Teresa Palmer: No secrets, no small talk
She’s pregnant with her fifth child, about to take an RV trip through Tornado Alley with her family and then heading back to Australia to promote her next project. Actor Teresa Palmer thought she’d be unemployable with kids — but she was wrong.
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Teresa Palmer is in her happy place. Pregnant with her fifth child – she’s not sure if that will be her last either, she laughs – she proudly lifts up her top to show off her bare belly, jumping up from being perched on the bedroom floor of an Airbnb in LA where she’s holidaying with her growing family.
Bare foot and fresh faced, she’s glowing. And not just because she’s living her dream.
Because she gets to show her kids they can live theirs too.
“All the time,” the Adelaide-born, Byron Bay-based 39-year-old says when asked if she stops to reflect on what it took to get her to the happiest time of her life.
“I do because I feel like I have a responsibility as a mother to impart on my children – that dreams work.
“Plant the seeds and throw yourself into them with fearless abandon – do it, because I did that as a 16-year-old.
“I was living in the house I was embarrassed about, and I was definitely in a state of self comparison and I would compare myself to other situations and other people’s parents, and they all had siblings and I didn’t have siblings. But I had this dream that was just so crystal clear.
“And I had no plan B. I just believed in it.
“And I think that for me that is the greatest gift I could give my kids – you have to lean into that with all of you.”
Now 26 weeks pregnant, the mother of Bodhi Rain, 11, Forest Sage, 9, Poet Lake, 6, Prairie Moon, 3, and stepmum to 16-year-old Isaac Love – her husband US actor/director Mark Webber’s son – Palmer is busy.
She’s taking a break and about to take an RV through Tornado Alley with her family before heading to Sydney for next week’s premiere of her new show, Mix Tape.
Then it’s back to her idyllic Byron Bay lifestyle – the slow one with surfs after school and sand between toes – the kind of life she wanted for her kids.
It may as well be a world away from her Adelaide upbringing, where she grew up in government housing with her mother Paula who suffered bipolar and schizoaffective disorder. Her parents split up when she was a toddler, and her dad Kevin paid for a private school, so she was able to go.
But that didn’t stop her from being embarrassed to be the girl who lived on the wrong side of town.
Then she took a chance.
“And if I could go back and tell my 16-year-old self … I mean – I read her journals,” she admits. “I’ve got all her journals here.
“I’ve got from age 14 to 21 – and I wrote every day. And it’s so funny to see my handwriting changing when I was shape shifting and trying to be cooler, doing tags and then where I landed by the time I was 21 – and then I stopped journalling.
“But I read those journals and I am instantly transported back to that girl – and I can feel the excitement about what the future had to offer – and that’s really cool.
“I had no self critical voice at that time and that’s such a beautiful thing.
“I worry now with social media – how do we keep our kids in that headspace of ‘I’m awesome, I can achieve anything’ – so that’s a big responsibility for us to show up for our kids in that way. It’s harder to be raised in this digital age.”
The simple life is one so many crave – and it’s the nostalgic notion dissected in Palmer’s new work, Mix Tape. The Binge original, which will premiere next week, is a deeply personal four-part series which also stars One Day’s Jim Sturgess and is set against every greatest hit from your childhood. And theirs.
Spanning 1989 to 2015, Mix Tape follows Alison (Palmer) and Daniel (Sturgess), two teenagers who fall deeply in love in the UK, bonded by their shared passion for music and their dreams of a bigger life beyond the confines of their home towns.
From traded mix tapes to plans of American road trips, their connection is undeniable but life has other plans.
More than two decades later, Daniel and Alison are living worlds apart. Daniel, now a music critic, remains tethered to Sheffield, grappling with the weight of a life that didn’t turn out as he imagined. Alison, living in Sydney, has built a seemingly perfect life as an author and mother, yet feels an unshakeable emptiness tied to the love she left behind.
When a chance encounter brings them together after 20 years, the two must confront their past, their present and the choices that have defined them.
“I just feel so good about putting this out into the world and the nostalgia people keep talking about, and also that longing for that first love experience and those butterflies, that crazy connection that you have with your first love,” Palmer says.
“Getting to unpack the idea of acting out – if you guys got back together 20 years later, what would that be like if we get to explore that in this show?
“So I love it and I also love everyone involved. And Jim Sturgess, my co-star, I’m obsessed with.
“He just shows up in the work and he cares about it so much.
“He made mix tapes, mixed playlists for me – so he was like ‘this is the Alison and Dan playlist … here’s another one for these kinds of scenes and here’s another one for these kinds of scenes’ and he was just the best partner.”
Making a mixed tape was something Palmer did as a young teen. In fact, she and a friend even ran their own makeshift radio station.
“I used to make them all the time,” she says.
“I had my own radio station, which wasn’t a real radio station, it was me and my friend … and we would listen to the local radio station and every time a song came on that we loved, you’d press the two buttons and you’d record the song.
“It was bad,” she laughs. “It was such a simpler time.”
There was a time though, that Palmer thought she wouldn’t make it as an actor. She’s had roadblocks. She quit after her own MeToo moment.
She battled with an eating disorder, orthorexia, which centres on an unhealthy obsession with healthy food. She thought she wouldn’t be hireable after having children. But the universe thought differently.
“It all happened so fast for me,” she recalls of her start in the business that was to change her life. “My first film premiered at Cannes – and then it was like American agents, come to America, audition for things – and then in that first two weeks in America, I booked three jobs, and I had these big jobs and big films and working with people and it was all such a whirlwind.
“I think it wasn’t until I was a little bit older that I was like, ‘Whoa, what was that?’ That was an insane ride.
“And also, I met some really nefarious characters along the way. I had my own MeToo experience. I was taken advantage of.
“I remember feeling like, ‘Oh, is this like, my dream? Is this what it’s actually like? Because if it is, I’d quit – this is not worth my happiness.’
“And I remember quitting.”
She was young and alone and felt pressured to ‘hook up’ with the male lead to have ‘more chemistry’ with him. She refused.
“I was 20, and I had just been fired off this job because I had refused to participate in some really coercive control stuff that was happening, and so I got fired. I went back to Australia and I told my agent, and I was like that’s it – cool – I’m ready to have my babies now – I’m gonna be a drama teacher, I’m going back to Adelaide, I’m going to marry my boyfriend and this was great.
“So I did have those moments.
Her agent, Ann Churchill-Brown from Shanahan Management – she’s Nicole Kidman’s agent too, Palmer says proudly – convinced her to have another go.
“I’m still with her – and by the way, I had written that in my journal when I was 16 – ‘I will be represented by Nicole Kidman’s agent’ – and I did. And she convinced me to come back.
“She was like, ‘Look – that was an awful experience, but I’m telling you, there are other experiences that you’re gonna have that’s just going to be the salve. It’s gonna feel so good’ … and after that time, she was right.
“I had all these beautiful experiences, one after the next. And the next wobbly moments I had was self-esteem stuff and feeling like I had to be a certain weight and falling into the trap that so many actors did in our early 20s where we started being really overly conscious about the foods we were eating and getting really skinny and going to the gym. So I fell into that for a couple of years, then I got myself out of it – then had my babies and it just cracked open my whole life. It was the happiest I’ve ever been.”
A few years into that, she started getting wobbly again. “Like – am I hireable still? Is anyone gonna hire me? I’ve got all these kids and there are so many other people who are just focused on their career and they don’t have children,” she says.
“Like, all right, maybe that was a good run and now I get to be a stay at home mum.
“And luckily enough, the opportunities just kept coming.
“And I feel more settled in who I am and I think maybe the choices of the roles I’m taking, especially in the last few years, are a bit more reflective of the sort of work I want to be doing.”
You saw that in Palmer’s depiction of the Liane Moriarty adaptation The Last Anniversary, and you see it in Mix Tape.
Her character Alison is a real “shell of herself” at the beginning, she admits. And then she shape shifts, like all good women do – Palmer included.
“She’s trying on this new skin of the Mosman mum with a very successful husband and this life that she thinks she should love, but actually, she’s running away from authentically who she is,” she says.
“And of course, there’s going to be little cracks in the marriage and there’s going to be distance and she doesn’t feel seen or heard. And then, of course, when Dan pops back into the picture, suddenly, it’s like she’s returning home again, and it’s a beautiful blossoming.”
Alison has such a rich backstory, and one that Palmer was able to draw on her own Adelaide upbringing to bring to life.
“The colourful experiences that she went through – she had to be a caretaker to her mother, and then of her brother, and then the abuse that she faced – there was so much there to unpack,” she says. “And I would try and find little moments of connection to the backstory.
“I remember the feeling of not wanting to have anyone over at my house because I grew up in the housing trust system. So I was moving from house to house but because my dad was paying for my school fees, I went to a really nice school – a private Catholic school – but I was the one there that was actually living on the other side of town, not the wealthy side of town.
“I was in the northern suburbs and I was in the tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny house, and I remember feeling really embarrassed.
“People would be like, ‘I’ll just come and pick you up’ or ‘I’ll just come over to your house’ and I would try and schedule playdates or hang out when I was at my dad’s house on a Sunday.
“So there was some similarities where I thought, all right, what can I lean on in my own life that felt gritty and hard and shameful and luckily, everything was there in the script – it was just all there.
“There was such rich character development that I was able to apply some of my own personal experiences as well as just get into the mindset of this person.”
She likens it to a rebirth.
“She was trying not to carry any of that over into her present life – they’re almost like two completely different characters,” Palmer continues. “I can recognise people in my own life who are in that stage of their life where they’re in a marriage, and they’re like – ‘Why is it not feeling great’? Like, what is it?’
“And sometimes it’s just going inward and going deep and cracking open those scars and those wounds and starting to look at all of the stuff – all of our childhood conditioning – and how that manifests itself in your present day life.
“And all of that is a beautiful self work that is always ongoing. It’s really important. And they’re the people I surround myself with as well. I’m like, I want to talk to you about the real stuff – let’s get deep with the first one minute of a conversation. Let’s go there. Tell me about your childhood wounds,” she laughs.
“I saw on Instagram recently someone had posted this thing where it was like, ‘I don’t want small talk, I want to know your secrets, your darkness, your insecurities, your vulnerabilities, your childhood trauma’, and I was like – ‘That’s what I want.’
“That’s how I connect with people. We go deep, pretty fast.”
After the Mix Tape premiere in Sydney next week it will be back to Byron to nest with her babies.
“I’m feeling so good,” she says of her pregnancy. “Here’s my bump, I’ll show you,” Palmer says as she jumps up.
“I just feel so grateful.
“I’m 39, so I don’t know if I could have another one and I had a loss last year, and I thought, right, that’s the end of the road for me … Am I going to have this experience again?
“And if not, what an incredible thing to have these beautiful, healthy children.
“But your heart wants what your heart wants, and I really wanted another one.” They haven’t found out if it’s a boy or girl, so she’s happily keeping all the hand-me-downs just in case. And also – just in case this isn’t her last.
“I still don’t think I’m done,” she admits.
“I feel like, who knows? I’ll wait till this baby comes. I was folding baby clothes today from storage and being like, ‘Wow, even if it’s one gender, I’m just gonna keep all of it,” she laughs.
“We just moved from Adelaide and I made the choice to raise them in Australia about four years ago, but I had a really long stint in LA and I loved it, but just in terms of where I wanted to plant roots and the education, the health system and all the things – I wanted them to have a grounded, back-to-nature kind of experience.
“Because our lifestyle is wild – and there’s travel and there’s just all these experiences that are so different and enriching, and then I thought, ‘OK, what’s the most grounding thing for them?’
“So it’s Byron.
“And the kids are so happy and they’ve got the best schools and best friends and we’re loving the slow vibes and surfs after school … I’m so happy.” ■
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Originally published as Teresa Palmer: No secrets, no small talk
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