Miranda Otto takes the lead in 24
She radiates strength and composure. No wonder Miranda Otto is landing roles playing whip-smart intelligence officers.
Night has fallen in Atlanta, Georgia, and the clock is ticking. On the other side of the planet, her countrymen are in a happy trance of Australia Day sunshine and barbecues, but Miranda Otto is backing up for the second consecutive night shoot of a frosty winter week. It’s raining. She has reams of dialogue to plough through. The pace won’t let up until daybreak. And the anxious clock just keeps on ticking, the real-time concept of her new show spiking the adrenalin so that every scene swells with a nerve-jangling urgency.
The stakes are high off-screen as well; 24: Legacy, Fox’s reboot of the popular, never-say-die 24 franchise, in which Kiefer Sutherland was charged with fending off terror attacks in 24-hour bursts, will be Otto’s introduction to mainstream America. She landed the female lead, a steely counter-terrorism expert, following a season-long arc as a Berlin-based double agent on the fifth season of Homeland, another close-to-the-bone examination of America’s war on terror. Otto’s first network show was given US television’s most coveted time slot, premiering after the Super Bowl last Sunday (it airs on Channel 10 here tomorrow). Homeland, a cable show, raised her profile Stateside (with more than two million US viewers), but this will elevate her to a whole new plane of renown. If it were a United States military mission, Otto’s next career manoeuvre would most aptly be named Operation Pressure Cooker.
And yet, in the midst of one of the most stressful scenarios of her life, Otto, 49, maintains a near-Buddhistic calm; she’s the embodiment of poise and flawless composure. “It’s because she’s happy,” says veteran Australian film producer Jan Chapman, who first worked with Otto when she was cast as a schoolgirl in Gillian Armstrong’s 1992 fractured-family drama The Last Days of Chez Nous. She also produced Otto’s most recent film, 2015’s The Daughter, and more in between, on hand as Miranda matured from the promising offspring of acting icon Barry Otto into an international film star via roles in War of the Worlds, What Lies Beneath and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. “She just seems more and more at ease with herself, more and more confident,” says Chapman. “Happiness emanates from her.”
Otto has been living in Los Angeles now for nearly four years, making a home there with Peter O’Brien, her actor husband of 14 years, and their 11-year-old daughter, Darcey. “She’s in a great relationship, loves her daughter very much, and has that as a very solid base,” Chapman says. “It’s fabulous that she’s able to explore this transition in her career from a place like that.”
Though he feels with a pang each kilometre that separates him from his eldest daughter, Barry Otto is “thrilled for her”, he says. “She’s on her way and she deserves to be in that big ocean of American film and television. She’s got Peter and she’s got Darcey and she’s loving the work she’s getting now; she’s a highly intelligent actress and these are smart, strong roles.”
There’s another man in Otto’s life who contributes greatly to the equanimity she brings to set. The pair spoke every day when she was fashioning her Homeland character. And they’ve continued their communications throughout the five months she’s spent filming in Atlanta, the Deep South birthplace of Coca-Cola and Martin Luther King Jr. The man is John MacGaffin, a 30-year veteran of the CIA who rose to become the number two spymaster for clandestine operations. Otto can only relax while playing the “blazing smart” former head of a fictional anti-terrorism agency because she’s been able to pick his rather large brain, downloading all that he knows about intelligence collection, law enforcement, counterterrorism and security. Her familiarity with, and enormous respect for, the intelligence community in Washington DC informs every loaded minute of her work on 24: Legacy. It was also responsible for that one time when she lost her cool, when she stepped outside her acting wheelhouse to criticise one of the most powerful men in the world, America’s newly minted president, Donald Trump.
“Probably part of my fascination with that world is the personal risk that people in the intelligence community put themselves in and the fact that it’s kind of a completely unsung risk,” Otto says during a brief respite before heading back to the night-time Atlanta set. “There are so many people in the intelligence community [and] nobody ever really knows who they were, or what they did, or the sacrifices they made – so much of it is secret. It’s not done for ego or financial gain; it really is about a calling and a passion to commit to this kind of work.” She considers intelligence work “the ultimate acting job”. “These people create characters and backstories and act out a part in certain situations,” she says. “But unlike me playing my part, where the worst thing that can happen is people don’t like it, if they’re not acting their part well, they’ll probably be killed.”
MacGaffin is her “touchstone”, creative consultant, guide and guru. Through him, she’s been introduced to the cliquey intelligence community, the men and women Ronald Reagan praised as “the eyes and ears of the free world”, and has first-hand knowledge of the sacrifices their top-secret work demands. So when Trump took a number of jabs at his country’s intelligence officers over their warnings about Russian interference in the presidential election, Otto saw red. Deviating from the 24: Legacy promotional script, she called Trump a “loose cannon” and his volley of critical tweets “an incredible insult to the intelligence community”.
“I think the work they do is incredible and they work so hard to protect the country,” she told Australian media during an early round of press for her new show. “The idea of belittling that in any way I just think is terrible.”
Otto is said to be keenly interested in politics and social issues – “She’s very up-to-date with what’s happening in the world,” says her father – but like many a celebrity who’s raised their head above the parapet to make a political statement, she appears to have immediately regretted it. One week later, she’s refusing to discuss the issue further. In fact, the publicists encircling the American network’s new talent warn she won’t countenance any “questions about politics” at all, which is an interesting gambit considering her show is set inside the Washington Beltway and opens with her character relinquishing her government job to help her senator husband run for president.
It’s a rare misstep for Otto, who typically seems to move through life with careful precision, mapping out the terrain in which her work and all-important family life can co-exist and then meticulously preparing for each and every role as if it were a high-stakes exam. She is known for her discipline and professionalism, her unwavering on-set focus and absorption in a character. Practically pointy-headed in her dedication to her craft, she’s the kind of woman who takes notes and makes lists.
If she had decided to go the “full Meryl Streep” on Trump, he would have faced a surprisingly steely opponent. Though her perfectly symmetrical porcelain features lend her an ethereal air, much like the character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest for whom she was named, this is no fairy-minded actress. Once only considered for what she has called “innocent, dreamy, pre-Raphaelite” characters, her roles have come to reflect inner strength and brainpower over the fragility of her looks.
“It’s incredibly important to me to play characters who use their intelligence to deal with situations,” she says. “I think at a certain stage in your life, most of the characters we enjoy seeing are women who know who they are, who’ve come to grips with their personality; there’s a strength about them that’s interesting to watch. I’m interested in women who are not defined by their marriage or their children, women who have other passions besides that.”
Defining the passions of icy Homeland villain Allison Carr tested Otto’s thorough commitment to research; a double agent must compartmentalise to function, and getting to the core of the Russian informant was like unpacking a stack of Matryoshka nesting dolls. She had less than two weeks to do it. Between landing the coveted role and the start of shooting in Berlin, Otto digested everything she could about spies, including British double agent Kim Philby’s memoir, and leant heavily on MacGaffin’s expertise. (It left her no time to learn the local language, save for the phrase “I’m sorry, I don’t speak German.”)
An unsettling performance, including a show-stopping scene in which her character shoots herself in the chest to convince her colleagues of her loyalty, led to multiple Hollywood talent agents dubbing the Australian actress the season’s “it girl”.
More satisfying to Otto was being approached by a stranger while grocery shopping near her LA home and told: “I hate you”. “It took her a moment to work it out, but she saw my face and she had this strong feeling about me,” she says, laughing. “It was great! I felt quite successful in that I’d provoked a reaction. And you realise what a huge audience Homeland had. It will be interesting to be on a network show to see what that means because I think it’s even more accessible to people.”
The anecdote also serves as an illustration of the way in which reality and fiction blur in the minds of viewers, especially with shows such as Homeland and 24: Legacy which, through a combination of detailed research and dark luck, sometimes closely align with real-world events. “I think it’s something that people are concerned about, obviously,” Otto says. “There’s a sense of watching ‘the other’ and trying to work out what terrorism is about and what is behind it and why do people feel compelled to act in that way. The nice thing about something like 24 is we can write it so it ends up where we want it to end up. We can make things work out, which in life you cannot always guarantee.”
The election of Donald Trump to the presidency may have opened up fault lines the length and breadth of America, but Otto’s little patch is more stable than it’s ever been. She moved with O’Brien, who most recently starred with Rebecca Gibney in the Australian TV series Winter, and their daughter to LA in 2013 because it was easier with Darcey in school and “so much of my work is coming out of America”.
“For years I didn’t think I wanted to be in America,” she says. “When I would visit LA I didn’t feel very grounded because everyone I knew was in the entertainment business and so it just felt like all everyone would ever talk about was that. Since moving here with my family it’s been completely different; you meet people through school and other activities and you meet people who are not in the business.”
Otto’s sister Gracie, 29, an actress and filmmaker described as the “extroverted” opposite of her older sibling, has a place in LA and is a frequent visitor, having just formed all-female production company Dollhouse Pictures with Rose Byrne and other industry friends.
No one could accuse Otto of not being career-focused. She made her feature film debut at the age of 19 with the 1986 coming-of age Australian drama Emma’s War and, since graduating from the National Institute of Dramatic Arts four years later, she’s rarely been out of work. But in 2002 she met O’Brien during an audition for the Henrik Ibsen play A Doll’s House at the Sydney Theatre Company and, following their marriage in 2003, a stable family life became a priority.
Sometimes it’s like juggling plates one-handed. Off the back of her high-profile role as the warrior princess Eowyn in the Lord of the Rings films, Otto received a call from Steven Spielberg offering her a role as Tom Cruise’s wife in his multi-million-dollar 2005 adaptation of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds. Spielberg became one of the first people outside her family to learn Otto was pregnant; she assumed that would be that, but Spielberg surprised her by writing her pregnancy into the script. When Darcey entered the real world six months later in Australia, however, O’Brien was away in Texas filming a movie.
Born and raised in Brisbane, Otto lived for a time in Hong Kong with her actress mother, Lindsay, after her parents divorced in 1973. She and her mother then moved to Newcastle, north of Sydney, where she attended high school and was academically gifted enough to receive an offer to study medicine. But she’d been spending weekends and holidays with her dad Barry in Sydney, absorbed in his beguiling world of make-believe. “She saw me playing Uncle Vanya about five or six times at the old Nimrod Theatre [in Sydney] and it just got into her blood and that’s what she wanted to do,” he says. “Medicine was on her mind but acting was almost inevitable, she couldn’t escape it.”
Ballet was also on Otto’s mind, briefly, but she abandoned her lessons when she realised the moderate scoliosis she suffered meant she could never be a professional dancer. (She will vicariously live the dream by appearing as artistic director of the National Ballet Company in Dance Academy: The Movie, a spin-off of the ABC-TV series, opening April 6.)
When she chose to go to NIDA, Barry Otto says his daughter “gave it her all”. In 1993, David Williamson wrote Brilliant Lies with her in mind, kicking off an acclaimed stage career which, on top of her Helpmann-nominated turn in A Doll’s House, included a lead role in the Royal Queensland Theatre Company’s Gigi and a part opposite her father in the STC’s 2005 production Boy Gets Girl. (They also starred together in the 2010 film South Solitary.) “She’s a lovely actress,” Barry says. “She’s got lovely qualities and a lot of experience and she’s a great one for doing her homework on things.”
Around 1995, she was beginning to tire of being offered dreamy-young-girl parts when along came the lead in Shirley Barrett’s Love Serenade, a deadpan comedy well-lubricated by a smouldering Barry White soundtrack. It went on to win the Camera d’Or at Cannes and three more Australian films followed in quick succession: The Well, True Love and Chaos and Doing Time for Patsy Cline with her then-beau, Richard Roxburgh.
Since making the move to television in America, Otto has found herself riveted by the pace in the writers’ room, “just how close to the wire they are and the incredible amount of work that goes into rewriting and trying to get it right”. Precise, conscientious and thorough: they’re clearly people after her own heart. The device in which each episode of 24: Legacy takes place over one hour of real time gives the show a fevered pulse that makes it exhausting to watch. One can only imagine the tension behind the scenes, even without last-minute script revisions. “You burn through a lot of story really quickly on this show,” she says. “You’re given an arc that you think would spread out over a season and it’s done in one episode: boom. It’s full on. You kind of start at 10 out of 10 and then you have to keep going, to keep feeding the clock.”
Otto just has time for a quick shower before heading back to the Atlanta set. She’ll work through the night filming the tenth episode, which takes place across the tenth hour of one frenetic day. She’ll be entirely present, of course, and giving 100 per cent. But in the brief bursts of down time, while a light is reset or camera angle changed, with the anxious clock tick-tick-ticking down the minutes, she’ll allow her thoughts to wander 3000km due west, to where her family is waiting in LA.
“To me, acting is a sort of a madness,” she says now. “Pretending to be something else and putting all this emotion into a fictional character; it’s a crazy job. So it’s a brilliant thing to come back from work and go…” She exhales with a sound like a deep-sea diver with a cold – bleeerrrchh – before continuing: “Then you’re with your family and everything levels out. The highs and the lows in acting are unimportant at the end of the day.”
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