THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN MAGAZINE
Essie Davis, star of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries: her time to shine
Out of character: Essie Davis. Picture: Phil Fisk
MEGAN LEHMANN
THE AUSTRALIAN
MAY 7, 2016 12:00AM
Pompous man: “You women are all the same.”
Phryne Fisher: “I’m quite sure we aren’t.”
(Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, season 2, episode 7)
They laughed when they went dancing in 1929. They kicked up their heels in smoky haunts and howling glamour dens and everyone dressed with impeccable taste and everything was a riot. In the midst of it all, in between-the-wars Melbourne, a sexually adventurous, independently wealthy lady detective flung herself about, catching villains, taking lovers and tossing back gin like water. Phryne Fisher, the strong, complicated heroine of the ABC’s hit period drama Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, may personify joie de vivre but she’s no flibbertigibbet. She is a substantial woman and, in bringing her to life, Essie Davis has created a new, very welcome pop culture archetype.
“She’s a character a lot of women would like to be,” the 46-year-old Tasmanian-born actress says. “Not only is she gorgeous and funny and intelligent, she’s naughty and outrageous and fights for the underdog and cares about women’s rights. She’s not afraid to scale a building and throw a dagger and she speaks lots of languages and she can do the flamenco or a fan dance. She’s like a superwoman.” A peal of high-spirited laughter ricochets off the walls of Davis’s London home, ruffling the feathers of the birds trilling outside her window. “And she shags men of every age and type!”
Good for her, says the majority of Miss Fisher’s burgeoning global fan base. How liberating to see an unmarried, childless woman in her early 40s who unabashedly enjoys the company of men. Of course, there are a handful of prudes, creeping in from the fringes of conservative America mostly, who have taken to social media to accuse the Jazz-age sleuth of being “a tramp” who “gives it away like Halloween candy”.
As Phryne Fisher.
This ruffles Davis’s own feathers. “They don’t have that problem with James Bond at all,” she huffs. But then, another musical laugh breaks free. “I think the appeal of her is that she is so independent and she can have whatever man she wants. They all want her!”
The creators of the show, which is based on a series of books by Australian author and lawyer Kerry Greenwood, encountered a similar double standard during development and production of the first series, when investors queried the protagonist’s promiscuity. But they held their ground and, three seasons in, the show has become something of a phenomenon. Spin-off merchandising includes flapper-era clothes and art deco baubles, even a colouring book; Davis is up for three Logies on Sunday, including the Gold; and there’s a script for a “globe-spanning” Miss Fisher movie with an “Indiana Jones/Romancing the Stone feel to it” just waiting for the star to free up some time. Regularly drawing audiences of 1.5 million in Australia, the series has been sold into 120 territories around the world and has gathered a cult following in the UK and, yes, in America, despite the party-poopers, making it one of this country’s most successful television brands.
Clearly its fun-loving feminist is the major lure. Yet she’s still such a novelty that even the series’ creators and writers, all women, sometimes find themselves floundering as they swim against the tide of television stereotypes. “Essie is the keeper of the light,” says Fiona Eagger, who serves as executive producer with her Every Cloud Productions partner Deb Cox. “She’s got very finely tuned antennae to know when her heroine isn’t being proactive, or when she’s being sidelined or a victim of ‘Let’s have the girl step aside and have the detective or the policeman come in and save the day’. Essie will never let her character be put to the side.”
And yet, and yet. The seemingly unstoppable Phryne Fisher is being forced to cool her heels for now as her alter-ego’s career hits the accelerator. After two decades of highly praised theatre and screen roles, Essie Davis is finally having her moment. Well, what would you call it if you were working on the new season of Game of Thrones and all showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss wanted to talk about was your recent film? That’s having a moment.
Essie Davis in the new Australian horror film, The Babadook.
The movie that made obsessed fanboys of the men behind the biggest TV show on the planet was The Babadook, a low-budget Australian horror film directed by Davis’s friend Jennifer Kent. Despite disappointing box office at home, the little indie ignited at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014 and set off like a brushfire around the world. “When I read the script, it was so incredibly gripping and terrifying and I spoke to [Kent] afterwards and went, ‘Holy *beep* man!’,” Davis says. “I read it sitting on the grass in the middle of the day in the sunshine going ‘Aaaargh!’”
Critics adored the “artfully chilling” parable of motherhood and hailed Davis as “a major actress” based on her turn as an unmoored, possibly homicidal widow struggling to control her six-year-old son. Oscar buzz followed, and Time magazine included her on its list of 10 best movie performances of 2014. Meanwhile, the film lodged in the pop culture firmament, with fans across the globe dressing as Davis’s character for Halloween.
Now here she is in a house on Hampstead Heath, her family’s gypsy existence halted while she and her film director husband Justin Kurzel – the talent behind the award-winning Snowtown and last year’s Macbeth – make London their work base. “It’s great and muddy and foresty; it’s my little bit of bush,” she says of the sprawling 320ha of woodlands and meadows on her doorstep. “London is a base for a while but I don’t know how long that while is. I mean, I nearly got a job in San Francisco two days ago so that could have been a base.”
With husband Justin Kerzel.
Miss Fisher’s precise, jet-black bob has been replaced with a shaggier, relaxed ’do, softening Davis’s finely etched features. This morning she waved off Kurzel early; he’s putting the finishing touches on Assassin’s Creed, a big-budget video-game adaptation starring Jeremy Irons and Michael Fassbender. Her 10-year-old twin daughters Ruby and Stella are on school holidays. She’s bribed, no, persuaded them to amuse themselves quietly by promising a day full of adventures beneath a rare blue sky: dumplings in Chinatown, a meandering walk on the heath.
The quietude feels fleeting. There’s a second draft of the Miss Fisher movie script to pore over and scripts are rolling in, via her new US and British agents, following the cult success of The Babadook. Was it only last week she was in Berlin with her best friend and their kids, learning of her Logie nod via email from her Australian agent? Just months ago that she wrapped a very British comedy called Mindhorn, from The Mighty Boosh co-creator Julian Barratt? “There’s lots and lots going on,” she says. “It’s a very intensive working time as well as I’m just loving being mum. There’s days of ‘Please read these three scripts’ all at once and lots of last-minute babysitting and ‘What are we going to have for dinner tonight? Oh, the same thing, OK’.”
This is the life of an expat showbiz family. Living large, making it work. She and Kurzel met in Sydney in 1996 during a Belvoir Street production of A View from the Bridge. They married in 2002 and have been on the move since. Sometimes it’s hard work. “Oh I miss having a home,” Davis says. A restless hand trails fingernails across her bottom lip. “Also, we never have coordinated time off together, so it’s longing for that family holiday that never seems to come. But I also love our crazy life as well. It’s complicated but it’s great. We feel very lucky.”
When Davis dreams of home, she thinks of Tasmania, 17,400km away. “Every time I land there my breath is taken away by how beautiful it is in comparison to everywhere else in the world,” she says. She grew up in Hobart, the youngest of seven children, and even then she was in awe of the physical beauty of the place. Her father, George, is an artist and he was enchanted too, committing the landscapes, flora and fauna to canvas. The family “didn’t have much money”, but they had an orchard and a vegie garden and her mother, Mary, was resourceful. Her brothers brought in oysters and crayfish from the sea.
Davis has been thinking a lot about home these past months. Her mother passed away in January, and she lets the tears flow freely as she talks of being “well, I’m just in a bit of a … fog”. She weeps silently for a while, as the birdsong continues beyond her window. “I’m sure everyone goes through it but it’s such an individual experience,” she says. “Really, I’m just taking some time, and loving being a mum myself.”
Her mother designed the costume for Davis’s first role, the lead in a Year 6 production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. As far back as she can remember, Essie had determined she would be an actress. She followed her idol Judy Davis to NIDA, sharing a flat with Cate Blanchett, who remains a close friend.
Davis first attracted the “one to watch” tag after graduating as a class standout from NIDA in 1992, and it followed her through an Olivier Award-winning turn for best supporting actress in A Streetcar Named Desire in London’s West End and a Tony-nominated performance on Broadway for Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers. Despite big-screen appearances in Girl with a Pearl Earring, the two Matrix sequels and Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, as well as acclaimed television series Cloudstreet and The Slap, she lacked a breakout role until Miss Fisher came sashaying along in 2012. The Babadook, filmed in South Australia between the first two series, finally gave her a foothold on the world stage.
In Game of Thrones.
And then, enter the dragons. Lately Game of Thrones’ famously hardcore fans moved into a new realm of obsession as the show’s return to TV edged closer. (Season 6 has just started on Foxtel.) Tweets were scrutinised, throwaway lines from the actors were pulled apart and deciphered, teasers and trailers endlessly dissected. Imagine the agitation, then, when behind-the-scenes footage leaked from the set in September, appearing to show Essie Davis with long, blonde tresses playing the central role of the evil and incestuous queen, Cersei Lannister.
It soon emerged GoT had gone meta; Davis was actually part of a travelling theatre troupe staging a play called The Bloody Hand. “I’m playing an actress who plays Queen Cersei in their play of Game of Thrones,” Davis elaborates, before shutting down the conversation. “I can’t tell you anything else,” she says. “I’ve signed a contract. I’m not allowed to tell you.”
She isn’t afraid to admit, however, that, until her casting, she had resisted what freshly minted addict Clive James recently described as the show’s “lawless interplay of violent power”. “I knew about it but I hadn’t watched it,” she says. “But then before we started filming I did my 50 hours to catch up. Now I am a fan. Now I want to know what’s going to happen.”
Which brings us back to what’s been called “the Miss Fisher conundrum”. The fans love her. They want to know what’s going to happen. Showrunners Eagger and Cox are keen to make the movie they have written and then put a fourth series into production. “You can take on the world in a feature film,” Eagger says. “In this one she flies all over in a light plane and it’s to do with Arabia and a crypt and finding missing jewels – it’s got all those wonderful ingredients, so our palette is much bigger.”
Only logistics stand in the way. “We’ve got so many more Miss Fishers in us,” Eagger says. “But with Essie in London it’s made things a bit more difficult planning around her.”
Davis is keen for another Phryne Fisher adventure. “She is special,” she says. “I’ve played a lot of emotionally damaged, fragile women; I’ve cried a lot on camera and on the stage. So it’s really nice to play someone who throws her head back and laughs, someone who is a life force of excitement and interest and curiosity and intelligence and, yeah, love for life.
“I hope she goes on a globetrotting adventure. I’m trying to make her not go from A to B so quickly. I want to go to all the C, D, E, F, G places…“
“imperfection is an altogether attainable human goal,” and “love is acceptance of imperfections.
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