Living a private life in the public eye: Strife star Asher Keddie on making it work
Changing up her work life has bought the star actor creative satisfaction and thr ability to better balance life at home.
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It’s school holidays in Melbourne, and Asher Keddie is juggling the usual tangle of family logistics while prepping for the release of Strife season two.
As an executive producer, her work didn’t finish when she wrapped the 10-week filming block in Sydney in late 2024. For the past five months, she’s been
deep in post-production – thankfully from home, where she lives with artist husband Vincent Fantauzzo.
The pair share two children: Luca, from Fantauzzo’s previous marriage, and their son Valentino, 10.
Between final edits and promotional duties, Keddie is also preparing for a long-overdue Easter getaway in inland NSW. As she dials in from her home office, her phone lights up.
“Bruna is texting me,” she says with a laugh, catching the name of co-producer Bruna Papandrea. “I’m in the middle of an interview,” she tells the screen dutifully before returning her focus.
It’s a moment that feels straight out of Strife – the whip-smart Binge series inspired by Mia Freedman’s memoir Work Strife Balance. But Keddie is quick to distance herself from her character, Evelyn. “Oh, I don’t live Evelyn’s life,” she says, “but we all have the juggles, don’t we?”
Over the past two decades, Keddie, 50, has become one of Australia’s most adored actors, known for portraying characters who are complex, flawed, and achingly human.
From the chaotic charm of Nina Proudman in Offspring – a role that earned her five consecutive Logies for Most Popular Actress and the Gold in 2013 – to the composed Heather Marconi in Nine Perfect Strangers, her performances have struck a deep chord.
In recent years, she’s fronted modern Australian dramas like Fake (Paramount+) and Plum (ABC). When Strife began in 2023, it marked not only a new role, but a new chapter as producer.
While producing may have seemed like a natural next step, it took a push.
Placing her phone aside, Keddie explains: “One of the reasons was Bruna Papandrea saying to me, ‘What are you doing? You must start now. We want your voice in this process’.”
Papandrea – the prolific producer behind Big Little Lies, The Undoing and Nine Perfect Strangers – has been instrumental in elevating female-led storytelling. Alongside showrunner Sarah Scheller, Freedman, and the team at Made Up Stories, Keddie found a collaborative space in which to endlessly share story ideas and lived experiences.
“It just felt like absolutely the right time and the right project,” Keddie says, “the people that I wanted to collaborate with and felt that I could collaborate with without censoring myself in any way. That’s a big part.”
They began talking about season two before the first wrapped. “We’re in constant conversation about the different themes we explore,” Keddie says. “We throw them at Sarah Scheller, who’s the most extraordinary writer, and she magics them on to the page. I feel very lucky in that way that my producing career has begun in this way, with this show.”
The series follows digital media entrepreneur Evelyn Jones as she navigates the high-stress world of women’s media in 2013, when new platforms were rapidly changing how women’s voices were seen – and scrutinised.
Season two deepens the emotional scope, exploring Evelyn’s ambition, loneliness, relationships, and mental health, and expanding the ensemble cast with comedian Mary “Effie” Coustas, returning favourites Jonathan LaPaglia and Matt Day, and cameos from Tim Minchin and Dylan Alcott.
“It was our intention, and I feel we’ve really achieved this, to explore much more emotionality in the show this time around, so we really get to not only observe, but really feel that juggle that a woman has in her career and her family,” says Keddie. “We look at her relationships and also her time that is spent alone as a result of the way she’s living her life and what she’s trying to create.”
It’s not a mirror of Keddie’s life – but parts of it resonate, as they do for many working women.
“I understand the ambition, the desire for my voice to be heard; I understand the parts of women that want to feel worthy,” she says.
“Understanding a lot of it but not understanding all of it … that made me want to have a more creative voice in the process.”
That creative shift, realised through Strife, has since extended to producing Fake, based on Stephanie Wood’s acclaimed memoir.
“It’s just been additive in every way,” she says. “It’s very fulfilling to be able to have a voice in the process that is more than delivering the performance. I really love acting – my day job, I call it – I love it more than ever, actually… but I like the process of storytelling, I always have, and so I kind of feel like I was always meant to be doing this.”
Keddie is a voracious reader – her home brimming with books and her nights spent immersed in them. Unsurprisingly, many of her recent projects are literary adaptations: The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, Fake, Plum, and Nine Perfect Strangers.
“I read and read and read,” she says. “Most of the day and I read at night before I go to sleep. I’m always in different stories. I look for stories that I don’t quite understand, that make me lean into them … that I can visualise as a drama. I get very excited by that. Books are fantastic in that way, and we have so many great writers now in this country that we’re spoiled for choice.”
Her portrayal of Evelyn is layered – strong yet vulnerable, generous and guarded.
While inspired by Freedman’s early experiences building Mamamia, the producers made a conscious decision early on not to treat it as a biopic.
“It was a character created from the ground up,” Keddie explains, “but inspired by the determination she had at that time, and still does, to break new ground in women’s media.”
As a result, the stories in Strife are informed by the entire creative team.
“The stories you see in Strife are all our stories,” Keddie says. “Some of them are mine, some of them are Bruna’s, some of them are Sarah’s. It’s been quite an organic process.”
Though she won’t reveal which stories are hers – “wouldn’t you like to know?” she grins – much of Evelyn’s life is drawn from the women around her. “I can’t give away our secrets,” she says, “but when I’m playing her, I’m feeling and thinking of all my female friends and colleagues that live in this media world.
“That’s the whole purpose – to make sure that what I’m delivering is relatable and as experiential for the viewer as possible.”
Season two explores the fight to sustain the breakthrough success of the media platform.
Evelyn must seek help, even when it’s uncomfortable, and the story doesn’t shy away from the toll that takes.
“I wanted to explore that,” Keddie says. “It’s easy sometimes for women to rush through their lives without being aware of how important that self-care is.”
The themes often hit close to home. The success of Offspring transformed Keddie’s public life. It was “the wonderful gift that keeps on giving” but it also came with a reckoning.
“When anonymity is no longer a reality, I spent a number of years feeling uncomfortable about that,” she reflects.
Motherhood ultimately shifted her perspective. She and Fantauzzo married in 2014, and Valentino was born the following year.
“It was when I had a family that it became something that was ever-present for me,” she says. “How do I place boundaries around this? How do I protect my family more than myself?”
Over time, she’s found her rhythm – one that allows her to give generously, but on her terms.
“I just found a way to live privately,” she says. “And to give of myself as generously as I felt comfortable with… It’s not as hard as I thought it was going to be, or as it felt at the time. I’m so comfortable with it now.”
Still, she’s acutely aware of the toll public visibility takes – especially for women who, like Evelyn, open themselves up online.
This season of Strife explores that terrain as Evelyn grapples with trolling and the pressure to appear endlessly resilient.
“She’s putting herself out there in a way that I never have,” Keddie says.
“People are opening themselves up, including Evelyn, to scrutiny and judgment and argument and all those things that, personally, I find completely mortifying.”
“I really respect people that have the courage to do that… knowing that the backlash could be there. But when it becomes self-loathing for Evelyn… that is the very thing we’re trying to explore in this season,” she continues.
“Evelyn feels like she needs to create content that will provoke, but also be authentic and it’s very tricky territory, which is precisely what I was interested in learning about.”
Despite the emotional depth, Strife pulses with humour and the familiar chaos of someone trying to keep all the plates spinning.
Keddie relishes the chance to embarrass herself for the sake of authenticity – or, more accurately, embarrass her co-stars.
“In season two, I’ve taken to embarrassing Matt Day more than myself,” she grins. “We had enormous fun.”
It’s a far cry from the pressure of perfection she felt early in her career. “I spent years in turmoil as a young actor,” she admits, “utter turmoil, ripping myself to shreds about all sorts of things – not feeling good enough, being told I wasn’t good enough, and accepting that. All the terrible things that young people go through.”
She always comes back to Offspring as the turning point. “Working in every scene of every day on a show for almost 10 years … that was the greatest gift,” she says. “That required me to let go of a lot of anxiety in terms of performance. I had to back myself and I had to be really bold about it because the show was really bold.”
It also marked the start of what she calls her “love affair” with blending comedy and drama.
“That’s the sweet spot for me, which again leads me to Strife,” she says. “Life is just very funny and very challenging.”
Producing now offers a rhythm that suits her. She’s able to work from home during pre- and post-production and feels less pressure to chase the next job. It’s a welcome shift.
A third season isn’t confirmed – but plans are already swirling. They never really stopped.
“There’s already text messages going on,” she grins, the message from Papandrea still waiting. “That is the kind of show that it is, it does incite constant discussion and inspiration.”
Ultimately, Keddie hopes audiences come away from Strife with a deeper understanding of what it means to try and “have it all” – and what it costs.
“I hope that men and women come away from watching this series and feel that they’ve understood the very many layers that are involved in the way a woman lives her life at this level,” she says.
“Trying to be everything to everyone – and perhaps then not being able to recognise that she needs to help herself as well. I’m excited by that, and I think it can spark an even bigger conversation about the female experience.”
As for the idea of the perfect work-life balance?
“It’s completely elusive,” she laughs.
“Unless you’re into self-sabotage, that’s kind of a crazy idea to me. The sooner we accept that the expectations we place on ourselves and each other are unreasonable, the sooner we’ll maybe start to find a little more balance that feels good.”
And maybe, in that quiet letting go – of pressure, of perfection – is where the real power lies. Sometimes, all it takes is the right story, and a nudge from Bruna Papandrea. ■
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