Spotlight: Emma Beech, 41, theatre-maker

Recognised for a sickening turn in a public health ad, theatre-maker and mum of triplets Emma Beech, 41, reveals how she deals with the notoriety — and her best parenting hack.

In your world premiere Adelaide Festival ­production, The Photo Box, you tell stories about your family. Is your interpretation oflife events ever controversial as far as they’re concerned?

Yes. There absolutely have been perspectives my family hasn’t agreed on. Before making The Photo Box I hadn’t used my family in my work in any significant way. So, I’ve had one of my sisters advising on this work. She calls me her first child because she was usually the one left to be responsible for me (she is 14 years older than me). We’ve got a very close relationship. I was telling our production team that growing up I was unheard and nobody wanted this little girl around because they were busy with their own lives. My sister interrupted and said “I just don’t get how you’re even saying those words. You were so loud and in our faces. What do you mean no one wanted to hear you? We couldn’t shut you up!” I replied, “but you kept telling me to shut up!” So we both got to share a little change of perspective through that.

You’re the youngest of nine children. If you were to ask your siblings about yourself, how would they describe you?

Nobody would say a blanket anything of what I was growing up, but there was the talk, of course, of how I was spoilt and how I got all these things they couldn’t have. Mum was 40 when she found out she was pregnant with me. It was a real accident. There were five boys between 15 and 20 and they were just really embarrassed. Full shame job. And my sister who is eight years older than me was not happy Jan, because she was so sure her baby place was going to last. Mum would buy me a packet of chips on the way home because she was in her forties and she was exhausted. She’d had eight kids, she was done. She was like, “if I get this girl a packet of chips she is quiet the whole way home”. But from my brothers’ and sisters’ perspective I was spoilt. I lived in a way as a burgeoning only child.

How did growing up in the tiny SA Riverland town of Barmera shape you?

Mum and Dad were working-class country people and aspiring middle-class. They behaved like middle-class people; they were very polite and wanted us to look nice on nothing. My family remembers growing up with so little. My sisters had to look after me because my parents bought a seven-day deli in the town. They made money but I didn’t really see them.

Some people may recognise you for sneezing green goop out of your nose in SA Health’s “We can all stop the spread” Covid campaign. . As an actor how do you grapple with notoriety?

To be honest I didn’t actually know what the ad was. My agent rang me up and said you’ve got that job. I got the storyboard at 11.30pm and I had to be on set at 5am and I had already signed for this job. Then, at the beginning of the Covid lockdown my agent rang me and said “you are literally the only actor I am calling today, probably for the next month, you’re the only person who’s going to be given money for a job”. The government offered to extend the run of the ad – which was originally for the flu season – as a Covid ad. If I was in Melbourne or Sydney it would have been a different conversation in my mind. In SA – maybe WA is similar – no one shares creative information in that way. So I thought yes, I’m going to take one for the team. At that moment in my life I had three young kids and I’d just bought a house with my partner. If I’d not had so many responsibilities in my life, I’d think differently about any offer I would get – and I would now. I’m careful about ads that come through.

You’re the mum of triplets – two girls and one boy. Best parenting hack?

Remember that it is three times the work BUT three times the love. With that in mind, get help. Professional help. My sister fundraised some money for us to hire a night nurse which meant I could get four hours sleep at a time, twice a week, for four months or so. It doesn’t sound like much, but oh boy, I looked forward to those nights so much. These were our first children, so we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, so we listened to some audio books and podcasts about babies and children, even if we fell asleep two minutes in. Now we have this collection of three little humans who do some pretty cute stuff.

The Photo Box is showing as part of Adelaide Festival, March 3-7.