Jacqueline McKenzie: ‘I have been scared for my safety’

ACTOR Jacqueline McKenzie has had a front seat to some of her industry’s most appalling behaviour. Now she talks about its seismic transformation, and opens up about that Russell Crowe “debacle”.

Jacqueline McKenzie: “One of my most fortunate assets was my lack of ethnicity. It did not make me feel good.” (Pic: Andreas Smetana)

JACQUELINE McKenzie’s advice to young, would-be actors is brutally unsentimental: “Join an amateur theatrical society.” Her suggestion to those considering a career in stand-up comedy is similarly pithy: “Give lots of dinner parties.”

The two-time AFI Award winner, most recently seen in Stan’s six-part reboot of her 1992 breakthrough film Romper Stomper, doesn’t want to rain on anyone’s parade. But she admits to having extremely mixed feelings when she accepted a recent invitation from her alma mater, Wenona School in North Sydney, to talk to students about making it in her profession.

McKenzie mistrusts the popular maxim, fed by a diet of reality television, that people should follow their dreams.

“Sometimes these messages are irresponsible,” she tells Stellar. “You can love acting with a passion, but you need to go out and make a living from it. Those are two very different things.”

So the 50-year-old actor says she felt duty-bound to inject a note of pragmatism into her speech. “I felt really mean saying it, but I told them it really isn’t for everyone. And if you want to act, there are plenty of fantastic amateur societies around. You can have a fantastic engagement with the arts and acting and ensembles, but at the same time you can have a job that you can feed your children with.”

McKenzie’s hard-headed counsel might well have been influenced by her own challenges as a single mother. She and daughter Roxy, eight, have just relocated to Los Angeles in time for pilot season and the actor is squeezing her talk with Stellar in-between meetings, auditions and the important task of finding her daughter a suitable school.

“It’s very hectic when you get here because you are sort of on call. It’s a bit like being a doctor really, but you are not saving lives — you are creating them. They call you up the night before and they give you 15 pages and you have got to have it down the next day.”

With daughter Roxy. (Picture: Instagram)

To facilitate her appearance in last year’s prestigious Broadway season of The Present, which co-starred Cate Blanchett and Richard Roxburgh, McKenzie home-schooled her daughter.

“It was one of the hardest things I have ever done,” she recalls now. “I used to go to work every day to shoot Richard Roxburgh with my heart in two. I did it 10 times a week — twice on a Wednesday, twice on a Saturday — and that was a break compared to home-schooling. Those teachers aren’t paid enough!

“We did it. But one of the things I didn’t realise is that if teachers don’t finish a lesson, they don’t finish. Whereas I was there going: ‘We have to do this word list, this maths thing.’ Roxy wasn’t finishing until 5 o’clock and we were going like the clappers. I was like, ‘Finally! Great, have your bath, here’s your dinner, I have to go to the theatre.’”

While McKenzie describes the experience as “extraordinary”, neither mother nor daughter is keen to repeat it any time soon. “When people ask Roxy, ‘How was New York?’ she says, ‘Yeah, it was all right.’ All she did was a bunch of homework.”

McKenzie’s current stint in Los Angeles is her first since Roxy started school. “It’s the only way we can do things as a unit. It’s just a big adventure and she is in this family and that’s what it is. It’s not like I am dealing with the HSC — we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

McKenzie made her big-screen debut in 1992 film Romper Stomper, in which she played opposite her then-lover Daniel Pollock (left) and Russell Crowe (right).

There have been significant changes since the actor first arrived in the city with her then-husband, orthopaedic surgeon Bill Walter, in the 1990s. One of the most tangible, she tells Stellar, is the legacy of the 2015 #OscarsSoWhite campaign. “Casting is so much more diverse. They literally come back to you and say things like, ‘No, we are going to go Latino for that role.’ That never used to be the case. I was very aware when I came out of NIDA that one of my most fortunate assets was my lack of ethnicity. There was a professional reason why they created Wogs Out Of Work. It was very difficult for people of any ethnicity in Australia. I knew it at the time. It didn’t make me feel good, either.”

Streaming and other new media platforms, McKenzie says, have helped change the narrative landscape. “It’s bums on seats. People either subscribe or they don’t. And I think audiences are saying they want to see stories about a more diverse group of people, stories that reflect the world they live in, not this homogenised version.”

Even in this new, more inclusive environment, however, McKenzie’s latest project, SBS TV’s four-part mini-series Safe Harbour, stands out. “The characters were diverse to begin with,” she says. “It’s not telling a white middle-class story and casting it diversely, it is actually telling a diverse story.”

Directed by Glendyn Ivin from a screenplay by Belinda Chayko, Safe Harbour tells the tale of a group of friends whose sailing holiday to Indonesia takes an unexpected detour when they come across a broken-down boat overloaded with desperate asylum seekers. The psychological thriller boasts an ensemble cast that includes Ewen Leslie, Phoebe Tonkin, Leeanna Walsman, Nicole Chamoun, Robert Rabiah and Hazem Shammas. And McKenzie says it was a dream project marred only by seasickness.

“The director and I kept comparing tablets — which ones we could take that wouldn’t zonk us out,” she laughs.

Although filming on Safe Harbour predated the #MeToo movement, which gained momentum on the back of a string of sexual harassment allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, the actor describes the environment on set as extraordinarily supportive.

The same can be said for her feature film debut opposite Russell Crowe in Romper Stomper.

Twenty-six years later, she looks back on her first big-screen appearance as “traumatic” because of the death of her then-lover, 23-year-old Daniel Pollock, who took his own life not long after filming completed. “That was a very tough time,” she says. “Because the film was immensely successful, critically acclaimed across the world, and Daniel — who was so extraordinary in it — never got to see it.”

But that tragedy, she stresses, had nothing to do with working conditions on the film. After Crowe told the audience at last December’s AACTA Awards ceremony an ill-judged story about “sodomising” her on set, McKenzie was quick to clarify things. “The very important conversation of sexual harassment in the workplace bears no relevance to this,” she posted the next day on Facebook. “There were no blurry lines during that awkward day’s filming in 1991.”

Jacqueline McKenzie features in Stellar’s IWD issue.

On reflection, she now observes, “The whole debacle with Russell at the AACTAs was a shame. What is a great dichotomy in all of this is that we are talking about trying to be sensitive on set and yet some of the things we are called to do... There was a tremendous team around me when those [violent and explicit sex] scenes were shot, so one can’t just make general statements about there not being support. A lot of this stuff happens backstage, in in-between moments on set, or in the lunch queue.”

Drug use and abuse, says McKenzie, is one of the major contributing factors yet to be addressed in the #MeToo campaign. “I think it covers more than sexual harassment,” she says.

“I think it covers bullying. And violence. And a kind of weird-arse bullying where you are just not protected by production. Working with people who are off their dial or coming off some massive coke bender and are aggressive; everybody knows what’s going on but no-one calls it.

“I have actually been scared for my safety. I don’t know in what other world these people would be employable. They are unfit to work.”

McKenzie believes the problem should be tackled at an insurance level. “If someone has got a strike against their name they are harder to insure. The only way you can really effect change is at the purse strings.”

Safe Harbour premieres 8.30pm Wednesday, on SBS.

Originally published as Jacqueline McKenzie: ‘I have been scared for my safety’