‘That whole idea of, ‘Oh, I’m going to Hollywood’ doesn’t feel like that’s the path’: Why Deb Mailman never tried to crack Hollywood
She has won Logies and starred in beloved Aussie dramas. Now, Deborah Mailman opens up about why she didn’t seek international fame.
Stellar
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When an elated Deborah Mailman collected her latest Logie in August, she stood onstage and declared, “Thank you, I actually really wanted this!”
Given so many women often feel the need to apologise for their success – or labour to hide their ambition – Mailman’s opener to her speech felt refreshingly candid and without guile.
“And you know what? I didn’t know that I was going to say that,” she tells Stellar as she adjusts her thick-rimmed glasses and breaks into a wide grin.
“It wasn’t until I had that Logie in my hand and I looked at it that it was the first thing that came to my mind.”
For Mailman, winning this year’s Logie for Best Lead Actress in a Drama – in a field that included Oscar nominees Sigourney Weaver and Rachel Griffiths – was particularly meaningful.
“I was so, so happy because it meant a lot to me doing Total Control,” she says of the ABC’s political drama, which wrapped at the start of the year after three seasons. “And it was one of my first leading roles, really. So I gave it my all, and it was really lovely to be rewarded in that way.”
Routinely cited as one of the country’s most popular and celebrated actors, Mailman has become such a fixture on our screens, it’s hard to fathom that Total Control’s outspoken and passionate senator Alex Irving was one of her first lead roles.
Indeed, prior to that series, Mailman had mostly shone as part of an ensemble cast such as in The Secret Life Of Us, for which she won the first of her six Logies in 2002.
Although she had found success on the big screen in her 1998 film debut, winning an AACTA Award for Best Lead Actress in the drama Radiance, it was her role in The Secret Life Of Us as Kelly – an idealistic 20-something sharing a St Kilda apartment with a cynical writer (Samuel Johnson) and a driven doctor (Claudia Karvan) – that put her on the map.
It also marked one of the first times a First Nations actor had starred in a prime-time commercial TV drama, but back then, Mailman didn’t think too much about the bigger impact. “I was just very happy to get the job as an actor,” she says with a shrug.
“It was really my first foray into working for television. Prior to that, I’d done a couple of little odd jobs here and there, but I’d come from a theatre background.
“So I was like, ‘Hang on, I’ve got work for how long? Six months? That means I get a weekly wage for the next six months – and I’ll be working with Claudia Karvan.’”
Seeing how drastically the TV landscape has changed since then has made Mailman appreciate how pioneering the show’s creators John Edwards and Amanda Higgs were in their matter-of-fact casting. “They weren’t thinking about a ‘First Nations character’,” she says.
“We’re just talking about a woman who is a hopeless romantic, whose whole world is about getting that trifecta of love, work and finance together. It was so relatable for me at that time. I was absolutely in Kelly’s shoes as a 20-something just starting out in the world, starting my career. So that resonated with me.”
Other than Karvan – with whom she keeps in touch through their work with the government’s entertainment agency Screen Australia, and who interviewed her the last time she appeared on a Stellar cover in 2019 – Mailman hasn’t kept in regular contact with her co-stars from The Secret Life Of Us. “It’s such a common thing,” she explains.
“You create this instant, immediate family, and you hold on tight through whatever job you’re going through. It’s intense. It’s wonderful. And you create really great energy around that. And then it goes. And it’s lovely when you can still hold on to that. But it’s also OK when it doesn’t. That connection doesn’t keep because it’s just part of the job.”
With The Secret Life Of Us finding new audiences around the world thanks to streaming services, could the hit drama follow the lead of resurrected 1990s series Heartbreak High and be rebooted for a modern audience? “Maybe,” Mailman offers.
“It would be a great opportunity to look at what that living condition would be for that age bracket now because there would be so many great, new storylines.” She then scoffs at any suggestion the original cast could reunite and return to their old digs in Melbourne’s St Kilda. “Nobody would want to see that,” she says with a laugh.
Nonetheless, the show’s huge success in the early 2000s meant the naturally shy Mailman had to adjust to life as a major TV star. “It was incredibly strange, I have to say,” she reflects. “It’s almost quite overwhelming when you’re walking down the street and someone just shouts out, ‘Hi Kelly’, and you’re like, ‘Oh … my name is Deb.’”
Of course, it’s been a long time since Mailman has had to remind people of her name, but she still leads a low-key and inconspicuous life at her home near Wollongong, south of Sydney, even travelling to and from acting jobs and photo shoots by public transport.
“That’s because I don’t drive,” she points out. “So I don’t have a choice. I can drive because I’ve got a ‘bush licence’, if you know what I mean by that. But when I was at uni, I couldn’t afford a car so it was far more doable to get around Brisbane on a push bike. And I had my legs. I don’t know what it’s like to have it any other way.”
Unlike many actors of her generation who left Australia to further their careers, Mailman says she has never been tempted to find roles abroad. “I think that whole idea of, ‘Oh, I’m going to Hollywood’ doesn’t feel like that’s the path anymore,” she notes.
“You want to work where the great work is, right? And whether that’s working in America, whether it’s working here or whether that’s working in England, it’s really about finding the interesting people that you want to walk with and where the ideas are. And I found those ideas here at home. That’s what I want to be a part of.”
Plus, as a self-described homebody and a mother of teenage sons – one of whom is about to sit his HSC – Mailman’s focus is here with her family.
“It’s hard for me to just go on a train and go to Sydney for a few days and stay up there or have to hop on a plane and go to Perth and film something, let alone actually contemplate the idea of going to a different country,” she continues.
“But in this day and age, if I was young and I had no attachments, I might be telling you a different story.”
Ultimately, Mailman simply doesn’t feel like she’s missing out on anything by staying in Australia and telling local stories that have an impact.
Whether she’s spotlighting important issues facing the Aboriginal community in shows such as 2012 dramas Redfern Now and Mabo or more recently in Total Control or keeping young audiences entertained in films like 2015’s Oddball and Blinky Bill, Mailman is always looking for new ways to enlighten and entertain.
“What has been really great over my body of work is that I found opportunities, and people have created those opportunities for me where, yes, I can play a strong First Nations character that’s anchored in that sort of narrative, but then shift in other ways that it doesn’t become part of the story,” she says.
Her latest role, in the upcoming Disney+ dramedy Last Days Of The Space Age, sees Mailman playing Eileen, a grandmother living in suburban Perth in 1979.
The eight-part series follows Eileen and her neighbours as they make sense of real-life situations that unfolded, including union strikes, a visiting Miss Universe pageant and the impending crash of the US space station Skylab (a research lab the size of a three-bedroom house, it was launched by NASA in 1973; after its final three-person crew left in 1974, it sat empty for five years awaiting a new crew, before eventually succumbing to Earth’s gravity and crashing in July 1979, scattering debris across a sparsely populated section of Western Australia).
As the daughter of Māori and Aboriginal parents who grew up the youngest of five children in a strong Aboriginal community in the outback Queensland city of Mount Isa, Mailman’s own memories of 1970s Australia sit in stark contrast to her Last Days Of The Space Age character’s journey – as the only person of colour in a white neighbourhood.
“Eileen has worked really hard to be part of the community,” she explains.
“She lives a little bit under the radar until she suddenly finds herself parenting her grandson Adam, who comes in with that fresh perspective on the state of the world, and really challenges Eileen to sort of take a more active role in speaking up about the injustices of the world, and the intolerance.”
Mailman loved working with Heartbreak High star Thomas Weatherall, who plays Adam, but at 52, she didn’t feel entirely ready to play a grandmother.
“It felt too soon,” she tells Stellar. “I had to do the calculations and then I was like, OK … it is possible if she was a young mother.”
Wrapping her head around the era itself came easier. “I remember where I was in 1979,” she says. “I was a kid in primary school and I remember we had this big cement common area in the playground, and we drew Skylab to understand how big it was,” she recalls.
“We talked about Skylab and that drawing was on the cement playground until the chalk washed away.”
Imagining a return to the practicalities of life in the 1970s – no social media, streaming or mobile phones – could be a stretch for some actors. Not Mailman, who says that her house retains a landline (“I don’t think we use it, but it’s still there”).
While she admits her guilty pleasure is playing the video game Plants Vs. Zombies on her iPad, Mailman says she prefers a life unencumbered by “likes”, posts and updates. She’s happiest at home watching TV with her husband, marketing specialist Matthew Coonan, and their sons, Henry and Oliver – even though she says, “My boys don’t watch the same thing that I watch. They’re on TikTok or YouTube and I’m still watching free-to-air, waiting for a call on my landline – which never happens because nobody has one anymore.”
She also understands that having a famous mum is a different experience for her sons.
“I’m absolutely in awe of how they manage to keep their cool around something that’s so much noise, so much going on,” she says of social media.
“I’ve never been too judgmental around them [and how they use it]. I’ve just trusted that they know how to look after themselves and be respectful on these platforms. So I’ll just leave it to them.”
There are benefits to having more tech-savvy people in the house, too. “We wouldn’t be talking right now without my son – he was the one who actually sorted out my computer problems,” she says about pulling off her Zoom interview with Stellar.
As for either of her boys following her footsteps into acting, neither has shown any interest – and she couldn’t even entice them to visit her on set when Last Days was filming not far from their family home. “I was like, ‘Come meet everyone,’ and they said, ‘Nuh,’” she adds with a laugh. “So I don’t think yet that anyone is remotely interested in doing what I do.
“But who knows? The world is at their feet. They don’t have to decide anything anytime soon.”
Last Days Of The Space Age premieres October 2 on Disney+. See the full shoot and interview with Deborah Mailman in the latest issue of Stellar. For more from Stellar, click here.
Originally published as ‘That whole idea of, ‘Oh, I’m going to Hollywood’ doesn’t feel like that’s the path’: Why Deb Mailman never tried to crack Hollywood
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