Claudia Karvan reflects on her acting career, upcoming role in Bump

The Australian actor reflects on the many risky choices she has made throughout her decades-long career - both those she relishes and those she regrets.

The mood shifts quickly when Claudia Karvan is asked how she avoided the pitfalls that ensnared so many adults she met during her colourful childhood in Sydney’s Kings Cross.

It was a frantic, formative time – her parents owned the neighbourhood’s legendary nightclub Arthur’s, and punk and disco were in her ear just as much as actors, rock stars and drag queens. She probably saw just as much as she shouldn’t have heard.

So as she sits on a lively Zoom call with Stellar in the inner-city home she shares with her partner Jeremy Sparks and their two children, Audrey, 19, and Albee, 14, Karvan grows ponderous while she considers her answer.

“You just have to prioritise mental health. You can’t take anything for granted.” (Picture: Daniel Nadel)

“A lot of the people I knew went to America because they couldn’t find employment here.” (Picture: Daniel Nadel)

“Prioritising and being aware of your mental health, and understanding that there is no…” She looks heavenward, her eyes welling up as she apologises: “Sorry, I am going to get emotional. Today is the anniversary of my best friend who I grew up with – and who was like my sister – in the Cross… she died by suicide today, only a few years ago.

“So it’s interesting that you asked that. That’s what happened to her. You just have to prioritise mental health. You can’t take anything for granted; you have to understand that there’s no rhyme or reason. Any one of us can fall off the ledge and you can’t have arrogance about that. From a very young age, I was aware that required a lot of focus.”

Karvan harnessed that focus to propel herself toward acting from age 11, when she headlined the 1983 film Molly; only a few years later, she went toe to toe with esteemed Australian actor Judy Davis, under the watchful eye of director Gillian Armstrong, in 1987’s High Tide. Wasn’t she intimidated?

“I had zero awareness,” she tells Stellar. “I didn’t know who Judy was. I didn’t know who Gillian was. I certainly didn’t do any research. There wasn’t the internet. I was just a 14-year-old girl.” Now 48, Karvan adds, “I say that Judy Davis was my first love.”

“I don’t need a lot of exposure or fame.” (Picture: Daniel Nadel)

Karvan never tried her hand in the US or the UK like so many of her peers; a CV with no noticeable gaps proves she didn’t need to,but when Stellar suggests the surge of foreign productions setting up shop in Australia owing to the pandemic might have left her feeling validated, she shrugs.

“I didn’t need COVID to come along to feel justification for the decision I made about my career. I’ve always put my family first – being around my brothers, my mother, my father… and I’ve had a stepchild from the age of 22, so I had family commitments very young.

“A lot of the people I knew went to America because they couldn’t find employment here. I’m sure Simon Baker wouldn’t mind me saying that I tried to get him an audition for Dating The Enemy because he was unemployed.

“They wouldn’t even see him. I didn’t really have a lot of motivation to go. And to be really frank, I don’t think my mental health would survive success in that sort of arena. I don’t need a lot of income, I don’t need a lot of assets, I don’t need a lot of exposure or fame.”

“I felt so embarrassed I played a Greek girl.” (Picture: The Heartbreak Kid)

In hindsight, certain successes look less savoury. She calls 1993’s The Heartbreak Kid, in which she played a high-school teacher who begins an affair with one of her students (played by Alex Dimitriades), “the unhappiest job of my career. I only ’fessed up recently that I felt so embarrassed I played a Greek girl. Can you imagine how I would be taken down today?

“Secondly, I was 19 and [Alex] was 17. I can’t make any #MeToo claims in my career; I’ve been lucky. But I certainly wish intimacy coaches had been invented back then.”

Staying put also gave Karvan chances to change the game – take the one-two punch of The Secret Life Of Us (which turns 20 next year) and Love My Way, two landmark TV dramas with which she remains indelibly linked and that maintain passionate fan bases.

“I think about one of my first scenes on Secret Life, and my best friend was teasing me because I would only use an applicator tampon, not an actual tampon,” she says.

“People didn’t talk like that on television then. My character farted when some guy put her into bed. Those intimate details… the veneer was removed. There was rawness, honesty and warmth – a permission not to be perfect.”

“There was rawness, honesty and warmth.” (Picture: Getty Images)

Those same qualities inform Karvan’s new project Bump, a 10-part series that reunites her with Secret Life producer John Edwards and centres on Oly, an overachieving Year 11 student (played by newcomer Nathalie Morris) who unexpectedly goes into labour with a child she never realised she was carrying, let alone has interest in raising.

Karvan plays her mother, an English teacher at Oly’s school who’s harbouring secrets of her own.

The premiere’s first 10 minutes are a panoply of chaos, emotion and a grisly birthing scene, all kicked off with Karvan performing a salsa in bra, underwear and not much else.

Karvan tells Stellar she became “obsessed” with salsa even before her successful run on Dancing With The Stars earlier this year (she placed third). “I pitched that scene in the writers’ room, got up and danced and said, ‘Yeah, and she’s in a G-string and a bra!’” she recalls.

“It was high stakes, which is what you want – you don’t want to be getting bored as an actor in your late career.” (Picture: Bump)

“And then I thought, why did I pitch that? I can’t even walk around my home without covering my bum. So I cheated by throwing a shirt on over it [for the scene].”

Asked if she felt self-conscious as she filmed it, Karvan, replies, “Not at all. I’ve got two kids. I’ve been pregnant. I breastfed. I’m not vain. It was high stakes, which is what you want – you don’t want to be getting bored as an actor in your late career.”

Double duty on the set of Bump as actor and producer proved to be both blessing and curse. “You have a lot of generosity toward the production,” Karvan says.

“You’re empathetic to it and you’re fully invested. But you’re also putting out fires all the time, trying to make sure everybody is being seen, heard and appreciated. To be honest, in my whole career, I’ve never burst into tears on set and had to walk around the neighbourhood to calm down, and that happened on the last day.

Claudia Karvan features in this Sunday’s Stellar.

“It wasn’t bad, it didn’t delay anything, it wasn’t embarrassing… it just happened, and we moved on.”

So if her next project calls for Karvan to simply hit her marks and say her lines, that’s just fine with her. “It’s fabulous,” she says.

“I get to benefit from everyone else’s hard work. I can sit in my trailer, read and meditate. It’s a privilege. What an honour to be given a job. I don’t have to think about anything else. It’s like going back on the tit.”

Bump premieres on Stan on January 1. If you or someone you know needs help, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

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