Magpie casting call
has embraced tough roles and had no intention of papering over the cracks of Sam’s battles.
“I don’t think of myself as being afraid of darkness,” she says. “I think it’s part of human nature. If something has been taken from you as big as that, and particularly for someone like Sam, who was the most active person, it was just unimaginable … I felt deep empathy for her and her loss.
“I was deeply impressed by how she has found ways to manage it and navigate it, and yet still there’s lots of anger and frustration. It’s a constant road ahead of healing. She deals with not just the psychological loss but the physical pain as well, constantly.”
As the film started to take shape, Naomi spent hours talking to Sam, developing a profound understanding of the realities of her situation.
“Sam’s saying: ‘Yes, I’m getting through, I’m still here, but it’s not over. It’s not like a little bird came down and saved us. Yes, it created some magic, it created some bonding, but the work isn’t finished; I’ve just found better ways to manage it’.
“That’s a great lesson for all of us and incredibly empowering because a movie like this should help you explore: what if it were you? How would you manage it? Who are you in that story?” Naomi says.
As a mother of two herself, that journey hit a chord. “It’s absolutely a family story. Yes, Sam’s at the centre of it, but she’s very connected to her children and her husband,” the actor explains. “Every day is a new day. It was about rebuilding the whole family structure. They all lost something in the process and they all manage it in their different ways.”
Naomi met the Blooms en masse right from that first encounter with Sam. “They all came. They’re a very close-knit family,” she says. “Cameron is so full of positive energy, and Sam seems very shy and demure at times, but she’s got to be strong. She’s got real courage, she really does.”
It would be confronting for Sam,
Cameron and their three sons to watch actors playing them on the big screen, but the Blooms never flinched and gave their all to the project. The film was shot in their actual home high above Bilgola Beach, in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, and the family moved up the road, regularly visiting the set.
“The family had a lot of input and it was always 100 per cent welcome,” Naomi says. “They were reading the scripts as we were producing them and I’d often go to Sam and say, ‘How would you have approached this?’”
“Naomi was so unreal – she’d ask me to come on set and if they had to do a specific thing, for example, if she had to get dressed, she wanted to make sure it looked right. It was
weird watching the monitor and thinking, ‘Oh my God, she’s playing me’, especially when I’m just me. And she’s incredible!” Sam laughs.
The toughest piece of casting was Penguin the magpie. “This was the one thing that was tripping me up,” says Naomi, grinning. “I thought, ‘How are we going to manage this?’ We talked about a combination of three different things: real, trained birds, animatronics and computer graphics. But I’m like: ‘You can’t train birds that well, and magpies, they’re kind of aggressive’. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
“It got closer and closer to filming and I was getting more nervous, and then I remember getting there the first day and meeting this bird guy – the trainer, Paul Mander. He was wonderful, my son fell in love with him. The bird walked all over me, travelled around my body and it looked like he wasn’t going to poke my eyes out, even though I was thinking that’s going to happen.”
Magpies do peck with their strong triangular beaks, they flap their wings and their claws are pretty sharp. Was Naomi scared at all?
“I’m a bit of a farm girl at heart, having grown up in the UK before Australia and living on a farm with my grandparents, so I’m not spooked by anything in nature particularly, not even magpies, even though I’ve been bombed by them before,” Naomi says. “I wouldn’t say the birds attacked me viciously, but I remember going horseriding once in Canberra and we went through some trees and a whole flock came down around my head!”
In the end, it was a team of eight different magpies playing Penguin, and Naomi confesses she was surprised and thrilled with the results. “Mostly it was just having to sit and wait and be patient and hope. One of the most beautiful moments is when I’m holding the bird on my chest – I couldn’t believe we got that. So, all credit to Paul, our lovely bird trainer,” she says.
Filming proved to be a bonding time for everyone. Naomi’s sons were often on set and when the Bloom boys came home from school, all the kids, including the actors who played them, would spend time together.
“Sam seems very shy, but she’s got real courage.”
“Sasha loved all the birds at our place,” Cameron says. “He would cuddle them and all the kids played on our trampoline. When our boys came over, they’d show off by doing lots of somersaults.”
“They loved it,” agrees Naomi. “Noah and Griffin MurrayJohnston [the actor who played him] hung out quite a lot together, as he was on set more than the other boys. They would play the guitar together and chat,” Cameron adds.
British actor Andrew Lincoln, best known as the hopeless romantic professing his love on placards in hit movie Love Actually, played Cameron, capturing his mannerisms and gentle nature to a tee.
“What resonated for me was Cameron’s amazing connection with nature,” Andrew says. “His was a family – not unlike my own – that had travelled, had a big world view, that were sort of freethinkers and had a communion with the wild. Then this broken bird comes into the household, and it almost brings a heartbeat back into his wife. I loved that.
“It’s a beautiful story to put into the world, and such an extraordinary tale of love, and courage and triumph through adversity.”
“We had a lovely relationship during the time he was here,” adds Cameron. “We went surfing together with Noah and talked about my photographs, and how I cared for
Sam and the boys since the accident.”
When he saw the final cut,
Cameron felt Andrew’s portrayal of him was perfect. “He’s a father of two young kids and understood the hardship I faced.” Cameron was also “blown away by Naomi’s performance. The anger and sadness were all there, as was the torment of having her old life ripped away. There’s a scene later in the film that still breaks my heart …”
For Sam, watching the film was a challenge. “I found it extremely confronting,” she says quietly. “It was very hard for me to watch certain scenes because most of them actually happened. Naomi’s portrayal of me was absolutely phenomenal.
There’s an emotional depth I didn’t think was possible.
“Naomi and I continue to have a close connection and I’m sure we’ll be friends for a long time to come. She’s been very supportive, compassionate and kind. I’m grateful to have such an extraordinary actress tell my story.”
Coach Kidman
I wonder if filming in Sydney made Naomi want to move back here. “It’s so funny, we’ve been talking about Australia a lot lately. We’d really love to be there right now,” she laughs, adding that after their visit her children “definitely love Australia”.
But the concept of home is not straightforward for Naomi, who was brought up in the UK and Australia, and has raised her own family in the US.
“My mum [Myfanwy Roberts] is in Europe. She doesn’t live full-time in England even though she works there,” Naomi explains. “I still have lots of friends there, I love England, but I also love Australia, and I love America. America has been very good to me. My children are American, my ex [actor Liev Schreiber] is American, so I’m very connected to this country.”
Naomi’s parents divorced when she was four and her father, Peter Watts, who was a sound engineer for the rock group Pink Floyd, died when he was just 31 from a suspected heroin overdose. Years later, when the family moved to Australia, Naomi’s mum promised to let her take acting classes.
Naomi loved performing and won roles in Home and Away and Aussie movie Flirting alongside Nicole Kidman, who became a lifelong best friend. But when she moved to the US hoping to make it in Hollywood, the reality was very different. Looking back, she’s thankful and somewhat amazed she didn’t throw in the towel.
Naomi’s big break came when director David Lynch picked her for his 2001 cult film Mulholland Drive. She won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress.
“It was a long road to any success and it took a master like David
Lynch to connect with me and see my talent,” she says. “I think I was so wounded from so much rejection over the years that I couldn’t be myself in those audition rooms, so it was incredibly painful and I thought about packing it up more than a handful of times. But, just in the nick of time, something would come, a little bite that would home me back in just as I’d packed my bags.
“I’d get that job done, pay off some bills and then get to the same point. It was like that for a good 10 years. Somehow, I just kept going. Looking back, I don’t know how I managed.”
Coaching from the sidelines was Nicole Kidman. “She was incredibly encouraging. I would tell her that I’d had the seventh callback and it was looking good but I wasn’t sure; she’d say, ‘Just hang in there, Nai, all it takes is one thing’. It didn’t make sense to me at the time, but I kept going. I had a few moments when I thought, ‘I can’t do it’, but she always tried to bolster me with confidence.
“When David finally took that risk on me, he somehow loosened me up to the point where I would unveil all these masks. David gave me his energy; he intuited something and made me feel safe. So Nic was right, it did just take one thing.”
Naomi says that, at the time, she was concerned that even though she was now winning parts, she may have arrived too late to build on her new success. “Certainly my career really only kicked off in my early 30s and I remember thinking, ‘Oh gosh, I’ve only got till I’m 40’, because that was what we were being told – it’s all over by then. But here I am into my 50s now and it’s not too shabby.”
Turning 50 was another milestone. “It sounds like a big one, doesn’t it? And it is a big one,” Naomi muses. “I embraced it as such. I got together with my friends and I’ve been very lucky. I feel like I’ve had some great relationships over time, I’ve got my wonderful children – it was shared with all of them. I made a special moment with everyone.”
Naomi is now 52 and when I ask if she feels different to the girl who was overwhelmed at auditions, she pauses, lost in thought. “I do, yes, but then I would say sometimes no; sometimes I feel like I’m still 27 and I get a shock when I see a reflection of myself.
“I’m glad I don’t have the angst that I had in my 20s. But you solve one set of problems and then you open up to a new set. You just learn to roll with it, ride the wave a bit better and, at this point of my life, I’ve figured it out a bit better now.” AWW
Penguin Bloom is in cinemas on January 21.