Outrageous endings:

TV prepares to say goodbye to the West family.

After 15 years and 159 episodes full of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, Antonia Prebble’s time as a member of New Zealand television’s most infamous family is ending.

“When I think about how long I’ve been doing it, it does seem pretty crazy and amazing at the same time,” she says, of her years on, first, Outrageous Fortune and then Westside.

Prebble was 20 when she was cast to play the youngest West family member, the tomboyish Loretta, in 2005. She was no acting novice – having already garnered an international following in the teen drama The Tribe – but it was her first adult role.

“It was such a big step for me and really the beginning of the next stage of my career, so it does feel pretty significant for that chapter to be closing now,” she says.

“It’s been absolutely life changing. It’s been a coming of age and then the sequel. When I think about how my life is now – even taking Outrageous Fortune out of the equation and just (talking about) Westside – and how it was six years ago, it’s totally changed. Now I’m engaged and have a baby (with fiance and co-star Dan Musgrove). That’s a lot of changes.”

Prebble admits that her first adult role was indeed very adult. Outrageous Fortune made impropriety an art form.

“(Outrageous Fortune) definitely trod new ground and backed itself from the beginning to be something really bolshie and different and confident, and

“I think she faces the prospect of her own death with incredible bravery.”

– Antonia Prebble

I think that’s one of the reasons it resonated so much,” Prebble says.

“It was a take-no-prisoners attitude that we had from the beginning and people seemed to respond to that.”

In 2015 when TV3 commissioned Westside, the prequel to the hit drama, Prebble was cast as Rita West, the grandmother Outrageous Fortune viewers knew only as the woman Grandpa Ted (played by the late Frank Whitten) was still mourning 15 years after her death.

“Rita was definitely a very different character to Loretta or anyone I had played before so it had this great balance of familiar and novel which was such a lovely space to work in,” Prebble says, adding she still doesn’t know if it was a casting world-first.

“But I can’t think of anyone who has played two different generations of one family in quite this way. I just feel really lucky that I got to do it.”

The period drama Westside has woven the West family’s activities into a framework of New Zealand history from 1974 until 1990 over six seasons.

As it draws to a close, Rita is battling terminal cancer while the rest of the family and its hangers-on continue to do what they do best – create mayhem.

For Prebble, watching Rita slowly edge towards death has been confronting and inspiring.

“I felt quite a weight of responsibility telling that story because it is quite a sacred story. Lots of people have gone through it with loved ones. I felt it was a privilege and a responsibility to do that the best I could,” the actor says. “I think she faces the prospect of her own death with incredible bravery, although perhaps not quite enough sensitivity or humility for the other people in her life who are also going to be affected by her death but, just for her own part, she faces it by accepting it and knowing that she can’t fight it. “She’s a far more fierce woman than I am. I would behave very differently. I don’t even want to think about it very much but I know my approach would be quite different to hers.”

Prebble believes well for everyone.

“I think they gave all of the characters the right sort of send-off.

“I think it’s satisfying but without jumping the shark or tying everything up too neatly in a bow,” she says.

“It finishes as it means to continue. You can see how it leads to Outrageous Fortune (which picks up 15 years later in 2005).

“No one wanted a whole season of just watching someone die. That’s not the show that we ever wanted to make, so it was walking that fine line of knowing the reality of what’s going to happen but also keeping hold of the essence of the show that we’ve been making for the last six years.

“I’m really looking forward to seeing it myself and also for other people to see it, but I think it’s time now for all of us to go and spread our wings a little bit and do some other work.”

Antonia Prebble as Loretta on Outrageous Fortune

Westside ends