Why Miranda Otto goes unnoticed in Australia
She has starred in several Hollywood films and is now in a hit Netflix hit series — so why has Miranda Otto not risen to the same level of fame as many of her fellow Aussie actors?
Stellar
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Miranda Otto is a conundrum of Australian show business. Undoubtedly a talented actor, but not feted as heartily as some of her high-profile peers.
She was born into the biz — the daughter of Barry Otto, a mainstay of Sydney theatre during the 1970s and a screen perennial — but had times when she didn’t crave to be part of it.
A constant film presence but not visible enough for us to grow tired of her. Successful yet not a tall poppy.
She is the translucent one in what might be called our “Generation 50”, the astounding collection of Australian actors who all turned 50 in the past 20 months — Nicole, Hugh, Eric, Rachel, Naomi, Guy... and Kylie.
Yet she hasn’t really commanded, or demanded, the attention many of her fellow stars attract. She’s still the jobbing actor who can walk unfettered through a shopping centre in her hometown of Sydney.
But Hollywood loves her. So much so, she’s now hard to pin down between jobs, having just arrived home in Los Angeles after shooting in Austria for five weeks opposite Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell in the comedy Downhill — an English-language remake of the 2014 Swedish film Force Majeure.
And that was two days after completing production on the newest season of the hit Netflix series Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina.
Otto is self-effacing about how she’s arrived in this place, that desirable comfort zone between the A-list and the B-list.
Or perhaps she doesn’t want to reveal much about her path or masterplan, if there even is one. Where some actors are calculating, Otto prefers to react.
“I don’t know, I just try to do it role by role,” she says of her progression.
“I’ve never been much of a networker. I’m pretty work-based, more than like fame-based or anything. Most things that I get, I give my interpretation [of the role] and they like it and I get the job and I do it.”
The getting and the doing have become easier since she moved to LA with her actor husband Peter O’Brien and teen daughter Darcey six years ago.
They’ve made friends via work, their neighbourhood and Darcey’s school and feel like they have made a home in the US — while returning home to Australia whenever they can.
Greater opportunities there mean work is constant for Otto and her husband. “Things turn over so quickly here,” notes Otto, recounting how her most recent job had her on a plane to work opposite Ferrell only a few days after reading the script and auditioning via iPhone.
“I found that harder to do from Australia,” she says of the rapid turnaround.
“And it was also harder because it meant having to keep leaving my family to come over here, or wherever the work was. Being based here, it’s just easier to get up and go to work.”
And it’s easy being married to a man who also appreciates the peculiar demands of the industry.
Otto and O’Brien have been married for 16 years — which is approximately 75 in showbiz years — and don’t face the ego clashes so common among creative couples.
Otto is incredulous at the suggestion artistic conflict or jealousy might be a thing given how smoothly they juggle their careers.
“We don’t have any of that at all,” she insists. “Peter is incredibly supportive of me and helps me with stuff all the time.”
That can mean filming an audition on the iPhone, suggestions for readings or just telling his wife to drop everything and take that job in Europe.
But it’s not insecurity from O’Brien, the former Neighbours star who now has more than 75 screen credits and counting.
“We don’t have those kind of jealousies about work,” adds Otto. “We’re in it together.”
And Otto herself is right into her career right now. It wasn’t always so. She’s had times when her love for acting diminished, previously admitting to periods of doubt.
“I guess I’m just not someone who enjoys sitting around doing nothing,” she says.
“And I always felt in my life there were a lot of things I could have done, so when I went through periods where I wasn’t working, I was like, ‘Well, why am I doing this?’”
It wasn’t that she fell out of love with acting. It’s that she grew bored. The small local industry couldn’t sustain the variety or constancy of work she desired.
Yet in the late-1990s, Miranda Otto was so omnipresent in Australian film, another Australian actress later told me she moved to Europe to further her career “because Miranda Otto was in f*cking everything”.
“I know!” Otto screams with laughter when told this now. “That’s the way it goes, right? There’ll be certain people who are in everything at some point and you think: ‘My god, am I ever going to get a run?’ And it comes and it goes.
“Yeah, I did have a couple of good runs in Australia.”
The first was straight after graduating from the country’s leading acting school, NIDA. Otto had the chops to pick up stage and TV work quickly before earning two Australian Film Institute nominations in 1992 for the films The Last Days Of Chez Nous and The Girl Who Came Late.
Then there was her amazing run of leading roles in three years from 1996, including the Cannes Festival award winner Love Serenade, The Well, True Love And Chaos, Doing Time For Patsy Cline, Dead Letter Office and In The Winter Dark.
Otto must have thought acting was easy. “I grew up in a family where my father’s an actor, so no, I never thought acting was an easy choice,” she says.
Even when work flowed, she remained “super aware” of acting’s perils, the ebbs and flows when the right project isn’t available or an actor has to reinvent themselves to break out of a particular image.
Otto was enamoured with acting ever since her childhood hanging around Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre, seeing plays with her father “and just feeling the energy and the intensity and the enthusiasm of all those people, all those brilliant actors”.
She recalls going to dinner after a technical run of a new play by Stephen Sewell (Welcome The Bright World) “and sitting there as a kid and them having these impassioned conversations. I just remember in that moment being totally seduced by it and the camaraderie of it, the enthusiasm, the passion of everyone at that table talking about this piece of work and being involved in this piece of art.”
She was seduced by that passion. And she had the surname, although she didn’t consider it an asset or a burden.
She admits the only burden had been growing up around such exalted actors and, as a young student, being daunted.
Part of Otto questioned whether she could share a stage next to experienced peers who “seemed to me like gods. I guess I was more intimidated by people I knew as a kid who were my parents’ friends and my dad and everyone I knew.”
The moment she felt she could hold her own was in the 2002 Sydney Theatre Company’s staging of A Doll’s House.
So many things coalesced on that production, including playing opposite her future husband. “In that play I felt like, ‘All right, I think I’m doing OK,’” she says laughing.
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And she has done “OK” ever since, subsequently building on her ethereal performance as Éowyn in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy to work across an array of diverse projects.
Next month she returns to screens as Zelda Spellman in Netflix’s hit Archie comic spin-off Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina.
Otto loves the role, despite initial doubts about what she thought would be a young teen series. “But it is quite adult and risqué,” she says.
When Australian costume designer Angus Strathie and production designer Lisa Soper showed Otto its gothic and highly stylised look, she was hooked. And she sounds overjoyed at how popular Sabrina has become.
Otto half-jokes she took the part because she chooses roles unlike her previous one: “I don’t really know what I’m looking for, other than something very different to what I’ve last done. I’m usually automatically attracted to something very different to that. Because I’ll feel, ‘I’ve done that.’”
But there’s been some strategy. When she began working in the US, Otto realised she had met only one female director in three years of auditioning.
Yet half the 20-odd films she had made back home were directed by women. So, in an era where #MeToo revelations are cascading through the sector, Otto perhaps subconsciously self-protected by working with women.
She tells Stellar she hasn’t had any “very, very bad experiences myself” on set because, “I’ve been very cautious about stuff and tried to avoid certain situations.
“A few things have been a bit much, but nothing I couldn’t deal with,” she adds. “I was very used to being directed by women.”
And she’s obviously enthusiastic about the current push to increase the number of female directors in the US and create clearer guidelines in screen and arts institutions.
“I don’t feel like there has been that support for [women]. And if you make it clear to people there won’t be what happened a lot of times in the past, where stuff has been really ad hoc, [like], ‘Oh just do something.’
“There has been some really positive change to come out of [#MeToo] and the more women in the business, [the bad behaviour] will just stop.”
Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina Season 2 airs on Netflix on April 5.
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Originally published as Why Miranda Otto goes unnoticed in Australia
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