Embedded Files
With Chrissie, Yumi, Gorgi and guest host Colette Mann.
Chrissie: She has been a fixture on our screen for years, but we rarely see actor Catherine McClements out of character. So this morning is a very special occasion! Please make her welcome, Catherine McClements!
[audience claps]
Chrissie: Catherine, we're all huge fans of yours.
Catherine: Oh thanks very much.
Chrissie: But my most recent obsession is you on Tangle, the Foxtel series. It's been an incredible success and I love it so much that it was the only show in the last ten years that I've made an appointment to watch and I watched it live. Did you love doing that role?
Catherine: Yeah I did. It was a role that was sort of a bit mysterious in the beginning, because you know, it was the other woman. It's not the woman that gets to go out and get all the boyfriends, it's the woman who stays at home, who's often got one role, or one scene, in a film or something. You feel sorry for her, and then that's all you see or hear from her. But it was something that really developed and I enjoyed watching her growing.
Chrissie: She certainly changed in series two! [Catherine laughs] I won't say too much more!
Colette: Did you know when you took it on, did they give you the whole arc of the character? Or...?
Catherine: We read most of series one, about five episodes of it.
Colette: So you knew all the ins and outs?
Catherine: Yeah. She did develop and I think that's the great thing about doing series television is as you start to do the role, the writers get into what you're interested in and start to pull it apart. And it starts to develop because you have an interest in it too, and the way the dynamic between the actors go and they start to write for that.
Chrissie: We do have a grab of Tangle, if you haven't seen it, take a look.
[short clip of episode 2x04 and 2x05 of Tangle]
All: Ooohh!
Catherine: I thought you weren't going to give it away!
[laughs]
Gorgi: I haven't had the joy of seeing Tangle, Chrissie keeps raving about it Catherine, but oh, she looks like she's a bit of a saucy character.
Catherine: Well no!
Colette: No, that's the whole thing, she's just a flawed lass.
[laughs]
Catherine: Well, I wouldn't call that flawed! [laughs]
Gorgi: Can we talk about... because you're a mum in real life, we're gonna show a grab of your fabulous work in the Ten series Rush.
Colette: Oh, I love Rush!
Gorgi: You watch every episode, don't you?
Colette: Every episode!
Gorgi: Let's take a look at this grab, to see how your roles as mums change in the two completely different series.
[short clip of episode 3x17 of Rush]
[audience claps]
Gorgi: So you can see those two completely different roles as mum. Do you pull from your own life experience of being a mum with those characters?
Colette: Oh God love her, she's blushing. [Catherine laughs] You shouldn't blush, that's fabulous.
Catherine: I hate watching myself. [laughs]
Colette: I know!
Catherine: We had this discussion when we filmed this Rush episode about how far a parent would go to save their child, and it was a very interesting discussion, because it was very soon after the Ben Cousins documentary had aired. There was a lot of talk about what that father had done for that son, and I was thinking also of David Hicks, and his father, who, in New York, put himself in a cage and tried to get his son freed in Guantanamo Bay. So, it's not about what their sons had done, it was their pure love and their role as a parent about saving their child. And we decided that this role of Kerry, who is a police officer, and has a lot of things at her fingertips to pull on to save her child and she will do anything. Anything!
Colette: But she has issues too, doesn't she?
Catherine: Well, you know... [laughs]
Colette: She does, yes!
Yumi: Do you reckon as an actor, this is a stupid question but I'm gonna ask it anyway. If you saw women playing mothers and some had children, and some didn't, you could pick who didn't have...
Catherine: No.
Yumi: You couldn't pick it?
Catherine: No.
Yumi: But there's something fierce and primal about it when you're experiencing it yourself, isn't there, about motherhood?
Catherine: Yeah, I think people's journeys in life lead in lots of different ways and we discover things about ourselves in lots of different ways. Some people discover things about themselves by having children, but you don't need to have children to discover those things about yourself, you know, that sort of love that you can have for someone. That sort of need to protect them can be for a sister or it can be for a friend, but children is sort of the easiest way you can tap it because you know...
Yumi: They're always hanging around!
Catherine: Yeah, yeah. And your ego goes out the window as soon as you have 'em! Yeah! That's right.
[laughs]
Colette: But he... with your son... in Rush, he's... he's a lot of trouble, isn't he?
Catherine: Yeah. Yeah.
[Chrissie laughs]
Colette: Yeah, he is a lot of trouble.
Gorgi: Catherine, can I ask you about, something I've really admired about you is that you've managed to separate your craft from this obsession of being a celebrity. And if I can just fill our audience on a quote you said, "With acting now, you see a lot more young people wanting to become famous. Acting is a profession about getting inside someone else's psyche, not being famous and getting caught with your pants down."
Catherine: Yeah. Well, I sort of said actually you can go outside on the street and pull your pants down and be famous, you know... fame is -
Colette: Is that all I had to do?
[laughs]
Catherine: Fame is a completely different thing than acting. There's been a lot of literature about asking young people what they wanna be when they grow up, and they write it down, and lot of people just say 'famous'.
Colette: Famous, yes.
Catherine: And that's fine. But if you wanna be an actor, it's a completely different journey. You know, when I was coming out of drama school, it was very clearly delineated. My heroes were people who didn't want to do interviews, who wanted the role to speak for itself. The more people who knew about you, the less power you had as an actor. I think things have changed, young people have such access to the making of or they can watch the same show again. They're making their own films, it's just more available. And so things have changed I think. But that was sort of my journey coming out of drama school.
Colette: We are very grateful for that journey, Catherine. You're probably one of our finest finest actors in this country.
Catherine: [looking a little embarrassed] Oh... ta.
Colette: And we're very grateful that you're here, and honoured that you talked to us! So please thank the lovely Catherine McClements.
[audience claps]
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