Actor and writer Tilda Cobham-Hervey.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
Family members pummel aspiring actors with the same well-meaning phrases: “I just think you need a back-up plan”; “You’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of rejection”; “I thought you wanted to be a vet?”
Nothing like that was ever thrown at Tilda Cobham-Hervey. Her mother was creative director of Adelaide’s Restless Dance Theatre, while her father is one of the city’s most highly regarded lighting designers – it’s no surprise that by the time she was 14, Tilda had co-founded a circus company.
She admits she wasn’t the best circus performer around, and so she had to find another means to justify her presence. She found it by bringing a little theatre into her act. “OK, I’m hula-hooping, but maybe I could talk at the same time. That might keep me here,” says Cobham-Hervey. “So I was already very much linked in to the excitement of storytelling and performance.”
Cobham-Hervey as Lucy, with Mark Coles Smith, in Apple Cider Vinegar.Credit: Courtesy of Netflix
It wasn’t long before she was turning to acting proper, sans the acrobatics. “Not many people can say that they ran away from the circus,” she jokes.
Today she’s a prolific star of film and TV, but Cobham-Hervey’s big break came almost by accident. At 16, she tagged along to an audition for a feature film because she was a fan of the filmmakers. “I was very aware of their work and in awe of what they did. There was an audition being run, but I never expected to get the role. The character description was ‘fierce, confident, sexually aware’, and I was 16 and the complete opposite of that. I’d never kissed a boy, didn’t know what I was doing.”
She aced the audition. The film was 52 Tuesdays, the coming-of-age drama directed by Sophie Hyde that went on to to become a critical darling and audience favourite, winning best director at the Sundance Film Festival.
Playing a lead role in a feature film would be a big ask of any teenager, but the unusual shooting style of 52 Tuesdays provided a smoother introduction to the demands of screen acting. “It was shot every Tuesday, only on Tuesdays, for a year,” says Cobham-Hervey. “It was only one day a week, which made it very manageable and not so daunting because you were doing tiny pieces. We also never saw a script. We only got the script for the next Tuesday at the end of the filming day.
Cobham-Hervey in the 2013 coming-of-age film 52 Tuesdays.
“Because I grew up so much over that year, the things that I thought I wouldn’t be comfortable doing or didn’t think I would be able to understand or improvise with, that changed over the year as I grew,” she says. “I didn’t even particularly feel like we were making a film. It felt like we were all working on this art project.”
Today Cobham-Hervey is 30, and has a long series of screen successes to her name. She’s played Helen Reddy in the biopic I Am Woman, and travelled to Bulgaria to shoot last year’s Young Woman and the Sea. She’s had ongoing roles in series such as The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart and Netflix’s upcoming Apple Cider Vinegar. She met her partner, Dev Patel, while the pair were starring in 2018’s Hotel Mumbai, and she’s busy behind the screen too: she helped develop Patel’s directorial debut feature Monkey Man, and hopes to begin shooting her own first full-length feature later this year.
Cobham-Hervey loves preparing for her roles. “What’s so amazing about this job is that often there’s something you get to learn about. Either research and understanding someone’s experience or there are specific skills that you have to learn,” she says.
For I Am Woman she took singing training, learning the secrets that give professional vocalists control over their instrument. For Apple Cider Vinegar she dug into the saga of disgraced wellness influencer Belle Gibson and the impact sham medicine can have on lives.
For Young Woman and the Sea she had to learn to swim. The film follows the story of the first woman to swim across the English Channel, and when a producer called to offer her a part, Cobham-Hervey almost had a panic attack. “He went, ‘It’s so brilliant because you’re Australian so you’re obviously a great swimmer’ ... I don’t drown when I go in the water, but I wouldn’t say I’m a swimmer. But you don’t say that part, you just say yes.”
After hanging up, she ran to her surfer brother and offered him $10 to take her to the local pool and teach her to swim properly. “We did swimming lessons for the first few weeks, and then I got a swim coach and nailed it in the end.”
Cobham-Hervey as Helen Reddy in I Am Woman.Credit: Lisa Tomasetti/Stan
Missing out on roles isn’t something she takes to heart. “You often know when you are right for something or not right for something,” she says. “I’ve also been on the other side where I’ve been watching auditions and choosing people for things. It’s so not about your talent. It could be about something completely random. I’ve got to the point where I understand there’s nothing malicious about being chosen or not chosen. You have to become very relaxed about that and make sure you keep busy and have a big world outside of acting.”
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO TILDA COBHAM-HERVEY
- Worst habit? Leaving teacups everywhere.
- Greatest fear? Illness ... and team sports.
- The line that stayed with you? My mum taught us all to “seize the day”.
- Biggest regret? Not going on the family holiday to Sicily in 2017. Never learning how to do a handstand. Not learning a language when I was a kid.
- Favourite book? That is like choosing between children! Miranda July’s All Fours, Irma Voth (Miriam Toews), Sorrow and Bliss (Meg Mason), Little Weirds (Jenny Slate), The Museum of Modern Love (Heather Rose) and a million more.
- The artwork/song you wish was yours? I don’t know if I want any of them to be mine, but I would have loved to be a part of No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July and Harold Fletcher.
- If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? I’d like to know about nature and time before humans ... But I wouldn’t want to stay long as that sounds lonely.
Lately, that has included a turn to writing for the screen. She has directed two shorts of her own and an immersive audio experience that has played the Edinburgh, Adelaide and Sydney fringe festivals. “Writing screenplays has become a really big thing for me, and creating theatre pieces. Whatever I can do. Keeping the creative brain working is the most exciting part, whatever medium it is.”
A decisive moment in Cobham-Hervey’s turn towards creating her own work came five years ago. During a press tour, she was repeatedly asked about the creative people she looked up to.
“I realised all the women I was listing were like Miranda July, Greta Gerwig, all these women that create their own work as well as whatever else they do in the film industry,” she says. “It really made me push myself into thinking about why I wasn’t doing that. Finding the confidence to go after that and realise you can start creating without waiting to be asked has been a really empowering thing.”
If her feature film gets off the ground, it will be shot in Adelaide. Cobham-Hervey’s agents used to try to convince her to leave South Australia and move somewhere with more job opportunities. “They would go, ‘We really need to get you out of there.’ And then we’d sign onto something, and it was set in India but still shooting in Adelaide. It’s been a pretty constant joke.”
She now lives part-time in LA but spends most of the year with Patel in her home town. Despite the couple’s celebrity, they don’t find themselves the subject of constant scrutiny.
“I wouldn’t say it’s hard, particularly when you’re in Adelaide,” she says. “It’s a strange world, fame, and it’s something I experience from the fringes, and it’s something that doesn’t interest either of us a huge amount, so we just stay busy on our respective projects. We have a normal life.”
Apple Cider Vinegar is on Netflix from February 6.
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