VWeekend: Miranda Otto on finding her voice, working in Australia again and why she returned to Middle-earth
The ever-versatile Miranda Otto opens up on how she juggles very different roles and why she was delighted to return to The Lord of the Rings 25 years after it made her a global star.
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Australian actor Miranda Otto is nothing if not versatile. In a career spanning nearly 40 years, she’s played a country singer, a warrior woman, a gargoyle queen, a cult leader and a comic book witch, to name but a few of her film and TV roles.
But acting challenges don’t come much trickier than when Otto was forced to juggle two diametrically opposed roles at the same time in a week, which must have given her the thespian equivalent of whiplash.
Two of her recent TV projects – Ladies in Black, which screened on the ABC earlier this year, and Thou Shalt Not Steal, currently streaming on Stan – ended up shooting concurrently for a short time in Adelaide, meaning she had to switch between the two.
In the former, a period drama set in the 1960s, Otto plays an uptight, snooty, ladies’ clothing sales supervisor, with a cutglass English accent and an immaculately put-together hairdo and outfit. In the latter, a black comedy-drama set in the 1980s Outback, she is a rough-as-guts, tough-as-nails, opportunistic former prostitute turned sex trafficker, who is about as ocker as characters come.
“There was a week when we were shooting in Adelaide, where they went, ‘Actually, could you do Monday on Ladies in Black, Tuesday on Thou Shalt Not Steal, Wednesday on Ladies in Black, Thursday on Thou Shalt Not Steal’, and I was going back and forth from one to the other,” Otto says over a Zoom call from her Sydney home. “It was more complicated in my brain than I thought it would be, actually. It was really quite a stretch of my imagination.”
Further complicating matters was the fact that she’d just recently returned from the US, where Otto had been based while she was working on the two seasons of supernatural teen drama Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and for much of the preceding decade.
For her recent work in Australia, not only did she have to hire a dialect coach to brush up on her English accent, she had to work harder to go full Aussie again.
“At first it was like, ‘Oh, wow, I’m used to my Australian accent, but I’ve got to really push it a lot further.’ So, that was something that, as we kept going, it got easier. But it was a lot switching back and forth between the two. That was a weird week.”
Gruelling though that particular chapter might have been, it’s also a fair snapshot of how Otto has approached a career that’s seen her work on huge productions with cinema visionaries such as Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings), Steven Spielberg (War of the Worlds), Robert Zemeckis (What Lies Beneath) and Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line).
“I don’t like to rest easy in something that I’ve just done and I feel like ‘Oh, I know how to do that’,” she says. “I always feel like that’s a real trap for me. And the times where I have kind of gone ‘Oh, I love that role I just played and this role is so much like it’, it has never really worked that well for me.
“So I find it’s better for me to just really launch into something completely different.”
Although she comes from an Australian acting family – father Barry has been a fixture on stage and screen for more than 50 years and half-sister Gracie is an acclaimed director – Brisbane-born Otto’s ambitions were much more modest when she started out.
Otto had already acted in TV and movies before she was accepted into Sydney’s prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), but her goal while she was there – like many of her fellow students – was to just be able to “maintain a life” in the notoriously fickle profession.
“When I was at NIDA, we were all very much in those days hoping that we would be full-time working at Sydney Theatre Company, getting to do lots of roles on stage,” Otto says.
“That was very much at that time our focus … to try to be working for a big state theatre company and getting to play in classics.
“I guess somewhere when I was a kid and I used to watch all those Hollywood movies and stuff, there must have been a part of me that was always dreaming of getting to be in those big, kind of glamorous movies that they used to make.”
Although Otto first made her mark in beloved ’90s Australian films such as The Nostradamus Kid (with her Thou Shalt Not Steal co-star Noah Taylor), The Last Days of Chez Nous and Doing Time for Patsy Cline, and had dipped her toe into Hollywood, it was the release of the second movie in Kiwi Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Two Towers, that really kicked her career into overdrive.
Playing Eowyn, the tenacious, trailblazing, sword-swinging shieldmaiden of Rohan in that film and its sequel, The Return of the King, remains one of her fondest memories, and she’s a little surprised to hear that 25 years have now passed since she was on the enormous sets around New Zealand, helping turn J.R.R Tolkien’s revered fantasy novels into some of the best cinema ever made.
“I just think all the time I wish I’d had more people come and visit me when I was there on set because it was such an extraordinary experience, and I don’t think anyone will have that experience again,” Otto says. “It was extraordinary to watch all these people come together to make something that was almost impossible to make. Peter Jackson was extraordinary and just the way they drew in all these people, and how hard everybody worked to try to realise that vision, and you film and it looks amazing but it was even more amazing seeing how they made it look amazing. I was so lucky to be a part of that.”
Given how transformative the experience of making those movies was, Otto didn’t have to think very hard when producer Philippa Boyens asked her to reprise the role for a voiceover in the coming animated Lord of the Rings adventure, The War of the Rohirrim.
True to form, Otto had just finished working on Thou Shalt Not Steal when she was summoned across the Ditch to narrate the tale of another shieldmaiden of Rohan, set centuries before the events of LOTR and also featuring the voices of Gaia Wise (daughter of Emma Thompson) and Succession’s Brian Cox. Otto says it “took a little bit of time to try and get that younger voice back again”, but Boyens says she’s selling herself short.
“She looked at me at the beginning of one of the sessions, and she said ‘I think it’s going to take me a while to find her’,” says Boyens in a separate interview. “It took her five minutes and there she was. She is such a powerful actress, she’s so good and … the narration was better than even what I could have hoped for because of what she brought to it.
“She could stay true to her character because she is the narrator. So we didn’t have to draw her as an anime character or anything like that.
“She knew it was going to be her voice that would carry the performance and could imagine herself back there. I know she loves the character Eowyn and always has, and was so brilliant in that role.”
Thanks to the Prime Video series The Rings of Power and now The War of the Rohirrim – not to mention more Jackson affiliated movies such as The Hunt for Gollum to come – LOTR is front and centre in the public consciousness again. Otto says she’s open to going back to the live action world – “I would love to work with them all again, but it would have to make sense for the character” – but says that the ideals and positive energy of Tolkien’s stories are what keep audiences coming back.
“It is really amazing when I meet up with fans of the films, how important those movies were to a lot of young women,” she says. “It’s quite a big thing to hear people’s personal stories when they talk about what it meant to them and what was going on in their life. So in that same way it has stayed with me. It’s a huge experience in my life and a really important part of my career.”
Since returning to Australia, where she’s had a hugely eclectic run of roles in Wellmania, The Clearing, the AACTA and Logie-winning Fires and The Unusual Suspects, Otto says she has been struck by the breadth of choice now on offer here, driven in part by the rise of streaming services.
“It has surprised me how much we have picked up here in terms of the creativity involved in projects,” she says. “The thing that I really enjoy about American television was that every show there has its complete style, its style of cinematography, its style of acting, its style of design. They are very good at completing a whole world and I feel like that is now happening so much more here in Australian shows. Stylistically there is the money and the backing to make shows that are really individual.
“There’s licence to get into some really interesting topics and interesting styles. It’s more – I wouldn’t say experimental so much – it’s just very creative.”
Thou Shalt Not Steal, with which she was involved from its early stages, is a case in point. Dylan River’s (Robbie Hood, Mystery Road: Origins) road drama about a delinquent Indigenous teenager trying to get back home after busting out of a remote detention centre and meeting all manner of dodgy characters along the way – including Otto’s Maxine and Taylor’s shady preacher – was like nothing she’d ever seen. “I just love his style; Dylan’s just got such an original voice,” Otto says.
“I’d watched Robbie Hood and I thought that had such a quirky, great sense of humour in it.”
And then there was the prospect of reuniting with Taylor and once again being the object of his amorous intentions 30 years after they made The Nostradamus Kid together.
“Poor Noah having to relive that all again,” Otto says with a laugh. “I hadn’t seen Noah for years. I think the last time I saw Noah was at a Nick Cave concert in Brixton when I ran into him a few years ago in London.
“He was just so great. From the first read-through, he had it down pat. He was so funny. And he was so fully invested, and it was just really fun bouncing off him and seeing him again after all these years.”
The War of the Rohirrim is in cinemas on December 12. Thou Shalt Not Steal is now streaming on Stan. Ladies In Black is streaming on ABC iview
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