Miranda Tapsell: from Kakadu to Cannes, and back
From Kakadu to Cannes, she shot to fame in The Sapphires and lit a rocket at the Logies. There’s no stopping Miranda Tapsell.
Begin by making a speech, an unpinned grenade of a speech lobbed into the chandeliered opulence of the vast Melbourne ballroom where a thousand of your carefully dressed peers are gathered, eyes on you. You’re nervous, of course, making this speech in front of all these people, knowing there are many thousands more watching on TV. Ascending the stairs to the left of the stage, you reflect on its incendiary potential and a fresh wave of nerves swings up from your gut. You feel like vomiting. You’re naturally shy and, standing just over 1.5m in your champagne satin heels, you’ll be so tiny, alone up there. You begin to think this is a bad idea.
But you’ve got something to say and you’re going to say it. The politics of race relations in Australia is vexed and complex but you’re not a politician, you’re an actress. A proud indigenous actress whose fierce dreams have propelled you from the tiny Kakadu town of Jabiru (population 1135) to the big-city lights of Sydney and NIDA, to the glitter and pomp of the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of your hit film The Sapphires, and now to the 2015 Logie Awards, where your mainstream popularity has just been underlined with a brace of wins for your role in the retro drama Love Child. After running through the obligatory thankyous, you draw a deep breath and begin your precisely scripted, deeply considered call to arms.
“If viewers clearly love seeing this,” you say, spreading your arms wide and shimmying a little in your midnight-blue gown, “why deprive them of that?” The audience is chuckling; your rebuke of the Australian screen industry is subversive, gift-wrapped and sweetened with the captured sunshine of your smile. You begin to think this is a good idea, and continue with a bold directive: “Put more beautiful people of colour on TV and connect viewers in ways that transcend race and unite us.” Then you add a provocative kicker: “That’s the real Team Australia.”
Suddenly you’ve done it, and no one’s booing you or mocking or shunning you as you’d feared. The room gives you a standing ovation, and everyone’s smiling and some people are crying. The speech travels far beyond Melbourne’s Crown Palladium, beyond the audience for a typical Logies broadcast, and tendrils its way into cyberspace like the spidery white fingers of lightning that constantly fire up the sky above your untamed Kakadu homeland. It goes viral and you’re very proud. But because you endured bullying and racism at school, because the scars run deep, because your mixed-race heritage seems a further complication, because there’s still so much misunderstanding and intolerance and divisiveness, you know this is just the beginning.
“I think the reason so many people gravitated toward that speech is because they could see I was terrified out of my wits,” Miranda Tapsell says now, still slightly uneasy with her role as a revolutionary. “I don’t think people realise how terrifying it is every time for me to stand up to people and say, ‘No, this is what I want out of this’. I was probably more nervous to win. I thought, ‘Now I have to actually go up and say this stuff’. But it’s so rare to win an award that it was incredibly important for me to take that moment.”
The actress, 30, is spooning down fruit salad after an early-morning photo shoot. Generous sunlight spills through a wall of loft-style windows, striping the floor of the inner-city Melbourne studio around the corner from where she has recently moved after a decade in Sydney. Tapsell’s dressed for the heat of the day in a vividly patterned silk shift by Roopa Pemmaraju, a local designer whose label showcases original artworks by indigenous Australians. She’s barefoot and jet-lagged, having just returned from a month-long European jaunt.
“People need to appreciate that when someone comes to them and says, ‘Hey, this really hurt my feelings’ they probably had a sleepless night beforehand,” she continues. “If someone has really upset me, I toss and I turn and I think, ‘How am I going to approach this, how am I going to make them listen to me, how am I going to make this accessible?’ She sighs and her shoulders slump theatrically. “Yeah. It’s an exhausting thing, educating people.”
Tapsell is half-joking, but she’s clearly thought this through. Tone is everything. Get the giftwrap right and you can put what you like in the box. A criticism of your own industry. A sly dig at a former prime minister. Bombshells. Fireworks.
Tapsell is variously described by friends and colleagues as “effervescent”, “friendly” and “sweet”: a smiley, pocket-sized glitter-bomb of good humour and grace. She’s also sneaky-tough. Born in Darwin, the only child of an Aboriginal mother and white father, she grew up cocooned in their unwavering love and encouragement, proud to call herself a Larrakia-Tiwi woman. “She’s a strong black woman from a good family,” says actor and filmmaker Wayne Blair, who directed her in 2012’s The Sapphires. “She has a very respectful nature and she’s a good listener.”
But, oh boy, does she love a good pyrotechnics display. Tapsell calls it “talking hot”, an expression borrowed from her Tiwi Islands ancestors that means to speak frankly and passionately. “When she gets the opportunity, she doesn’t hold back,” Blair laughs. “If engaged, Miranda will definitely share her thoughts with you. It’s hard to make a difference in this country but she makes people reconsider the way they do things or the way they handle certain situations.”
Actor and writer Adam Zwar spent time with Tapsell on the Sydney set of Squinters, the upcoming ABC commuter comedy he co-created with No Activity’s Trent O’Donnell. “She just lifts the energy in any room,” he says, going on to praise the “dry comic timing” she displays alongside co-stars Jacki Weaver, Tim Minchin and Damon Herriman. But, he warns, she’s no pushover. “Just because she’s sweet doesn’t mean she’s not tough,” he says. “If there’s an idea she doesn’t like she’s very happy to tell you that.”
Tapsell and her good friend Nakkiah Lui, an in-demand indigenous playwright and actor from Mt Druitt in Sydney’s west, regularly and gleefully light taboo fuses on their podcast, Pretty for an Aboriginal. The title gives the first clue that it takes a feisty, gloves-off approach to discussions about gender, body image, politics and, predominantly, race. In promotional material for an upcoming live recording at the Sydney Opera House, the pair are described as “Australia’s most outspoken black women”. But there’s giftwrap here too: humour, charm and bursts of untrammelled silliness help the candour go down easily, whether they’re discussing sexism with US author Roxane Gay or chatting with Orange Is the New Black actress Yael Stone about the impact of African-American culture on young indigenous Australians.
“A lot of young girls write to Nakkiah and me regarding the podcast and it almost seems they’ve had this awakening,” Tapsell says. “They’ve gone, ‘Yeah, it actually is awesome to be Aboriginal’.” She is, however, keenly aware there’s a potential wellspring of vitriol waiting. Sydney Swans great Adam Goodes and Australian basketball superstar Liz Cambage have both paid a price for speaking up about racism and it makes Tapsell not so much fearful as wary. “Look at Adam Goodes, an incredible Brownlow medallist and that’s how he’s left his career — it’s so sad,” she says.
Tapsell tapped the wellspring two years ago when she appeared on The Verdict, the short-lived Channel 9 panel show hosted by Karl Stefanovic. After speaking bluntly about her childhood experience of racism, she said she didn’t feel Australian, particularly on Australia Day, “because people are essentially telling me that I can’t be a part of that”. The response was swift and savage: almost 300 commenters took to the show’s Facebook page to attack her. “Princess”, “joke” and “sook” were among the gentler epithets. Tapsell won’t be bowed, however. As Blair says, “What she gains in love and respect from her own mob outweighs any social media backlash she might attract.”
The personal, freewheeling nature of Pretty for an Aboriginal allows for nuance, shades from light to dark, and lets Tapsell and Lui control the narrative. “We bring it forward in a very lighthearted, funny way,” she says. “Rather than saying, ‘Oh, this is crap and this is crap’, we are more like, “Why does this operate the way that it does? It’s a bit nuts, isn’t it?’ We’re really good at breaking down why people may be angry. I think people misread the anger, they think people are just bitter and twisted and they forget there is actual hurt behind it. There is this deep pain in a lot of Aboriginal people and I think people need to understand what that is.”
Tapsell met Lui in 2014 in the tomato-red foyer of the Belvoir Street Theatre where, six years before, she’d had her first big break with the lead role in Dallas Winmar’s play Yibiyung. The two were bonding over a post-show drink when the same thought struck them both: I wonder if people are looking at us because we’re Aboriginal women holding glasses of wine? “We talked about why we should feel uncomfortable when we’re having one glass of wine in a public space, and it’s because people project things onto you whether you want them to or not,” says Tapsell. “But doing the podcast and continuing to do interesting work on stage and screen will be my freedom from that.”
That work will this year include a role in Lui’s reprise of her acclaimed comic play Black is the New White for the Sydney Theatre Company, as well as the ABC comedy Squinters (due to start February 7). “I really enjoy comedy because you can disarm people with humour,” she says. “Because I got laughed at so much as a kid it’s been nice to learn over the years to take control and have people laugh with me, not at me.”
It’s been a big couple of years for Tapsell since herdouble Logie win for Love Child, the since-axed Channel 9 drama about unwed teenage mothers in 1970s Sydney. She’s appeared in Cleverman, Wolf Creek and Newton’s Law, and played a press gallery journalist on Secret City. She’s finger-painted and sock-puppeted her way into the hearts of small children around the country as a presenter on Play School. (“The single most joyful thing I have ever done.”) On stage in The Literati, Tapsell played the sister of blonde-haired, blue-eyed Kate Mulvany’s character — “everything I have been asking for” — and broke more new ground, along with her idol Deborah Mailman, voicing a character on NITV’s Little J and Big Cuz, the first cartoon series to cater specifically for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids.
Tapsell recalls being 13 in Jabiru and watching Mailman become the first Aboriginal woman to win a Logie for the hit TV drama The Secret Life of Us. It gave her permission to dream, and soon she was watching and re-watching Halle Berry’s 2002 Oscar acceptance speech, practising her own gush of gratitude, tearfully clutching the spectre of a statue. At 16, she won the Bell Shakespeare Company regional performance scholarship and went on to study at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA). Blair met her early, directing her in Romeo and Juliet for one of Bell Shakespeare’s regional tours and running into her again at the prestigious drama school. “She was a standout from the beginning,” he says. “She had this shy, inquisitive nature about her; she was always waiting to ask a question.” Shy, maybe, “but she was at NIDA and she was from Darwin so ... there must have been some bit of chutzpah she possessed.”
That chutzpah was on display when she returned to the Logies in 2016 as a presenter. In the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against Craig McLachlan, 52 (which he has denied), footage has re-emerged of the actor co-hosting with Tapsell that night and behaving like a handsy “drunk uncle”, as he was described in the press the next day. While visibly uncomfortable, at one point wincing when he drapes his arm around her shoulders, Tapsell holds her own, subtly pushing him away.
The following year, Tapsell presented again, but this time there was cause for muted celebration: a record number of nominations for indigenous actors, including Mailman, Hunter Page-Lochard, Rob Collins and Jessica Mauboy. With real-life statues on her own mantelpiece, Tapsell is still dreaming big. “It’s wonderful that so many people appreciated what I said at the Logies [in 2015], but now it needs to start coming from other people who aren’t brown or black or gay or from the LGBTIQ community,” she says. “It needs to come from the people who do have more of a say.”
She doesn’t want colour-blind casting, she says. Differences should be celebrated, not ignored. “The reason I want more Aboriginal stories told is because I think it’s important to not just see the one perspective,” she says. “I know my life is very different from other Aboriginal people’s, so mine isn’t the one story people should be using to inform themselves on every Aboriginal person.” Why shouldn’t she play an Aboriginal version of X-Men superhero Storm, the role Berry made famous? Why couldn’t she be the villain in a murder mystery? And where was the mainstream romantic comedy with an Aboriginal lead?
She couldn’t find one, so she wrote her own, a feel-good romp with all the genre tropes of the movies she loves: Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually, My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It’s a typically take-charge move that, come April, will have the added bonus of taking her home.
The violent percussion of the wet season thunderstorms will have eased when Tapsell and the cast and crew of Top End Wedding head north to Kakadu National Park to begin filming. Floodwaters will start to recede, leaving stick-legged lotus birds to pick their way across billabongs carpeted with water lilies. The rush of swollen waterfalls will have dialled back to a melodious tumble.
Top End Wedding will star Tapsell as a successful Sydney lawyer whose boss has given her just 10 days to get married, a challenge that sparks a whirlwind gallop through her Northern Territory birthplace in search of her mother. Hilarity, presumably, ensues but there’s subversion below the surface sheen. “It’s very aspirational, like most romantic comedies,” she says. “It’s also about someone learning to be proud of who they are and what it means to be an Aboriginal person, so it’s nice to see things flipped on their head a little bit.”
Tapsell co-wrote the screenplay with her friend Joshua Tyler (Plonk), secured investment funding from Screen Australia and invited Wayne Blair to direct. The film will shoot in Kakadu, Katherine and the Tiwi Islands, off Darwin. “That community up there really loves and respects her,” Blair says. “I’ve been on country with her and people gravitate towards her. She inspires her own mob, she makes them feel proud. I see it and feel it.”
Tapsell was born in Larrakia country, in Darwin, but moved to Jabiru, in Kakadu, when she was five after her father Tony got a job on the town council. Her mother, Barbara, a Larrakia-Tiwi woman from Darwin, worked at the local school. Her parents took her camping among the ancient sandstone escarpments of the World Heritage-listed park and swimming at Jim Jim Falls. She fished and climbed ghost gums. But Tapsell felt she lacked a spiritual connection to country, not knowing the traditional language, the dances or Dreamtime stories of either her birthplace or her new home. She was a town kid, growing up in a community whose sole reason for being was to service the nearby Ranger uranium mine; her two best friends were non-indigenous. “I guess I felt a little bit out of place at times growing up,” she says. “I really got on with the Aboriginal kids, but I ended up having more in common with a lot of the non-indigenous girls at the school whose dads worked at the mine.”
From her father, she inherited English, Irish and Czech genes, and he also taught her about diplomacy and respect. “There is a very grounding effect in knowing who you are and where you come from and my dad has never questioned my lived experience,” Tapsell says. “He’s always said, ‘You’ve lived your life as an Aboriginal person so naturally you’re going to embrace your Aboriginality’, and I really love that about my dad. Both my parents have told me it’s OK to have my foot in two camps. It’s a unique position and it’s important for me to take the privileges I have and use them for good.”
It was when Tapsell moved back to Darwin at 14 to attend high school that she felt the full force of barefaced racism. She was called “half-caste”, “gin bag”, “nigger” — slurs meant to shred and diminish. But the insult that really got under her skin was more subtle. “I remember I was watching a play in Darwin and someone was speaking an Aboriginal language very fluently,” she says. “Someone said, ‘Miranda, do you know what they’re saying?’ and I said I didn’t, and she said, ‘Well, why not?’ like it was my fault. Like generations of Aboriginal people were forced to stop speaking their language and somehow it was my fault. I realised how irrelevant that is to people and how much people don’t know and don’t care to know. I think that was the thing that really hurt me.”
When Tapsell’s feet hit the brick-red dirt of home, a notion that encompasses the Top End in its entirety, her place in the world of bright lights and awards and designer dresses dissolves. She’s looking forward to forging an even deeper connection to country with Top End Wedding, all her jostling former selves united through her art.
“I would have a deeper sense of self if I was able to speak in a different language — to speak in Larrakia, to speak in Tiwi; oh my gosh, it would mean the world to me. But unfortunately that’s not what reality is and this is what the film is doing for me,” she says. “It’s helping me understand, it’s helping me create that connection with the people of Tiwi and Darwin and with that country. Having that connection with family means more than anything to me.”