States to star alongside Nicole Kidman in the movie The Goldfinch, which is based on Donna Tartt’s novel of the same name.

Cummings is well known in her native country for her roles in the TV series Puberty Blues and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries and will reprise her role as lady’s maid Dot later this year in the upcoming movie Miss Fisher And The Crypt Of Tears.

And she has become almost an honorary New Zealander thanks to her role in Pork Pie, the remake of the 1981 movie Goodbye Pork Pie, and now Westside.

She frankly admits she had never seen Outrageous Fortune and knew nothing of Cheryl West when she was cast in Westside.

“I haven’t met Robyn but, weirdly, when I was preparing for Pork Pie, I would listen to her interviews to learn the Kiwi accent,” she says, adding as she was only cast a week before filming started she had little time to research the character.

“I was a little bit anxious because I really didn’t have time to watch Robyn through all of Outrageous so I didn’t have a chance to get her mannerisms into my body and her instincts into my cells.

“What Mark Beasley, our producer, said – and it was so liberating – was ‘We don’t want to see that Cheryl in Westside. We don’t want to see the hardened Cheryl. Leave that until the tragedy and the events that occur to her happen’. They want to see a journey.”

The actor admits she feels a little guilty to be an Australian in a major Kiwi role – but only a little.

“I’m obsessed with New Zealand and I think I should get commission from New Zealand tourism because I’ve recommended everyone come here,” she says.

“I just adore this country and would set up camp today if I could. I love the nature here. I love the people, I love working here. The cast and crew are just so brilliant.

“My boyfriend (Shannara Chronicles actor Aaron Jakubenko) and I have between us done seven series here together collectively. I seem to socialise a lot more with the Kiwis in Los Angeles than I do with the Aussies. I’ve been creating a life over there and Kiwis just seem to be a part of it.”

“That kind of heartache exists in the world and I just hope that we can do them justice with this storyline.”

– Ashleigh Cummings (Cheryl) pictured with Reef Ireland (Wolf)