Meet Bruna Papandrea, the most famous Aussie in Hollywood you’ve never heard of
She’s one of the most famous Aussies in Hollywood, friends with Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman - so who is Bruna Papandrea? Here’s her next big Aussie project
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It all begins with falling in love.
For Bruna Papandrea, the Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning producer behind screen hits like Nine Perfect Strangers and The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, long before the cameras have started to roll, she has sat up late at night, devouring the pages of a book.
Papandrea, along with Jodi Matterson and Steve Hutensky, is the creative force behind Made Up Stories, the phenomenally successful Australian-based production company with a string of hits to its name, including The Dry and Penguin Bloom.
From 2012 to 2016, Papandrea also partnered with Reese Witherspoon to produce internationally acclaimed films such as Gone Girl and Wild, as well as the HBO mini series Big Little Lies, under their Pacific Standard banner.
“For me, it always starts with the book,” Papandrea says. “I am a lover of words, and a lover of writers, and the fact that we get to tell their stories is something I treasure. I never forget how amazing that is.”
The latest story Papandrea is telling is not just a tale she loves, but inspired by a person she loves – Australian writer and founder of the Mamamia women’s media company, Mia Freedman. Made Up Stories has adapted Freedman’s 2017 memoir, Work, Strife, Balance, into an eight-episode dramedy, Strife, debuting on Binge on December 6.
Five years in the making, Papandrea stresses that the series is not a Freedman biopic, but inspired by her good friend’s raw, honest and, at times, hilarious, account of her early days navigating her then fledgling start-up, Mamamia.
“I think Mia was shocked how long it took. In her business you have an idea, you work
and work on it, and it’s published online, or on air by the end of the day, but in my
business things can take a little longer,’’ she says.
Strife stars beloved Australian actress Asher Keddie as Evelyn Jones, tracking her rise from loungeroom blogger to digital publishing phenomenon.
Written by Australian screenwriter Sarah Scheller (The Letdown) Papandrea says Strife is “the show I was born to make”.
“I know I’ve made a lot of things, but this one really resonates with me, as I think it will with so many women,’’ she says.
“When I first read the book, I was dealing with so many of the things Mia talked about in it. I married late, I had kids late, I had a big career, I owned a business and I was grappling with that feeling of trying to do it all, but always feeling like I was failing at something, and Mia was just so honest about that in her book, and her feelings of anxiety. I thought it was brave – I think Mia is brave.”
Papandrea should know; back in the day, she and Freedman – along with leading
makeup artist Kellie Stratton – used to kick around Sydney together as a joined-at-the-hip trio.
“I had been best friends with Mia when I was a 20-something,” Papandrea smiles. “We just trafficked in the same circles.
“My first job – apart from all the restaurants I worked in – was as a kind of assistant in an agency for makeup artists and photographers. It was the ’90s, Mia was already deep in the magazine world, as was Kellie, and the three of us were just inseparable,” Papandrea laughs.
“We all called each other Bingo for reasons neither me nor Mia can remember, but when we see each other now, it’s still “Oh hi, Bingo!”
When Papandrea left Sydney in the late ’90s to seek her film fortunes overseas, she and Freedman lost touch. But, in the way old friends do, when they met again years later, they reconnected instantly and easily.
“I had left Australia for, like 20 years, and when I came back Mia asked me to do No Filter (Freedman’s phenomenally popular interview podcast) and when I walked into the Mamamia offices in Sydney, I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, what have you created?’ Because it was extraordinary,’’ she says.
“I was in this office and I saw some 60 or so women working there and one guy. And I was just wowed by the whole energy, to be honest.
“I also had a very female-driven company, and it was just very impressive to me, because I know what it is to run a business as Mia has, to put it all on the line, to take risks, to be prepared to fall on your face and to sometimes alienate people with your storytelling. You have to be a strong woman.”
So, too, is Papandrea, and little wonder – she was raised by one.
Papandrea grew up in a world far different to the one she inhabits now, in Elizabeth, a working-class town in Adelaide she describes as “Snowtown adjacent, and rough”.
“In my year at school, several girls were murdered, it was just harsh, really,” she says.
“My mum was a single mum (Papandrea has two siblings) and she raised us to be, well, I heard a phrase the other day, which was, ‘Teach your kids to be upstanders, not bystanders’ and that’s how my mum brought us up.
“She also let us be whatever we needed to be. It was such a gift, that she allowed us to be ourselves, and I also think having to struggle early on was a gift, too, not a burden. So much of my drive comes from that upbringing, I think.”
There were other gifts. The state school Papandrea attended was poor in funds, but rich in teachers who cared.
“My school had a special music program, we did school musicals, and two teachers, my drama teacher, her name was Joy, and my music teacher, Ray, were so encouraging to me, to all of us,” she says.
“This is how teachers can change lives, by making kids believe in themselves, whatever their circumstances. A film crew making a documentary about our school musical came to our school and I became – and stayed – friends with them.”
Showing an early passion for filmmaking – and networking – Papandrea struck up a penpal friendship with one of the producers, Cristina Pozzan.
“This was in 1984, I think I was 12, but I was just fascinated by the whole thing. I kept in touch with Cristina. We went on a trip to Melbourne with that school musical – it really was an amazing school – I’d never been out of South Australia, and I think I looked her up, and then I interned with her when I left home in what was my first movie, Return Home.”
Papandrea pauses.
“When you don’t come from a place where things come easily, you need people to see you, to believe in you.”
Papandrea now makes sure, in her own wildly successful company, she does just that.
“One of the reasons I tell my own story as much as I can, is that it really dawned on me when hiring people in Hollywood, that almost everybody at every entry level job went to an Ivy League school – so we have tried to access programs where people have gone through scholarship,’’ she says.
“We hired one young woman who went to college on a scholarship. She was working in a shoe store at the time, and we’ve hired people from cold calling the office.”
And, as big a success that Made Up Stories undoubtedly is, it remains the sort of place where you could imagine someone cold calling, actually getting through, then getting a job.
With offices in Sydney, Los Angeles and London, it has a core staff of just 14 – a well-oiled machine, it is more family than firm.
And when Papandrea finds someone whose talent she really believes in, she invests heavily both professionally and personally, working with some creative talents again and again. Talents like Australian writer Liane Moriarty, the author of Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers and The Last Anniversary, which Papandrea has also bought the screen rights to.
“I joke with Liane that I’m going to get all of her adaptations made. We are joined at the hip with her and some of her biggest books haven’t even been made yet,’’ she says.
It’s not only writers that Made Up Stories works with repeatedly. Nicole Kidman, who Papandrea is close to, appeared in both Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers. Asher Keddie also starred in The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart and Nine Perfect Strangers.
“I love working with Asher, she is a multi-complex woman in her late 40s and she’s become a very close friend of mine,’’ Papandrea says.
“I love her performance in Strife. She was always my first choice for Eve, but to be honest I wasn’t sure if she would want to be in a potentially ongoing series again (Keddie starred as beloved obstetrician Nina Proudman in six seasons of the equally beloved television series Offspring) but in the end we just sent it to her and she said yes, and that she’d like to develop it with us, and she came on board also as a producer.
“I think that’s what we all are. We are all producers, not executives. This is the one thing I can’t emphasise enough. I was lucky to get the high profile through working with Reese, but we are such a team, Steve (Hutensky, also Papandrea’s husband) founded the company, he works so much harder than I do, and Jodi is such a rock star. She is the backbone of how we get stuff made in Australia.”
Papandrea was made in Australia too – and she is now, along with Hutensky and their twins, a girl and a boy born in 2012, based in Sydney after many years overseas – the Covid pandemic, as it did for so many people, causing the life pivot.
“We came back here to film Nine Perfect Strangers when Covid hit,’’ she says.
“We were so fortunate to be able to keep working, and it also brought us back home. I mean, my husband is so American, and my kids are American, but they absolutely love it here. We travel a lot and that is the price of being based here, but that was always my dream.
“This is the home of my heart, I always wanted to come back to live here, and I looked to people like Baz Luhrmann and Jane Campion who have always maintained that you don’t have to live overseas to tell great stories.”
Bruna Papandrea has many more tales to tell – she hints that another season of the phenomenally popular Big Little Lies is not out of the question. Made Up Stories recently optioned Sarah Vaughan’s thriller, Reputation, (it also made Vaughan’s Anatomy of a Scandal for Netflix) and Bangles’ singer Susanna Hoffs’ first novel, This Bird Has Flown.
Papandrea’s choices are female-centric and eclectic, each one wildly different from the last. The commonality is always in the quality of the writing. Given she is so knee-deep in words, has she ever considered writing a book herself?
“Oh no,” she laughs, “I’m a terrible writer.” One hell of a storyteller, though.
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