How model Abbey Lee Kershaw went from catwalk to Chekhov

Supermodel turned actor Abbey Lee has drawn comparisons with Michelle Pfeiffer for her latest role as the daughter of a white supremicist.

Vogue October | Abbey Lee Kershaw Picture: Hanna Tveite

You may remember Abbey-Lee Kershaw.

The Melbourne born girl with razor sharp cheekbones who started modelling at 15 and took the profession by storm. On rising to supermodel status, she scrawled ‘GUN CONTROL’ on her stomac at her Met Gala appearance in 2013 — then walked away from a full-time career in what would have been her prime at the age of 25.

“I was in a really great place in my career,” she tells Vogue Australia’s October edition. “I was actually doing really well. I was number two on models.com and I was like: ‘Bye.’ You know?

“I didn’t wash up or sell out and then try and come back. I just … peaced out”.
So where has she been?

Performing Chekhov in London, for one. Now aged 33, and going by Abbey Lee, she has pursued acting with the kind of intensity and passion she says she never had for the catwalk.

“(Acting) takes all of the things that I love about other art forms like rhythm, performance, energy, voice, the mind, the body. All of those things have to constantly be alive. It’s an opportunity to look at parts of yourselves and to try and understand things that have happened to you,” Lee says.

Abbey Lee Kershaw photographed for Vogue’s October issue. Picture: Hanna Tveite

Amide a phenomenally successful career walking for almost every fashion house in the industry and adoring the covers of all the significant magazines, Lee found roles in Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015, Australian film Ruben Guthrie (2015), thrillers The Neon Demon (2016) and Elizabeth Harvest (2018) before tackling Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at London’s Hampstead Theatre last year.

And, Vogue reports, she’s made herself a true student of the craft.

“It wasn’t enough to rehearse for seven hours a day. Everyone would go and meet at the bar and have a drink, and I’d go home and keep studying, and keep going over it, and keep trying to figure the character out, and read more Chekhov,” she says.

In her latest project, acclaimed television series Lovecraft Country, which is available on Foxtel’s Binge streaming service, Lee studied up on the issues of race, oppression and inequality for her role as the wealthy and mysterious Christina Braithwaite, a role Lee reveals she missed out on initially before Elizabeth Debicki, who had been signed, had to bow out owing to scheduling conflicts. The show is set in the 1950s segregated America and Braithwhite is the daughter of the leader of a secret white supremacist sect,

“I just keep extending my research and that was the beginning of having by brain f-cking explode and my eyes wide open and being like: ‘Shit, there is so much that I thought I knew,” she says. “We’ve heard things like the Tulsa Massacre and Emmett Till; we’ve heard these names before and we think we know, and we really don’t.”

Series creator Misha Green compares Lee’s presence to that of Michelle Pfeiffer — declaring there’s something “electric” about her. “There’s something manic and calm about her at the same time.”

Lee says she taps into the challenges she faced as a young model — and experience she says “damaged” her when it comes to body image — and channels them into her different roles.

“I think what modelling did was it put some depths in my eyes,” she says.

“I get so down on myself sometimes because I wish I was this highly trained, highly intelligent actor with all this knowledge and I’m like: ‘Well, I’ve had some experiences that potentially the kids who go to drama school will never have.’ I’m very willing to drag all of those really difficult experiences out of me and use them as my work.

“I think a lot of the time I get cast in roles like Christina, who are questionable in their morals and have a dark side, because I have a dark side.”

“As a model it’s not about you. It’s really not. It’s like you’re there to represent the brand, the clothes, the hairstylist, the make-up artist. You’re there as a representation of everybody else’s vision.”

Vogue Australia October 2020 on sale Monday, October 19