Asher Keddie on her most surprising role yet
In an exclusive interview, Offspring actor Asher Keddie reveals her groundbreaking new role at Myer and opens up about the real-life love story with her husband, motherhood, and how, at 45, she’s stopped second-guessing herself.
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Asher Keddie flops back onto the bed in a gorgeous green pantsuit and laughs. It’s not a manufactured model laugh, created for the camera, but a big, throaty real-woman laugh that suggests posing in clothes on an otherwise ordinary Saturday morning is the most fun in the world.
She works quickly, slipping in and out of outfits, oohing and ahhing at one dress yet knowing instinctively when another doesn’t work. It’s not a typical fashion shoot where a team creates a “story” and the model is the mannequin on which it’s told. Rather, Asher Keddie is the story and the plot is quite unlike anything we’ve seen before in modern retail.
In an unprecedented pivot, Myer has chosen Keddie as the face of its brand in her new role as Myer’s Style Ambassador. She’s not a model or an influencer and her legs — by fashion standards — are not actually that long.
But in a gutsy move, the venerated institution has chosen a mature and well-established woman with a career, husband and children to take the store in a new direction.
For 45-year-old Keddie, the ambassadorship has not just arrived at the right time. It also comes as she, too, embarks on a new and rejuvenated chapter in her life.
“It was the synergy that caught my interest first and foremost,” she explains, back in her own floaty skirt, leather jacket and trainers after Stellar’s cover shoot.
“When the rebranding and regeneration were pitched to me, it occurred to me that that’s how I feel about my life at the moment. It’s about experience, not age, and the confidence that comes with that to feel good about your choices. Confidence is vital to pushing creativity and creating a point of difference.”
Keddie is an inspired choice. She’s mainstream enough to be relatable but with the gravitas, intellect and classic beauty to bring the very necessary “aspiration” into the mix as well.
Men adore her, women want to be her and, thanks to her role as Nina Proudman in seven seasons of the wildly popular TV series Offspring, she’s synonymous with a particularly individual way of dressing.
“I’ve always loved fashion and was dressing up in my mum’s clothes when I was four,” she recalls.
“Nina was a way for me to experiment with a unique style. I always wanted her to be a modern spin on a ’70s silhouette, with the knee-high boots, skirts and belts over T-shirts. We pulled together a really great look for her and it evolved over the years.”
She still has some of Nina’s clothes in her wardrobe: jackets, pants and those boots which injected sex appeal into the largely hospital-based drama.
“I love her clothes but, funnily enough, I don’t wear many of the pieces I took from Nina because they just feel so quintessentially her,” Keddie admits with a laugh.
In a world where clothes are increasingly procured in brisk online transactions, it comes as no surprise retailers want to bring “feeling” back to the shopping experience.
After many years of mass but colourless consumption, shops and brands need to offer something meaningful and special. As US Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour recently told The Times in the UK: “One big change I see right now is that customers and the CEOs of businesses are really searching for what fashion means today, and how there needs to be an emotional connection... a sense of value.”
And so it is that Keddie is stepping into the shoes once occupied by the likes of Jennifer Hawkins and, at rival David Jones, models including Megan Gale and Jessica Gomes.
With a flourishing career, a loving marriage and two sons to raise, fashion is not her raison d’être but the icing on an otherwise fulfilling life.
“I think it’s really cool that Myer is choosing to partner with someone like me who is quite possibly more accessible, particularly for the demographic aged between 35 and 45,” she tells Stellar, one leg curled under her as she reclines in an armchair.
“It’s a different style that appeals to a woman of my age. Sophistication comes into play, but it’s not stiff; it’s still playful.”
She wants to take the “worry” out of dressing. “For a lot of people looking at a 19-year-old model, there’s a feeling that ‘I can’t pull that off.’ But there’s so much you can pull off if you can find the confidence to look at fashion in a different way and make it unique for yourself. That’s what I’d really like to try to bring to the Myer audience.”
If Myer chose her for her relatability, she chose them because of timing and nostalgia. It’s a partnership that’s come at the right time in her busy life, but it also cements her childhood memories of shopping at Christmas in Melbourne’s Bourke Street store, a tradition she’s now continued with her own children.
She pauses, considering the significance of her signing: “All I can say is, I hope it works for them.”
With her multiple Logie Awards, and headlining roles in projects as diverse as Offspring, Love My Way, Paper Giants: The Birth Of Cleo, Swinging Safari, The Cry and now SBS’s confronting The Hunting, Keddie is professionally at the top of her game.
She’s just finished shooting upcoming ABC miniseries Stateless with Cate Blanchett, Dominic West and Jai Courtney, and is in development on her own project with Offspring producer Imogen Banks.
For a long time Keddie has been one of the nation’s most respected actors, but also one of the most guarded and deeply private. It’s now apparent that it was fear and self-professed vulnerability that contributed to her reticence over the years.
And it’s an altogether more-relaxed woman who sits down with Stellar, a state she attributes not to growing older but to experience.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt this peaceful, which is not to say the challenges aren’t there because they are, every week,” she confides. “But in the last few years, I’ve made the choice to own my own life and my own choices.
“That’s given me an enormous amount of confidence and because of that, life is becoming really fruitful now. I’m not second-guessing myself as much as I used to, and I’m not second-guessing the people in my life as much as I used to.
“I’m feeling good about the choices I’m making and how I reveal myself as opposed to 10 years ago.”
Satisfying working partnerships have brought greater ease, and so too has her harmonious personal life. Married for five years to celebrated artist Vincent Fantauzzo, the couple raise boys, Luca, nine, Fantauzzo’s son from a previous relationship, and Valentino, four, and have recently added a blue American staffy named Sandro to the family.
Keddie raises an eyebrow: “Vincent thought it was a good idea to introduce a puppy. I thought we had a lot going on, but he always wins any battle that has to do with fun and giving our kids joy because he’s such a big kid himself. I didn’t want to add any chaos to our house, but it’s worked out well.”
Enchantingly, Keddie’s first meeting with Fantauzzo was more romantic than anything she’s played onscreen.
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She was waiting at his Melbourne art studio to be photographed for a series of portraits and when he arrived there was an instant spark. As she tells it, before a word was spoken, they both knew they were going to be with each other forever.
“Those moments in life are pretty rare where you just know something instantly, without question, and it’s a profound feeling,” she says.
There have been areas they’ve had to work at but, in essence, they’ve given each other space to do some growing up. Yet the excitement and delight of those early days remain.
As if to illustrate the fact, she starts to tell a story, then hesitates, clearly concerned she is giving too much away. But it’s too sweet a story not to share. She takes a deep breath and reveals that when she first posed for Fantauzzo, they talked without stopping.
“We were just talking, talking, talking. We never drew breath, and we’d been going for about half an hour. Then I saw his eyes pop up above the camera and he stopped talking and just smiled at me.
“I’ll never forget that moment. It was a moment of connection that’s never left us, so when he photographs me now, all these years down the track, he still does that.”
She smiles, almost to herself. “He just likes me. Nothing has waned between us. We excite each other.”
Fantauzzo has diffused some of her seriousness, but motherhood has also contributed to her sense of playfulness. Luca was two when he and Keddie met, so the pair have never not had a child in the mix.
Recently the couple has been discussing the themes raised in The Hunting, which is currently screening, and Keddie admits she thought she had a few years before she’d have to discuss social media, sexualisation and misogyny.
“It’s a whole different universe and we have to educate ourselves about what our children are going to encounter and what they’re trying to navigate.”
Valentino is still in preschool, but he already has a mind of his own. Keddie tells how the four-year-old recently decided to make pasta from scratch, refusing his mother’s assistance. “I kept offering to help, but he said, ‘No, thank you, I’ll do the ‘gredients’.’ He’s so up for life, this kid, that I delight in him all the time.” (She admits she did tweak things slightly while her son wasn’t looking.)
Perhaps it’s because she’s an actor and has built a career on channelling feeling. Or maybe it’s because she came to marriage and motherhood relatively late.
Whatever the case, Keddie’s grateful for all of it: the varied and challenging work; the solid friendships — Kylie Minogue among them; the loving relationship and the children she may not have had.
“I’m so glad I got to have this,” she says, gathering up her belongings, keen to catch a flight home to her beloved boys. “I feel very, very happy and that makes me feel so good.”
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