Tilda Cobham Hervey tells how I Am Woman role in Helen Reddy biopic changed her life
TV fans are the big winners in the COVID cinema closures, with hotly-anticipated Aussie biopic, I Am Woman, starring Tilda Cobham Hervey. She reveals how it changed her life.
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If you’d met Tilda Cobham-Hervey five years ago, the delicate, fairy-like beauty was the furthest thing from a go-getting, feminist icon, who would take her career in her hands and boldly shake up the world.
But such has been the evolution of the Adelaide-born actor – growing in confidence and into her craft – that she projects all the tenacity and self-assurance needed to play pioneering singer, Helen Reddy in new Stan biopic, I Am Woman.
And, she tells The BINGE Guide, she has the role to thank for her new-found fortitude and sense of self, as she explored Reddy’s remarkable tale of endurance and empowerment.
It’s a success story made for a movie: winning her ticket to America on the talent show, Bandstand, struggling to cover rent in New York and using up all but US$12 of her savings, before penning her only real hit that was enough to project the single mum to the top of the charts, and embraced as the anthem for the women’s movement worldwide.
“There’s so much about Helen’s life that’s really inspiring and I do think it’s really, deeply changed the way I think about the world,” Cobham-Hervey says, from the Los Angeles home she shares with boyfriend and Hotel Mumbai co-star, Dev Patel.
“She really made me have to go and figure out the kind of woman I want to be and how I want to sit in the world. She was very brave and courageous and honest. She was a very authentic artist and I think I took away a lot of that from it.”
So timid is the 25-year-old at times that until recently she couldn’t be so brazen as to call herself an actor on official forms.
“I have written ‘actor’ on a form a few times now. For a long time, when you arrive in America, and you’d have to write your occupation, I’d be like ‘artist’ ... I just couldn’t write ‘actor’ but I’m getting there,” she says.
“I think I still find the idea of acting quite terrifying and I often ask myself why I’m doing it because it seems quite odd, against my character, to do this job. It really takes a lot to get up and go in there ... but I am getting more confident.”
She credits those around her with bolstering that backbone, as she’s landed one impressive credit after another.
There was Elizabeth Debicki and Matt Le Nevez in The Kettering Incid ent [streaming BINGE]; Pamela Rabe, Brendan Maclean and Kate Box in F*cking Adelaide [streaming ABC iView]; and Danielle McDonald, and Evan Peters in I Am Woman.
“I think that’s been the gift of getting to work with really great people and I feel like I’ve got so much more to learn and so grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given to keep playing and learning with very excellent people,” she enthuses.
Her collaboration with Australian director, Unjoo Moon on I Am Woman was another blessing, she explains.
“I completely fell in love with the story and I was so shocked that I didn’t already know the story and that no one had made a movie about her already ... her story is so incredible.”
A scheduled brief introduction to Moon “ended up being three or four hours.”
Flying to LA to make her first short film, as writer and director of A Field Guide to Being A 12 Year Old Girl, with a group of 12 year old girls she’d been mentoring for months over Skype, she got a call to audition as she was boarding the plane.
“It was such great timing because I had been working with these girls and once I read this story, I felt it was one they needed to hear, that I needed to hear, that we all needed to hear ... this story about this strong, ambitious, passionate woman.”
Cobham-Hervey made the decision not to meet Reddy until after filming had wrapped, to keep some distance from her construction of the character.
But Reddy’s famous song played an almost daily part in getting her into the right head space to tackle the project.
“It was a very short shoot and we had a lot to do in a very short amount of time,” Cobham-Hervey explains.
“Some days we’d be going through three different time zones ... so I’d be 48 in the morning and have this big emotional scene with my 18-year-old daughter. Then, a second later, I’d be in a gown doing a 70s pop song, and the next minute, I’d just arrived in New York as a 23-year-old. Some days I’d be like, ‘I can’t do this’ then you’d play ‘I Am Woman’ and you’d get revved up and think, ‘oh, yeah, I can, I can do anything ... let’s go again.’ It’s a great song,” she says.
The extraordinary wardrobe, hair styling and make-up helped Cobham-Hervey nail the physicality of the role, and acted as a “really big jumping off point,” she says.
“I had fake teeth, a fake chin, fat suits, pregnant bellies, wrinkles ... we had so much fun.”
When she finally came to meet Reddy and her family it was at G’Day USA in January, which celebrates the careers of famed Australians.
“We were honouring Helen and I had to do a speech about her before I met her, so I was so nervous and then got to meet her afterwards. She’s so gorgeous and funny and cheeky and it was very weird, but awesome to meet her family, her children and [ex-husband] Jeff Ward. I spent so long studying them that I felt very familiar with them and had to keep reminding myself that they’d never met me before,” she laughs.
The film was originally planned for a cinema release, but COVID restrictions crushed those plans.
Cobham-Hervey was disappointed the biopic would not get the big screen treatment it did at the Toronto Film Festival where “the whole cinema would just sing along ... it was so special.”
“But at the same time, I’m in LA and we’ve been in lockdown for five months, so being able to sit down at night and watch an amazing film or TV show has been such a saving grace and I think you just have to adapt. This is such a hopeful movie and an inspiring story, so if it has to be told on people’s couches, then that’s okay.”
* I Am Woman, streaming Friday August 28 on Stan.
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Originally published as Tilda Cobham Hervey tells how I Am Woman role in Helen Reddy biopic changed her life