‘It was like watching a brother and sister kiss’: Kate Mulvany’s secrets from the set

This story is part of the November 24 edition of Sunday Life.See all 14 stories.

As a childhood Christmas Day ritual, Kate Mulvany, her younger sister Tegan and parents Danny and Glenys would load up the family car with presents (not to mention crayfish they’d caught near their home in Geraldton, Western Australia), then drive six hours south to Perth to spend Christmas with Glenys’ younger sister, Jan.

There would be turkey, ham and prawns, and a backyard pool into which the cousins would dive bomb before banding together to make a whirlpool, pulling everyone into its current. There was backyard cricket, and tables would be pushed back for dancing to Uncle Terry’s record collection. But the tradition had to change when Aunty Jan developed melanoma and died in her 50s.

“I yearn to go back to one of those Christmases,” says a wistful Mulvany. “Even to go back for half an hour of one of those Christmas Days would be brilliant. But time moves on.”

The 47-year-old actor is in Sydney to promote her new film, How to Make Gravy, based on Paul Kelly’s gritty, classic Christmas song. Having previously lived in Sydney, Mulvany and her husband, Hamish Michael (they acted together in the first season of the jury drama The Twelve), now spend half of each year in upstate New York and the other half in Melbourne.

Over a pancake breakfast in a cafe before the Sunday Life photo shoot, she explains the move as one forced on them by the “cost of living, and we were renting in Sydney”. But Melbourne brought opportunities, too: the forthcoming biopic Better Man, in which Mulvany plays British singer Robbie Williams’ mother Janet (requiring her to acquire an “ay-up” Stoke-on-Trent accent), was principally filmed there.

The US part of the equation came about because Mulvany recently played Sister Harriet opposite Al Pacino in two seasons of the Nazi revenge drama Hunters. But she’s also nurturing her second career as a playwright and mostly used the US as a “writing room”. While it snowed outside the couple’s New York window, she turned her attention to adapting D’Arcy Niland’s classic 1955 outback road novel The Shiralee, which she’ll also perform in next year for Sydney Theatre Company.

Kate Mulvany wears Acler dress, Zara shoes.Credit: Hugh Stewart

Mulvany knows Australia’s rural roads well. In 1998, aged 21, she drove across the Nullarbor in her Mazda 121 in pursuit of an acting career on the east coast, having graduated in 1997 from Perth’s Curtin University with a bachelor of arts and a double major in theatre and scriptwriting. She had already auditioned for Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Art in Perth in 1996, but didn’t get in.

For her NIDA audition, Mulvany had performed a monologue from George Bernard Shaw’s play St Joan dressed as an elf because later that day she had to work her Christmas gig in the impish costume at Myer.

During these shifts, Myer’s annual festive compilation CD, The Spirit of Christmas, would be on heavy rotation – and alongside Judith Durham singing O Happy Day and Frankie J. Holden crooning Santa Claus Is Coming to Town came Paul Kelly’s then brand-new How to Make Gravy, narrated by
a guy called Joe who hopes he can earn a jail release to be home for Christmas.

“Once an hour, How to Make Gravy would come on and I’d have to excuse myself and have a cry,” recalls Mulvany. “I just love that song so much.”

Almost three decades later, in the film adaptation directed by Nick Waterman and co-written by Waterman and singer-songwriter Megan Washington, Mulvany is bringing life to Joe’s sister Stella, “flying in from the coast” as the lyrics go.

Mulvany says the three siblings in the film – Joe, Dan and Stella – have been dealing with decades of grief and trauma over their father’s suicide, while the family “pays out” on Stella for not being present when their mother recently died. Mulvany, who built a backstory for Stella as someone who wants to be free but also to be seen for herself, says, “I think she’s already been the mother to that bloody family, and it held her back a fair bit. When she took off for the coast, she really took off for the coast.”

Zimmermann top and skirt.Credit: Hugh Stewart

Mulvany’s best friend, actor Damon Herriman, plays Stella’s husband Roger. One scene requires the pair to have a long kiss. “For the crew, it was like watching a brother and sister kiss,” says Mulvany, laughing. “We shot it at a working motel, so there were all these kids hanging off the banisters, watching us have this pash.” Meanwhile, Daniel Henshall portrays Joe, remorseful for his violence while teaching his son Angus to bloody another kid’s nose.

‘The blood in shared genetics, in shared trauma, in shared joy, in tradition and most of all in sharing of culture, of story, of song – that’s gravy to me.’

KATE MULVANY

I ask Mulvany whether she thinks gravy is a metaphor for glue, for family bonds. “I would say blood,” she replies. “The blood in shared genetics, in shared trauma, in shared joy, in tradition and most of all in sharing of culture, of story, of song – that’s gravy to me; a big blood songline.”

Mulvany has often reached back into childhood and family for inspiration. Her mother, an English teacher, encouraged her to get out of Geraldton but never thought her eldest would cross the Nullarbor to pursue acting. It was Mulvany’s late father, a “£10 Pom” who had left school in the UK at 14, who used to tell stories and read books and who passed on his love of words to his daughters.

This love has served Mulvany well. She’s just rewritten a play she wrote when she was 24, The Seed, in which the character of Danny is based on her father, who was a conscript in the Vietnam War. Mulvany played Danny’s daughter, Rose, in the original version, and the role has now been taken on by her younger sister, Tegan, in the current production at WA’s Black Swan State Theatre Company.

At three, Mulvany was diagnosed with a rare childhood cancer, her Wilms’ tumour very likely the legacy of her father’s exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. The dark mass was meant to prove terminal, yet Mulvany survived the removal of not just the tumour but also a kidney, a ureter and an adrenal gland.

Long periods in hospital during childhood helped make Mulvany an astute observer as well as fuelling her desire to write and perform. After every chemotherapy session, her father would buy her a soft toy from The Muppets or Sesame Street. “In my chemo photos, I’m surrounded by Kermit, Piggy, Big Bird, Grover,” she says. “I found my Grover the other day. He still smells like the hospital.”

Sacai top from Parlour X. Comme des Garçons skirt from Parlour X. Zara shoes.Credit: Hugh Stewart

Today, Mulvany is sometimes forced to use a walking cane, like the handsome, ornate one she brought into the cafe today. “I have atrophied back muscles,” she explains, “and I have severe osteoporosis right through my spine, so my spine and ribs break very easily. I have a broken rib right now, and it’s just one of those things you learn to live with.”

Mulvany leant into this disability when she played Richard III for Bell Shakespeare in 2017, emphasising the curvature of the spine she shares with the maligned king. Al Pacino, famous for his portrayal of Richard, was fascinated by her approach to the role. “He asked me questions like, ‘How did you walk on?’ I said I kind of snuck on and sat there for a while. He goes, ‘Oh, that’s smart.’ He’s just a delight.”

Gail Sorronda dress.Credit: Hugh Stewart

The year of her portrayal of Richard III, Mulvany’s father died. “He was very humble, very quiet, very routine, as a soldier is,” she recalls. “In his last few weeks, I was back in Perth, and I got a bit worried about him, walking to the TAB by himself – he had to cross this piece of forest. So I started secretly following him, to make sure he was OK. Every person he met – there were people sleeping rough – they’d all go, ‘Hi Danny’, and he’d give them whatever he’d got from the TAB.”

Having adapted (but not performed in) author Ruth Park’s novel The Harp in the South for Sydney Theatre Company, adapting The Shiralee, written by Park’s husband, seemed a natural fit. Mulvany recalls the times her father, a road builder, would pull her out of school and take her to dusty WA towns, and Niland’s outback road story of father and daughter Mac and Buster was one she’d loved as a two-part 1980s TV miniseries. This time, though, Mulvany was keen to draw out more of the misogyny of 1950s Australia in the story.

Nervously, she also agreed to outgoing artistic director Kip Williams’ suggestion that she play Mac’s estranged wife, Marge. It’s a huge thing for Mulvany to act again for Sydney Theatre Company, given that her last performance there, in 2008, coincided with her previous longtime partner, All Saints actor Mark Priestley, taking his own life.

“Mark died just before the last production I acted in at the STC,” says Mulvany, recalling the traumatic events. “Even during Harp [in 2018] I’d ask permission to step on stage to hand an actor a note; I was like, ‘I don’t feel quite right yet.’

“Now, I’m going back on there. It will be at the Opera House, so very familiar, but to perform for STC after 17 years will be fantastic.”

How to Make Gravy premieres December 1 on Binge, available on Hubbl and Foxtel On Demand.

Lifeline: 13 11 14.

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