Zen and motherhood helps Teresa Palmer finds her place in Hollywood
TERESA Palmer is a unique Hollywood star — a devoted earth mother who is also a talented and stunningly beautiful actor. We discover what makes the Adelaide A-lister tick.
SA News
Don't miss out on the headlines from SA News. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- After an Adelaide tree change and sea change, Teresa heads back to LA
- Why Teresa wants her kids to grow up in Adelaide
- ‘Please let me pee!’ Glenelg shops refuse to let pregnant star use their loo
TERESA Palmer these days has an entourage, just like the movie star she is.
There’s her angelic son Bodhi Rain, who she clearly adores, US independent film maker Mark Webber, who she married in Mexico in 2013, and stepson Isaac, another tallow-haired boy.
For her photo shoot the team includes a stylist, two people for hair and makeup, and a nail technician requested by her people in Los Angeles.
At the centre of this whirlpool is the golden girl — part earth mother, part gorgeous actor with a Hollywood thriller, Lights Out, opening next week.
She arrives looking flawless: make-up free, her honey blonde hair tousled and shiny, her skin illuminated by the glow of her second pregnancy.
As the team gets to work she chats away about the things that matter. It becomes clear she has no intention of playing it safe by testing the waters in Hollywood before complicating her career with young children. In fact she is utterly — admirably — fearless in her determination to embrace motherhood, just when her career has taken off.
“My passion has always been to be a mum, you ask any of my friends, my family; everyone knows that I have been desperate to be a mum my whole life,” Palmer says.
The Australian actor’s desire for stability, a nesting instinct directly traceable to motherhood, could be said to be badly timed.
Until this year’s The Choice, a major Nicholas Sparks release that made $20 million in the US, Palmer was being cast in smaller films like Kill Me Three Times, or in small roles in big films like Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups.
Just when she decided to no longer accept films where her female character only supported the male roles, she began being cast differently. She is the lead in Lights Out, a horror movie, not something she would usually do.
“Realistically, it was shooting in Los Angeles so I got to sleep in my own bed and be with my kids,” she says.
“And I loved the script, I loved the idea that they’d played on our fear of the dark because I had experienced that as a child.”
She has two other films out this year, including Cate Shortland’s Berlin Syndrome, about an obsessive relationship, and Mel Gibson’s war film Hacksaw Ridge, in which Palmer happily reverted to a female support role because of the quality of the project.
She plays a nurse and the fiance of Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spider-Man), a conscientious objector in World War II who becomes a war hero.
She cannot speak highly enough of Gibson, who cast her after she was convinced she had blown it. Webber helped her put down an audition tape in their bedroom, which she sent and forgot.
Three months later her agent called to say Gibson wanted a Skype meeting and a time would be set.
Out of the blue she was shocked to get a call from a casting agent to say “Where are you? Mel Gibson has been waiting on Skype for the last 40 minutes.”
“I was so shocked and I’d just come back from my husband’s surprise 35th birthday party — thank God I hadn’t drunk any wine or anything. I raced to the house, chucked on the Skype, then all my devices died, so I’d connect with him for a second and it would cut out. It was the worst thing ever.
“I didn’t know anything about my character, I was ill prepared, it was awful. In fact I got off Skype and cried, ‘I can’t believe that just happened, that was the worst, most horrendous thing.’ ”
Gibson was laughing and, before getting off Skype, said to her, “I like you, you’re real”.
On the strength of being herself, technical glitches and all, he cast her and she joined the shoot in Sydney late last year. She says Gibson worked incredibly hard, pitched in and ate with the crew every day.
“I really loved that about him. I’d worked on all these films with celebrities at different levels and the majority of them, I can tell you, if they have a profile they don’t eat with the crew, they’ll have an assistant go and pick it up and eat in the privacy of their trailer.”
It was an unexpectedly happy experience and she came away admiring him for his mind and abilities.
“I think he makes you bring your A game, just being around him,” the 30-year-old says. “I think this is probably the best film he has ever made and it’s just so exciting to be involved in a project like this.”
With Bodhi now two and another boy due in December, Palmer recently bought her father’s wildlife sanctuary deep in the Adelaide Hills. She is putting down family roots in the environment she knows.
“I grew up having this really traditional upbringing in Adelaide and it wasn’t until I was 18 that my life took a radical change. I want that for him (Bodhi), and for my next baby and my future children. There is so much about Australia that we want our kids to experience.”
Not that she is planning a quiet life.
They will still spend at least half the year in LA, a city she has grown to love. Living there has been part of a spiritual awakening that showed her what mattered even while she was hauling herself from one cattle call audition to the next.
She and Webber have tapped into a community of like-minded people who mix alternative lifestyles with their hot careers, and includes the golden couple of wellness, fellow Aussies Christiane and James Duigan.
Once she recovers from the next birth, she plans to travel where the work takes her, and take the whole family along.
The plan is working well because just as Palmer embraced motherhood, so her star has risen to the point where she can dictate her terms. And at 30, she is more fierce about getting what she wants.
In LA she has tapped into a sympathetic group of producers who embrace the idea of mothers and families on sets and have not baulked at hiring her travelling circus.
She tells producers she is a breastfeeding mother who wants her son with her every day and if they want her, they get the whole family. The fact that they have all agreed makes Palmer wonder what she used to be so worried about.
“I am really shocked that I had this idea that once I had children, everything would become really challenging in terms of my career,” she says.
“I really have experienced the opposite.”
Until her mid 20s, Palmer was another pretty young hopeful in LA chasing her next role. She started acting a decade ago in the Aussie independent film 2.37, about a day in the lives of a group of teenagers, one of whom suicides. It won three AFI nominations.
She followed up with another Australian film, December Boys, where she gave Daniel Radcliffe his first screen kiss, before moving to LA.
There were demoralising auditions and knock-backs. Worse, there were big films, like George Miller’s Justice League of America that cast her as Talia al Ghul, Batman’s love interest, that fell over.
A rumoured role in Mad Max: Fury Road, in its first incarnation, also fell through.
She struggled with loneliness, homesickness, and boy trouble. Having split from her Adelaide love, Port Adelaide AFL footballer Stuart Dew, her name was linked to actors Adam Brody and Topher Grace, briefly to the mercurial UK comedian Russell Brand, and for an intense time to Canadian actor Scott Speedman.
Then in 2013 came a breakthrough lead role in the zombie love story Warm Bodies, which also starred Nicholas Hoult and John Malkovich. It raised her profile a notch at around the time she met future husband Webber. Her life began coming together.
On a visit to Adelaide where she and Webber filmed part of their independent feature, The Ever After, she was already starting to rebel against the industry’s rules and find her own way.
She had been doing about one serious studio film a year but they were films chosen for her.
Now she was starting to say no in an effort to become “more present” in her career choices.
Already on her path to a more fulfilling life, in 2013 she made her first video diary for Your Zen Life, a health and fitness blog she launched with actor friend Phoebe Tonkin.
Your Zen Life is today a flourishing website with vegan recipes, stylish yoga pants, beauty tips and regular “Tez Talks” segments in which Palmer chats about her life and encourages others to make the most of theirs. Her pregnancy triggered a sister website with friend Sarah Olsen, Your Zen Mama.
“We wanted to create an environment where we celebrate the connections between us rather
than the separatism that we feel so much in our industry,” she says.
So does the Zen reference mean she is Buddhist?
“I don’t label at all,” she says. “I grew up a really strict Catholic — my mum still goes to Latin mass every single day, she is a very devout Catholic.
I am spiritual and my philosophy is to meet all situations with love and compassion, first and foremost.”
Palmer’s mother, Paula, has travelled with her in the past, caring for Bodhi while his parents are at work, but is finding it harder now he is an active boy.
Palmer has never wanted a nanny but they recently hired a part-time personal assistant to help with travel arrangements and he acts as a babysitter when needed.
So far, it is all working like a dream. Palmer is feeling good about herself and doing virtually what she wants.
“It just organically happened right after he (Bodhi) was born, I still can’t quite put my finger on it.”
Lights Out opens on Thursday
Battle to save animals on the brink at Outback reserve
Conservationists are battling to save animals at an Outback reserve from the effects of the worst drought in recent memory, and have received a funding boost to redouble their efforts.
Country tradie to face court over incomplete work
A country tradesman will face the Elizabeth Magistrates Court over allegations he was not licenced and refused to refund money to clients.