Wentworth star Kate Box on life, love and living in Sydney’s Covid-19 lockdown
Wentworth star Kate Box has revealed how the final season of the show has taken its toll on her, as she filmed the toughest scenes of her life.
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It’s not often Kate Box wishes she was a little more Lou Kelly – the former top dog of Wentworth and the character she plays in Foxtel’s high-rating drama about the fictional correctional facility.
But when the Adelaide-born-and-bred actor, now based in Sydney with partner Jada Alberts and their three children, drew her 5km radius and realised the beach was just on the other side of her permitted lockdown exercise circle, she had to repress her desire to draw on her on-screen alter ego’s flippant disregard for rules.
Box was filming the final season of Wentworth in Melbourne when the city went into its harsh 112-day lockdown last year. So it’s groundhog day when we chat and she’s in the seventh week of Sydney’s seemingly never-ending lockdown.
She is resigned to the massive challenge, as she terms it. There’s a certain level of acceptance – “but your body has also been through it once before so it recognises the trauma pretty instantly and wants to buck up against it”.
The kids are climbing the walls. There’s loads of rounds of Junior Monopoly and craft. Box jokes her skills for art outweigh her patience.
“Some days I’m quite inventive, other days I can’t bring myself to do it,” Box confesses. “I see the clean up before I see the finished artistry and so I get deterred quite easily.
“I think that is something I’ve given up this time – given up on my standards of perfection. “Domestic life does look pretty scrappy now. It’s just a big blowout of streamers, paint and chalk. We’re all right.”
What’s not so all right is the hard border between New South Wales and home. Box is truly feeling the distance between her Adelaide family and friends. She’s dying to reunite with them. While’s she’s grateful for the chance to be connected through FaceTime and Zoom, joking she’s glad it’s not the ’90s, where she “would have been faxing for love”, she does find something so lonely about Zoom.
“Some days I’m really up for it and I want to sit down at the end of the night and catch up with someone,” Box shares.
“And then other days it actually feels like is spells out the distance a little bolder.”
Speaking of bolder, after serving eight years of hard drama, Wentworth, the award-winning reboot of Prisoner, will slam shut its bars one last time. The last season – aptly titled The Final Sentence – has started on Foxtel and in its typical, no-holds-barred fashion, it smashed viewers’ hearts against the floor last week, with the retribution killing of Box’s on-screen true love Reb Keane, played by Zoe Terakes.
Lou was brought back to Wentworth on robbery charges, and brought her partner Reb – a young transgender man. The pair was caught robbing a jewellery store to pay for Reb’s gender-reassignment surgery. Box will miss playing out that storyline.
“It’s such a good storyline. Zoe is just spectacular; they (as in Zoe, whose preferred pronouns are they/them) have so much oomph and so much vulnerability at the same time, and they’re such a political human in the world outside of Wentworth,” she says.
“They are very articulate about the queer community, about pronouns and the trans community – they’re a great advocate and voice to have attached to something like this.”
For Box as well, being a queer actor playing a queer role was refreshing. She has said previously: “It never happens that you get two queer actors playing queer roles in mainstream TV; it’s a pretty rare thing. You feel that responsibility, but also it’s really exciting and really freeing.”
Shooting those first two episodes and then exploring the depths of Lou’s grief took its toll on Box. It wasn’t as simple as slipping out of the inmates’ teal tracksuits and into her civvies.
“That love story was so in-built as to who this character was, having to reshape their entire view of the world and having to do it within their grief and loss was a little hard to shake off this time,” she shares.
“I think the depth that you have to go to portray that grief, you also have to understand it and feel it. Your body doesn’t know what is fact or fiction and it takes a while to unwind – which is where family comes in handy. Coming home to three beautiful kids and partner and a life which is very different to Wentworth Correctional Facility.
“The great thing about the cast and crew is that they are all so incredibly respectful and create a space in which you can honour the massive emotion you have to go through.
“Everybody working there has to either live or watch really traumatic things. Everyone recognises work like that can take its toll and we all need to help each other shake it off afterwards. There’s a lot of love on set after those scenes.”
Strict Covid protocols meant there were no actual hugs though – rather looks of empathy and an extra Tim Tam.
There was no wrap party either – which was especially sad given they were farewelling not just one season, but the end of the entire nine-series juggernaut that was Wentworth.
“We just got out of our teals and went home,” Box says. “It was quite strange, I mean of course it was so amazing: firstly to be part of something that held its own for so many seasons, I only came for the last two, but you definitely felt it was an ending to something very epic.
“It was really beautiful to watch the original family farewell each other and I think, right to the very end, the very last shot, the adrenaline of the show really kept surging through so there was very little time to reflect.
“It felt like a real race to the finish. They obviously wanted to go out with a pretty massive hurrah, which they succeeded in.”
Did she steal, er take, any mementos? One of those ubiquitous, and super comfy teal trackies, perhaps?
“I was gifted a few trackies and I got a couple of those great all-in-one overalls,” Box says. “I haven’t quite pulled them out yet. I probably won’t wear mine out in public. It sends a slightly different message- maybe of someone who can’t quite let go.
“But if this lockdown thing continues and I never work again, then maybe in a few years I might want to duck to the shop in one. You know, just kind of a bit like ‘Hey guys, remembers I was in this thing once’. But for now they’re still tucked safely in the drawer.”
Box is going to miss the cast – which also includes Kate Jenkinson, Kate Atkinson, Sigrid Thornton, Susie Porter, Jane Hall and Pamela Rabe – but she’ll also just miss playing Lou.
“I’ve always been really keen to play characters who move through the world in a way that thrills and surprises and challenges me and are different to the way I move through the world,” she explains.
“I’m really drawn to characters’ unpredictability and unconventionality who buck up against authority and characters who have a really whack sense of humour.
“I think what a person finds funny tells a lot about them. While I think it’s crucial to understand where the character comes from and what shapes their world view, I think if you can plug into what makes them laugh, it’s a pretty good insight into who they are.”
It’s certainly an interesting – albeit unexpected – insight to learn that Box herself loves a laugh at people’s misfortunes and has a “sick addiction” to watching videos of people falling over. This deep appreciation of real-life slapstick has only heightened since she’s become a mother. Box shares how she was told off by her eldest daughter recently.
“This girl fell over in the most extraordinary way and my first reaction was to giggle,” she confesses. “I’ve learnt at home, when my kids fall over, to look away first. Just for a split second because I know I’m going to laugh and then I’ll come straight back in with compassion and empathy.
“Every now and again when I’m in an unfamiliar environment, like I was at the park when this kid just tumbled over and I burst out laughing and quickly shut it down. But Robyn looked right at me and said ‘Mum you shouldn’t laugh’ and I was like ‘you are so right, darling’.”
Box laughs at the recollection of her indignant daughter, as she clarifies her humour is nowhere near as macabre as Lou’s. But her tendency to find inappropriate lightness in a dark time has constantly got her into trouble since she was young.
Always a studious child, from her days at Colonel Light Gardens Primary School and Annesley College, the only time she would be told off was for laughing. Box was repeatedly kicked out of classes for losing it – even through studying her Bachelor of Arts at Adelaide and Flinders Uni. And at Australia’s prestigious acting school NIDA.
“I think it’s also that pressure of being in a place where you shouldn’t be laughing – the old giggle-in-church scenario,” she explains. “At NIDA, you find you and your friends are doing something absolutely ridiculous and you’re asked to do something well out of what your day would normally entail and challenge yourself with some skills that you don't really have and you fail pretty gloriously a lot of the time. And so do your mates. It’s pretty good material for a great laugh.”
In the past couple of years, Box’s popped up all over the place, and always, it seems, playing larger-than-life characters.
After her AACTA-winning role in the 2018 telemovie Riot, about Australia’s gay and lesbian rights movement in the early 1970s, she’s found roles coming to her. “Not so much this year,” she adds with a laugh, referencing the toll the pandemic continues to take on artists’ work.
She truly has extraordinary resume, as well as the AACTA for Riot, she was nominated for an AACTA for the 2018 film The Little Death and scored a Helpmann nomination the same year for Sydney Theatre Company’s Top Girls.
Narrowing down a favourite role is like nominating her favourite child – almost impossible, but Lou holds a special place.
“I guess playing Nicole on Rake (was up there) that was my longest-running show and there was something really special about being able to live with a character that long,” Box muses. “She probably got under my skin in way that others had not because I got to take up residency with her.
“But then I had such a wonderful time playing Esme in Upright, It was a tiny role. Just a couple of weeks of shooting. But I loved the way they wrote that woman, playing her was such a joy. She was another woman with a wacky sense of humour.
“Marg in Riot was a pretty massive gamechanger for me and I had a wild love of that woman and her character.
“Everything really brings a different piece of the puzzle to your career.”
At the end of the month she’ll be seen in ABC’s epic six-part anthology series Fires. Inspired by the 2019 devastating bushfires which swept Australia, it was filmed in Melbourne and regional Victoria earlier this year.
“That was a really extraordinary project to be a part of,” Box shares. “It was amazing to research and get my head around and understand from many personal accounts of the devastation of those fires.”
There’s a wry laugh from Box as I comment that it’s ironic that most Australians thought that would be the worst part about 2020.
“I know, I know – it’s the year that just keeps on giving.”
Like most in the devastated arts industry, she’s lost work. But also had to turn down some opportunities, her kids are two, four and five years old.
“There is a lot of stuff happening interstate but with a young family, committing to taking a job is very difficult when there is no opportunity to return on the weekends,” Box explains. “I have to work out how long I’ll be away from them.”
She is cautiously optimistic about what 2022 will hold and has learnt to enjoy the chance to slow down.
“I wasn’t able to do that very well early on in lockdown,” Box says. “I felt I had to keep up a certain pace to the day that was productive. But I’ve accepted that everyone works much better in the household when we actually don’t do that. We do better when we slow down, having that level of acceptance that we are doing our best thing by staying still and safe and being patient. And being protective of our community – that’s a pretty good job.”
So, as for what’s next, Box is not really sure. She’s content to stay put and wait the lockdown out – with all of the craft. “We’re going to need a whole lot more glitter,” she laughs.
Wentworth, Tuesday, 8.30pm, Foxtel
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