Tilda Cobham-Hervey reveals her Adelaide ‘double life’ and how she redefined success
Tilda Cobham-Hervey’s superstar stocks continue to rise — but, as she reveals in a candid interview, it’s her SA home that has kept her sane.
SA Weekend
Don't miss out on the headlines from SA Weekend. Followed categories will be added to My News.
If you’d emerged from the local swimming pool on a sweltering summer’s day a decade ago, it’s unlikely you’d find Tilda Cobham-Hervey in the water.
The Adelaide-born actress could swim – well, breaststroke at least, she clarifies with a timid smile – but the self-confessed introvert would have more likely been nestled under the shadiest tree, her gossamer features poring over a novel.
She’s aware of a splash of irony, then, when it comes to her latest role.
The 29-year-old, multi-award winning actress, writer, performer and director stars alongside Star Wars alumni Daisy Ridley in blockbuster Disney biopic Young Woman and the Sea, sharing the little-known story of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim 21 miles across the English Channel in 1926.
It was Hollywood producer Chad Oman, behind mega flicks like Top Gun: Maverick and Pirates of the Caribbean, who offered her the part over a phone call taken in her Adelaide home.
But, Cobham-Hervey recalls with a laugh, her bookish childhood beside the pool quickly caught up with her.
“He said, ‘We’re so excited, we would really love you to be a part of this film’ … and then he said, ‘You’re Australian, so you’re obviously a great swimmer’.
“I ran out to my brother who was here, he was about 19 at the time, and I said immediately: ‘I’ll pay you 20 bucks to take me to the local pool and teach me how to swim’.”
Over the ensuing months, Ridley and Cobham-Hervey – who play the titular character and Trudy’s sister Meg, respectively – were coached by British Olympic swimmer Siobhan-Marie O’Connor to prepare themselves for the roles.
At a glance, the sister-like physical similarities between Ridley and Cobham-Hervey are stunning. But, much like siblings taking to the pool in a hot Aussie summer, the process led to a deeper, watertight bond.
“Quite often on film sets, you arrive and then two days later you’re filming with someone you’ve just met, who’s suddenly your husband,” Cobham-Hervey says.
“But we had quite a few weeks of getting in the pool together, learning to swim together, which was just such an incredible bonding experience.
“We’re really similar people, she makes me laugh a lot. She’s someone that is just so warm, so funny, so grounded – it was luckily very easy.”
“Inspirational woman” has become somewhat of a breakout theme in recent years for Cobham-Hervey.
In 2020, she was nominated for best lead actress at the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA) Awards for her performance as feminist singer-activist Helen Reddy in I Am Woman, and last year brought the role of Esme Nicholls in Dictionary of Lost Words to the Adelaide Festival Centre and Sydney Opera House stages.
It’s from inspirational women, she says – “knowing how cliche this sounds” – that she has found her own confidence and voice as a burgeoning screenwriter away from the camera.
“The way that I’ve got through this industry is being supported by amazing women, be that in my family and friendship groups, in a professional sense, or even people you haven’t met,” she says.
“It was things like Fleabag and I May Destroy You and Greta Gerwig’s work and Miranda July’s work that made me go, ‘Oh, I could try that’.
“A really big part of my life at the moment is writing and thinking about how to create work – and I don’t think I would have had the confidence to do that without seeing those women do it so successfully.
“I think that’s a similar thing with Gertrude Ederle – she was the first person to do something that hadn’t been done before, which opens the door to allow other women to dream of those things. It is a really lovely thing to be a part of, particularly something about it being a true story. It feels like you’re doing something a lot bigger in some way, because you’re trying to also honour and respect those people that we’re telling the story about.”
Insecurities, joy and a Hollywood double life
“I felt like such a doodle though, I came to the party dressed as the moon.”
Cobham-Hervey is recounting the weekend prior to this interview, as we had quickly established, in the most Adelaide of circumstances, that we’d actually been at the same event – a Moulin Rouge-themed celebration for up-and-coming South Australian filmmaker Tamara Hardman, inspired by Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 jukebox musical.
Largely, the party was filled with sequins, costumed lingerie and feather boas.
Cobham-Hervey wore – as she now recalls, stifling her smile with a self-conscious hand – a hat shaped like a moon.
As we laugh through the story, I reassure her she looked great (although, speaking to the radiant star, it feels absurd to do so). But such is the charm of Cobham-Hervey, whose fairy-like self-awareness and relentless lack of ego has served her across an ever-expanding repertoire of projects.
Cobham-Hervey and Hardman met through Closer Productions, the Glenside-based film outfit behind her breakout role in Sundance Festival hit 52 Tuesdays, with the actress also starring in Hardman’s locally produced short film, Are You Really The Universe?
It was with Closer Productions that Cobham-Hervey in 2018 unleashed her funny bone in ABC dramedyF*cking Adelaide, a tongue-in-cheek love letter to the hometown arts scene that nurtured her early forays into acting and writing.
“I was really lucky to start my career in Adelaide around incredible filmmakers, and Closer Productions has been a really big part of my life,” she says.
“The fact that they are still based in Adelaide but make films all over the world has been a constant inspiration to me, and I think that really showed me that there’s many ways to be an artist.”
After stints living in London and LA, the Covid pandemic brought Cobham-Hervey back to Adelaide – and with her, long-time love Dev Patel, whose own celebrity stocks have soared in the seven years since they met on the set of Hotel Mumbai.
She now splits her time between Adelaide and LA, a juxtaposition of cities she says could not be more comical.
But her connection to Adelaide and its intimate arts scene has, she says, at times been the tether that has saved her from being swept away in the Hollywood whirlwind.
“I’m a little bit of a hermit, so in both worlds I have my little space and routine and people,” she says.
“But they are quite different lands, and I do sometimes feel like I’m living two different lives or two versions of myself.
“What I love about Adelaide is that it is a really tight-knit community, and there’s so much support between different directors and actors in a different way than there is in such a big city like LA.
“I think it’s been a really positive thing to keep pushing yourself in different directions and still being able to come back to Adelaide and have the support of a creative team you’ve known for 10 years to hold you on the other side.”
Daughter of State Theatre stage and lighting designer Geoff Cobham and Restless Dance creative producer Roz Hervey, it was unlikely the 29 year old was ever going to find herself working outside the arts.
But she admits, while lowering herself into the pool of the Playford Hotel wearing a ruby-red gown by renowned local designer Paolo Sebastian (“I can’t believe I’m wearing Paolo”), that it has taken her years to even begin to shake the impostor syndrome and insecurities that come from the Hollywood machine.
“Has the idea of success changed for you, along this journey?” I ask.
She takes a contemplative pause at the question. “The idea of success in this industry can get quite confusing at certain points about what you should be doing, and theshoulds of this industry,” she says.
“I think there’s a thing about being an artist, particularly as an actor, where you always have to be picked for it. The world of acting is constantly humbling. You’re constantly busy, you finish the job, then you’re unemployed.
“There was a point, probably a couple of years ago, when I hadn’t worked in quite a long time and I was like, ‘What am I doing in my life? I’ve got to quit, I’ve got to get a real job.’
“But then I remember that you can keep being creative whenever you want to. That’s something you can do by yourself in many different ways.”
In her own words, the set ofYoung Woman and the Sea was “a lot of fun, personal and connected”. But it’s in her home town that Cobham-Hervey finds freedom to flex her creative muscles – and in her writing that she has found solace and opportunity in what can be a ruthless industry. She’s extremely busy – and she likes it that way.
“(In Adelaide), you sort of have the time and space to be able to make and create, where the hustle that you might require in a bigger city like LA is sometimes harder to be in that introspective creation space. Often, the really personally rewarding projects are the ones that are really small and with people you know and you’re creating together.
“I think everyone’s looking for different things out of this industry. But for me, it’s really become important for it to be a story that I really want to be a part of telling, with people I really enjoy being around and (whose) vision I really respect.
“It’s such a privilege to be an artist, and I think if it’s not fun then there’s no point in doing it.”
‘She was raped, I was conceived’: Layne Beachley’s secret torment
For surf legend Layne Beachley, becoming the best in the world became an unhealthy obsession as she wrestled with dark secrets from her past.
Mum’s journey from Housing Trust to running an Australian superbiz
Wendy-Jayne Williams has been a leader in the world of business for decades but behind her success, she admits there were many hurdles.