After hitting rock bottom, one script has ignited Melissa George’s second act

The American novelist, playwright and art collector Gertrude Stein was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in Oakland, California, but moved to France at the beginning of the 20th century. Of that transition, she once famously said: “America is my country, and Paris is my home town.”

A century later, the global wanderings of Australian actor Melissa George might be a shimmering reflection of Stein’s own journey; one which saw Melissa exchange her home town of Perth for Sydney, then Sydney for Hollywood with a detour through Buenos Aires, and, finally, Hollywood for Paris.

It is in the French capital that Melissa, in addition to raising her two sons, Raphaël, 7, and Solal Samuel Glenn, 5, has undergone something of a reckoning with herself. She lost her confidence, she says. But she has slowly found it again. And, at 44, she is embarking on the second act of an already impressive career.

Melissa’s latest work, a lead role in the new Apple TV+ adaptation of the book The Mosquito Coast, opposite actor Justin Theroux (the nephew of the book’s author, Paul Theroux), launches soon. Filmed in California, and Guadalajara, Zapopan and near Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, it is a stunning piece of streaming cinema. But Melissa admits it might never have happened, so crippling was her loss of confidence.

She was sent the script at the end of 2019, but sat on it for four months, too afraid to schedule a casting. “To be honest, I lost my nerve,” she says, candidly. “I was in a very bad place. I was very insecure about all aspects of life. And I thought, if I want something and I’m going to play the game and I don’t get it, I’m not going to make it. So I preferred to not play the game.

“I was in a very bad place. I was very insecure about all aspects of life. And I thought, if I want something and I’m going to play the game and I don’t get it, I’m not going to make it. So I preferred to not play the game.”

“When you’re full of confidence, and you’ve just got the lead in something, and your bank account is full, and you don’t care, you think, I’m going to go on tape tomorrow … But I was at rock bottom. And the beauty about rock bottom is that you can’t go any further, right? So I kept the script next to my bed for four months.”

Melissa also signed with a new agent, who was unaware she had squirrelled away the script of The Mosquito Coast. In the end, Theroux texted her directly and her agent gave her 30 minutes to deliver a casting audition. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, she says, something simply clicked.

“I set up the phone, my kids heard me acting the scene on the phone with my mum, and they were confused,” she recalls. “I just said, ‘I’m building a future, I’ll explain tomorrow.’ And my kids said, ‘Please go to work, it’s time.’ ”

There is a certain serendipity around the working reunion of Melissa and Theroux. In David Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive, it was Theroux’s Adam Kesher who said, of Melissa’s Camilla Rhodes, “This is the girl.” And it was Theroux, who was executive producing the new adaptation of The Mosquito Coast as well as playing its protagonist Allie Fox, who had his mind set on Melissa playing his on-screen wife, Margot.

“The fact that he uttered the words ‘This is the girl’ 20 years ago and, fast-forward to the present, he was the one who called the producers and said, ‘I want Melissa for this’ … it’s a compliment, and it brings nice familiarity that we’ve known each other for a long time,” she says.

“It’s uncanny to think that life could bring us back together in such different circumstances.”

The book was released in 1981 – a film adaptation from Australian director Peter Weir, starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, followed in 1986 – and was to some extent a reaction to Watergate, a global recession and the Middle East oil crisis. In 2021, as a four-decade old work, but in a world racked with pandemic and economic chaos, Melissa says its narrative still resonates.

“We would all love to escape capitalism, socialism and consumerism, and get the hell out of here, sail away and eat fish, take our kids and lie on the beach and escape all the obligations we have from day-to-day life,” she says. “That would be a dream in this pandemic.”

Melissa wears clothing and jewellery by Patou.Credit: Antoine Doyen

Geographically, the role posed a challenge. Melissa has lived in Paris since starting a family there with her former partner Jean-David Blanc. The couple split in 2016 but she has remained in Paris with Raphaël and Solal Samuel Glenn as a single mother.

“I have always been a huge traveller,” Melissa says. “I was married to a Chilean [actor and director Claudio Dabed, between 2000-2011] and lived in Buenos Aires and I still have a home there. When you’re Australian, we’re used to travelling and going to all sorts of crazy places and going off the grid.”

It also represents a springboard into a second act for Melissa, whose first took her from Home and Away to a Hollywood career working with directors such as Lynch, Steven Soderbergh (The Limey) and Alex Proyas (Dark City). She starred in the acclaimed Australian TV drama The Slap and its US remake, as well as In Treatment for HBO.

“When you get compliments from a career 10 years ago, 15 years ago, like, she’s underrated, or that performance in In Treatment or in The Slap was so good … you kind of just go along,” Melissa says. “I don’t want to be the girl that’s on the show that doesn’t mean anything. I want to take my time. I’m hoping that the second act makes all those comments about me a reality, if that makes sense.”

“I don’t want to be the girl that’s on the show that doesn’t mean anything. I want to take my time.”

And yet behind the detail-perfect image she projects, there is enormous vulnerability. Melissa has long been driven by a desire to find acceptance and win the respect of her peers. In past interviews, we have talked about the challenge of being a mother of two French sons, which keeps her based in Paris, while trying to work in a global business that is headquartered in Hollywood.

Casting an Australian-born, American-accented actor who lives in France is sometimes too large a logistical leap. And at the same time, France’s own culturally exclusive film community is not an easy place for an Australian, even a French-speaking one, to find a voice.

Two recent roles have changed that: Alison in the eight-part French-American drama series The Eddy, shot in Paris, with French, English, Arabic and Polish dialogue, and Anna, in De Son Vivant, co-written and directed by Emmanuelle Bercot, and starring one of Melissa’s acting idols, Catherine Deneuve.

“I feel I’m going through a cultural dilemma because I will never be a French girl,” she says. “That’s really hard for anyone not from the country where they live. I’m almost a Parisian, but it doesn’t help me at all because at the end of the day, I won’t be French. I’ll always be l’étranger, ‘the stranger’.”

Melissa wears dress by Christian Dior, earrings by Bonanza Paris, rings by Mansano.Credit: Antoine Doyen

Which brings us to another kindred spirit, Sabrina Fairchild, the fictional chauffeur’s daughter who runs away to Paris in search of love and fulfilment in Samuel A. Taylor’s romantic comedy Sabrina Fair. In the play’s 1995 film adaptation, the editor of French Vogue, played by Fanny Ardant, offers Sabrina this advice: “I sat in a cafe, I drank coffee and I wrote nonsense in a journal. And then, somehow, it was not nonsense. I went for long walks and I met myself in Paris.”

“I live by my own rules in Paris. I answer to myself and to the needs of my children. And this is the gift of all gifts. My friends and my lovers, people that I will never let go of, are all around me.”

For Melissa, Australia is still her country, but Paris, somehow, is her home town. “I always go to a place and have the most amazing experience, followed by a witch hunt – that’s the motto of my life,” says Melissa, laughing. “So I’ve been through that, but I never lost the love for the Parisians or Paris, because I get the love back tenfold.

“I live by my own rules in Paris and [I have] nobody to answer to,” she says. “I answer to myself and to the needs of my children. And this is the gift of all gifts. And my friends and my lovers and people that I will never let go of, they’re all around me.

“I feel I’m more cultured, I’m more tolerant, but I have not lost track of my Australian ways, absolutely not,” she adds. “My kids … they’re very French, but their humour is Australian. So I feel like being an Aussie in Paris is the greatest gift.

“With the new lockdown, to give you an example, the president of France has left open places to buy cheese, wine and flowers, and hairdressers. Because in France, these are essential services. Oh my god, it doesn’t make sense at all, but they’re just passionate about all things.”

The Mosquito Coast is streaming on Apple TV+ from April 30.

Photography by Antoine Doyen. Styling by Victoria Rastello. Hair and make-up by Didier Cometti and Angelo Buonomo.

This article appears in Sunday Life magazine within the Sun-Herald and the Sunday Age on sale April 25. To read more from Sunday Life, visit The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.