‘I don’t do things I don’t believe in’: Rachel Griffiths on sex, life and feminomics

When the offer for the new television series Madam came in, actress Rachel Griffiths was handed a copy of the book it was based on: the at-the-time unpublished memoir of Antonia Murphy, about her experience running an “ethical” brothel in New Zealand.

In the series, Murphy becomes McKenzie “Mack” Leigh, played by Griffiths, whose idea for the unusual business venture springs out of a perfect storm of mounting debt, the ongoing cost of caring for her disabled son and the discovery that her husband, Rob (Martin Henderson), has cheated on her with a sex worker.

For Griffiths, the Melbourne-born star of Muriel’s Wedding and, more recently, Total Control and Bali 2002, the series posed a compelling question: what can happen in the commercial sex industry when criminality and power imbalance are taken out of the equation.

Rima Te Wiata, who plays the brothel’s co-owner Jules, and Rachel Griffiths as Mack Leigh in Madam.

“I figured in a system where women cannot be prosecuted for the choices they’re making, the law creates an environment in which better things can happen when the law isn’t the problem,” Griffiths says.

“Because when you have the law, then you’ve got cops, and you’ve got to have cops being paid off, and then you’ve got to have someone up the food chain high enough to be paying off the cops to not raid the brothel,” she says.

At the heart of Madam is the question of “feminomics”, says Griffiths. “In New Zealand, sex work is legal, but it’s also completely decriminalised. In Australia, I don’t think we’re quite there [in terms of] those protections for women,” she says.

“It’s just ridiculous that we’ve been incarcerating women, removing them from their families for making decisions to engage in transactions with their bodies, more often than not to support themselves and their families.”

There are also – to some extent – feminomics to the jobbing life of an actress. “I’ve got a thing when I do a movie or a show, it’s how long, how far, how much and how good ... because it’s almost never in my hometown,” Griffiths says.

“That algorithm has to work ... I can’t go to France for one year to do an underground, underpaid film set in a quarry. I can’t justify it. How good is [also an important] question, I don’t do things I don’t believe in.”

Last year, Griffiths says, she passed on an extraordinary project because she could not make it work. “It just didn’t suit the algorithm, it was too long, and it was too far [and] as a mum – you just make those decisions,” she says.

Florence Hartigan, Carmel McGlone, Eden Hart, Lyncia Muller, Moana Johnson and Ariana Osborne in Madam.

“The women I talked to [researching Madam], many of them were single mums and head of the household, and they’re just making the same decision – how long do I have to work, for how much money, how far away is it?” Griffiths says.

“If they do minimum wage at the supermarket, then they’re paying someone to take their kids to school or put them to bed; if they do sex work, they do eight hours, meet all their other family obligations and pay their taxes,” she says. “It’s kind of weird that we have shamed women for making that very, very rational choice.”

Once she signed on to Madam, however, she had to take herself out of the intellectual space and focus on inhabiting the fictional world of the series in a more day-to-day way.

Rachel Griffiths, left, in Six Feet Under.

“I’ve just got a busy brain and it f---ing takes me down rabbit holes, and I see things at 10,000 feet, but my challenge, when I’m acting, is that I am never sitting at 10,000 feet or 5000 feet or 2000, 1000,” she says. “If you’re sitting up here thinking about the thematics and the conversations this will inspire when it airs in Finland in a year, you’re not in the present, you’re not in the feeling.

“So in my first read [of the script], my head spins and goes, oh, this is good. I try to bring the [political complexities of the] Roman Empire to everything I do. It always fits in somewhere, I guess. I am purpose-driven in my content, but not necessarily in the way you might think.

“But on the day I’m playing a real breathing person, who’s just a pick-up and a drop-off and all the washing and the dinner and killing the chicken, and I’m f---ing exhausted. My husband’s f---ing flaky. You’re just playing in the exhausted rage of that.”

Madam also leans into comedy, a genre Griffiths would have you believe she is not naturally adept in, though the enduring magic of Muriel’s Wedding – one of the funniest, albeit melancholic, films of all time – would prove otherwise.

Rachel Griffiths, left, with Toni Collette in Muriel’s Wedding. 

“I was terrified,” Griffiths says. “It’s funny and I hadn’t done a lot [of comedy]. Then I have these other scenes which are really delicate, marital discord with 20 years of grievances coming out in the kitchen while chopping vegetables. So I was nervous about those tonal swings, about how we could do that.”

For most of her career in the US, Griffiths has chosen work carefully. Six Feet Under, in which she played Brenda Chenowith, was written by acclaimed screenwriter Alan Ball. Brothers and Sisters, in which she played Sarah Walker, while arguably a soap, was a soap penned by New York playwright Jon Robin Baitz.

Griffiths, right, with Calista Flockhart, in Brothers & Sisters.Credit: Disney Television

“Alan Ball absolutely was the great television pioneer in terms of representation because it was really the first time we’d seen queer lives explored in this way,” Griffiths says. “It’s not like the queer guy dies or let’s kill the lesbian, which is a cliché content.

“It’s like the guy in the wrong colour shirt in Star Trek; you’re like, oh, he’s going to get it,” Griffiths adds. [For the record, the colour was red.] “So for queer stories, queer lives, queer interior lives, it just was incomparable.

“Instead of writing Brenda as this kind of accessory, to humanise, where I’m serving [her boyfriend’s] character, Alan allowed me to have my own stage, to be a fully fleshed out, very complicated young woman, kind of neurotic and traumatised in a way we hadn’t really seen done with that kind of acerbic rage she has,” she says.

In Brothers and Sisters, the interior emotional lives of an American family were unpicked in a similar way. “It redefined the daughter, it redefined the girlfriend, and it redefined the mother,” Griffiths says.

“Because the mother in American television had never really had an interior life, she just absolutely devoted herself to her family cheerfully and didn’t feel like pulling her hair out at the end of the day. For so many women, it was really, really groundbreaking on representation. I’ve had many younger show runners tell me how important that was.”

Madam airs at 9pm on Tuesdays on Nine, which is the owner of this masthead.

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