Teresa Palmer on juggling movie stardom and motherhood
Teresa Palmer reveals how she does it all. And with her latest role in this month’s most buzzy miniseries, The Clearing, things are only getting better.
Teresa Palmer bursts out of the studio green room looking like a Christmas present in a little black dress festooned with bows. “Chanel, babe! Chanel,” she cries, striding forward in boots that sparkle all the way to her knees. She’s halfway through her Vogue Australia shoot; it’s just past lunch – two jumbo slices of avocado toast for Palmer – and already she has ticked off another Chanel look (many feathers, very tweed), a Sportmax dress (splendidly highlighter pink), and some Dior, Hermès and Cartier, just for fun.
It is fun, all of this magazine magic – the lights, the camera, the action-packed schedule. And Palmer is good at it. Shots are nailed in less time than it takes to make a matcha latte. The 37-year-old actor and star of this month’s Disney+ series The Clearing has been on the cover of Vogue Australia before – “the best magazine in the entire world!” she declares – six years ago exactly. “I feel re-energised being back on set,” she muses. “It’s just a different life from mum world.”
That’s the world Palmer occupies at home in Adelaide, where she lives for half the year with her husband, actor Mark Webber, and their four children: Bodhi Rain, Forest Sage, Poet Lake and Prairie Moon. She is also stepmother to Webber’s son Isaac. Theirs is one big, blended, brilliantly happy family.
“I have four children, two dogs, two snails and a cat – yes, we’ve got two pet snails right now,” Palmer says cheerfully, wrapped in a bathrobe between shots, her energy disarmingly frank and engaging. Her life, she adds, is a “whirlwind”. “People say that word so flippantly, but with me, it’s legit,” she says with a smile.
“There’s the part of my personality that craves it and seeks it out. And I love the busyness. As I’ve gotten older … I’ve said to my husband, I just want simple. And he’s like, ‘No you don’t! You think you do, but you don’t really. You love the complexity and the colour and the vibrancy of our life.’ So I think I’m almost like a swinging pendulum.”
At one end of that swooping arc: Chanel and Cartier. At the other, a “floaty dress” and a Viktoria & Woods cap pulled low on her head. “My day is always jam-packed with things, from the moment I’m up in the morning at 6.30 to the moment I go to sleep at 10.30,” she sums up. “I never have just a simple day at home. That’s just the way it is.”
True to her word, Palmer calls me from one of her not-just-a-simple-day-at-home the next week. She’s in her car. Alone. (“For once,” she jokes.) Parked outside her house in Adelaide. Her mother is inside with Palmer’s girls after a morning of carefully calibrated chaos. “Poet has tap dance on Monday followed by Leap into Dance, so I have to be there to swap her shoes over into ballet shoes,” Palmer recounts. “Then my mum sits in the car with Poet while I’m inside with Prairie and she has her toddler ballet.” She’s waiting for Webber to return from the gym with her lunch. “Thanks babe,” she murmurs, when he arrives. “The girls are inside.”
Palmer was born in Adelaide and raised by her mother after her parents’ divorce. The pendulum swings of her childhood opened a window into a world of escapism that led straight to Hollywood. By 19, she was starring opposite Daniel Radcliffe in The December Boys; a few years later she was headlining the Cate Shortland psychological drama Berlin Syndrome and the Oscar-winning war epic Hacksaw Ridge.
She met Webber in 2012 on Twitter, when that platform was still a place where nice things could happen, and they spent weeks emailing back and forth before setting a date in real life. Within 10 months they were engaged and the first of their brood arrived in 2014. Webber is Palmer’s soulmate.
“I’ll just say that I never feel alone,” she shares. “There’s always someone who I can talk to, on such a deep level. He makes me feel so seen, and so heard, and really supported. I felt alone a lot growing up, being an only child and it was just me. That just feels so unfamiliar [now], the alone feeling, because I have him and we get to do life together. We always say we can achieve anything.” Even if the pair “should not be the poster children for spending enough time with each other”, she admits.
“But I think for us, the first step in shifting that is recognising it, and knowing that we really need to spend more time tending to this beautiful thing that is our relationship.” They had one of those moments the other night, when they stashed their phones and “really looked at each other” and talked about everything going on in their mad, marvellous lives. “In those moments, I just feel that connection so deeply, and that love reignites.”
Their youngest, the toddler ballerina Prairie – named after the Laura Ingalls Wilder television adaptation that Palmer watched as a child with her beloved nanna – was born in 2021 and nine months later Palmer returned to work to film The Clearing. The miniseries is one of the first Australian productions from Disney+ and based on the psychological thriller by J.P. Pomare who, in turn, was loosely inspired by the infamous story of The Family, an insidious cult that took hold in rural Victoria in the 1960s.
The leader of The Clearing’s fictional group is played by Miranda Otto, softly spoken but severe; Palmer plays Freya, a former member confronting her past in this “story of redemption, and trauma and renewal”. From there it’s practically AACTA award winners only, from Guy Pearce to Mark Coles Smith, Kate Mulvany and nominee Julia Savage, the breakout child star in Del Kathryn Barton’s directorial debut Blaze. Savage plays a younger version of Freya. Says Palmer: “I just kept thinking, ‘I’ve got to bring it, because she’s going to be bringing it.’” And she did. Palmer’s work is career best, her Freya an inscrutable, compelling cipher.
The act of returning to work was “great”. “I was so ready, to be honest,” says Palmer, in part because the role itself was so challenging. “Every day, at the end of the day, I would have a headache because I had to go there emotionally, and then I just had to pivot into parenting,” she recalls. The long car ride home was her only time to decompress. “I remember just having to pound so much coconut water every time I got home because it was just heavy subject matter … And it’s all-consuming, being a mum, as well. I would have to be 100 per cent present with the kids, otherwise I’m not showing up for them in the way that I want to be showing up for them.”
Palmer watched the first two episodes of The Clearing in March with her husband and her best friends and was “blown away”. She praises the direction, the writing, the editing, the music, the production design … But is Palmer proud of herself? I can practically hear her squirming down the line. “I’m really self-critical,” she offers. She concedes that she was able to watch the episodes “without being overly judgmental”, which she is taking as a sign that, “I feel good about the work that I did”.
Palmer does believe, “I’ve only gotten better, the older I’ve got”. Something she attributes to a combination of life experience and the work that she has put into herself over the years. “I think I can reach greater depths now, as a 37-year-old woman, than when I was working in my early 20s.” The Clearing has unlocked something inside her. “I’ve been in amazing things,” Palmer explains, “but the level of this show, I think, is what really lights the fire within me … It is next level. I want to keep up-levelling in my career.”
The Clearing kickstarts what Palmer calls her “season of work” after years spent raising children. “I wasn’t chasing down the opportunities the way that I was in my earlier years,” Palmer notes. “I just wanted to be Mum … And whatever kind of came my way, if it was good enough, I was excited to go and do it and I’d fold it into our life.” But Poet goes to school next year, Bodhi is almost double digits, and Palmer is feeling that tug of independence.
She just wrapped on the action comedy The Fall Guy opposite Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, in which she plays a “wild” character she likens to Isla Fisher’s Gloria in Wedding Crashers. “Ryan was so generous and really made me feel like I was meant to be there,” Palmer says. “I remember every night coming home and before I would open the door … I would just look up and say, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ Just filled with gratitude, because here I was shooting this dream project.”
The season of work is a good one. It does come laced with “mum guilt”, but then, Palmer points out, she feels mum guilt all the time. “Even when I’m a stay-at-home mum, in between jobs, I’ll have mum guilt,” she says. “When I work, I just try and reframe my thinking surrounding it. I know that I am giving them a gift of being able to see that you can be a parent, you can also be passionate about the work that you’re doing, and those things can coexist. They get to see their mum go to work and do something that she feels excited about, and be in the environment where she thrives.”
Palmer doesn’t like looking too far down the road ahead – “you can’t really have plans in this industry, to be honest” – but one day she hopes to find herself in Australia, her “chosen country” more permanently. And maybe, one day, more children. “I have definitely not got to the place where I hear other women explaining that you just know that you’re done. That has not happened for me,” Palmer shares, her voice warm and wistful. “I still see newborns and babies, and my pregnant friends, and I still sense that there’s another child out there for me, or another couple of children out there. But I also don’t want to be greedy. I have such healthy, beautiful, amazing children and I’m so grateful. I’m open to the possibility of more children. I’m definitely not closed off in any way … But for right now, I just feel very content.”
The Clearing streams on Disney+ from May 24.
This article appears in the May issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout