Tilda Cobham-Hervey hopesThe Lost Flowers of Alice Hart will get us talking about domestic violence
The stories we sometimes tell ourselves about love can be extreme and toxic, says the Adelaide-born, Hepburn-esque star of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.
In The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, the new Australian drama series starring Sigourney Weaver, Alycia Debnam-Carey and Tilda Cobham-Hervey, every blossom has a secret meaning.
The drooping Sturt’s desert pea is a reminder to “have courage, take heart”; the tendrils of a black fire orchid stands for “desire to possess”. In episode two, we learn that the radiant abundance of wattle actually means “always with you”.
This story appears in the August issue of WISH, out on Friday, August 4, with The Australian.
And it is always around: as the young Alice Hart escapes her traumatic childhood home and moves into the room that once belonged to her mother Agnes (Cobham-Hervey) at Thornfield, the flower farm presided over by her grandmother June (Weaver), she finds wattle everywhere.
Pressed into the pages of books, embroidered onto a work smock, stitched into a quilt, etched into the bedroom wallpaper. Because wattle is Agnes’s flower, and through the course of Alice’s (Debnam-Carey) life, explored as the series unfolds this month on Prime Video, Agnes will always be with her.
Wattle is also with us at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, where I meet star of the series Cobham-Hervey one morning in late June. “The Agnes wattle!” she exclaims, pointing towards an intricate sketch by artist Simryn Gill called Maria’s Garden (2021). The artwork comprises dozens and dozens of strips of paper, etched with lifesize rendered impressions of plants taken from a backyard in Marrickville, including one spectacular branch of dangling wattle. The work takes up the better part of an entire room on the museum’s third floor.
“I love when you go to a gallery and you see a piece that just takes up the whole space,” Cobham-Hervey enthuses. She smiles contentedly, soaking it all in. Art galleries are her happy place; visiting the MCA for this interview was her suggestion, even though she was here only a few months ago to see the retrospective of Korean artist Do Ho Suh, which, for the record, she loved. (Korea is her No. 1 dream travel destination.)
The 28-year-old grew up in Adelaide, the daughter of a dancer mother and a lighting-designer father so her childhood was steeped in the arts. She remembers one family holiday, after her dad received a grant to “study outdoor festivals”, at the Venice Biennale. She was 18, her brother was eight. “It was so incredible, I still think about it all the time,” says Cobham-Hervey. “But my poor brother. We once looked at his diary while we were away and it just said, ‘Today, we had to see more art. Sad face’.”
Cobham-Hervey originally auditioned for the role of Alice in Lost Flowers. It went to Debnam-Carey, so she tested for Agnes, Alice’s mother and a woman trapped in a cycle of trauma. Series producer Jodi Matterson believes the role of Agnes is “genuinely one of the most difficult and pivotal of the show”, a complex character whose love for her daughter is all-encompassing.
She describes Cobham-Hervey as “captivating”, with a “true creative spirit” and “Audrey Hepburn-like beauty”. (Coincidentally, Hepburn was early cinematic inspiration for the actor, who watched all her movies with her grandmother. Her favourite is Funny Face.)
“She has a luminosity that makes you want to watch her on screen forever and I can honestly say that even after seeing this show countless times, I am still so moved by her powerful performance,” adds Matterson.
“What I really got so fascinated by was the complexity of her and her relationship,” Cobham-Hervey explains. “I think there are a lot of stories in our culture that we tell about love and romance. I’m a hopeless romantic, so I’m definitely a part of feeling that you want to be needed, or confusing loving with pleasing, or that you need to be saved, or that love is everything, or that it’s me and my partner against the world. And some of those things are so beautiful and incredible, and you want that, but the extreme of that is kind of a dangerous idea.”
This nuance is something Lost Flowers author Holly Ringland praises in Cobham-Hervey’s performance.
“Her ability to embody Agnes’s contradictions – her disempowerment, her power, her entrapment and strength, her numbness and her ferocious, immeasurable capacity to love – brought such richness and presence to Agnes’s character on screen.”
Cobham-Hervey is hopeful that Lost Flowers can help start conversations, however confronting, about the shocking prevalence of domestic violence in Australia. “That’s the reason you make stuff. Well, certainly I do,” she says. “I am very lucky that I haven’t had the same experience that Agnes had, but there were definitely a lot of things I could still connect to. Even if you haven’t gone through that, it makes you question your own life and things that you’ve experienced too, and it did make me have conversations with my friends, or my mum, around these subjects.”
Agnes is also a mother, Cobham-Hervey is not. Lost Flowers is the second time she’s played a mum; the first was when she starred as singer Helen Reddy in the 2020 biopic I Am Woman. The actor spends much of her screen time in Lost Flowers wearing a prosthetic pregnant belly. “And everyone treats you really differently!” Cobham-Hervey says. “They’re like, ‘Do you want a seat?’. It’s not real! I can run, it’s fine.”
But the experience proved instructive. “Playing a mum has made me think a lot more about my mum, and how amazing and difficult it is to be a mother. That’s been a really powerful thing, to see a different way into your parent’s life, through playing a parent.” Cobham-Hervey’s path to acting began with the circus.
“I was very energetic,” she says with a grimace. “That’s why my parents put me into after-school circus classes.”
Today, the actor is sweet and softly spoken. It’s hard to imagine her as a child, she admits, who refused to go to sleep. For her next film, biopic Young Woman and the Sea about the first woman to swim the English Channel, Cobham-Hervey had to be taught how to swim properly by a former Olympian.
“I’ve got videos of me trying to freestyle. I’d get one stroke and then just sort of start sinking.”Beyond learning how to tumble and freefall from the age of nine, art was always in her life. “That was the biggest conversation in our household,” she admits. “The idea of imagination was so encouraged.”
Film came later. She remembers seeing The Lion King, but the film that really made an impression on her was the Parisian fairytale Amelie: “I was so obsessed with it. I wanted my hair cut like her.” (Indeed here she debuts a new crop).
Cobham-Hervey followed that with a chaser of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich. “Those sort of things really excited me. The unusual ways you can tell stories that make you look at the world in a different way,” she offers.
“I think that’s why I ended up in the film world more than theatre … You’re so intimately in someone else’s experience.” Which was what happened with her first role, as the daughter of a transitioning parent in Adelaide filmmaker Sophie Hyde’s 52 Tuesdays, at age 16.
Cobham-Hervey didn’t think much of acting at the time. “I still went back on the road with the circus for three months afterwards,” she says. When the movie finally came out, she was working in the tea room at her local cinema and had to lie that it wasn’t her on the movie poster.
It is a cliché to describe an actor as down-to-earth, but in the case of Cobham-Hervey, it’s just the truth. On set for WISH, she jokingly describes herself as a “spiller”, as she shrugs out of a pink floral Chanel top before lunch; at the MCA, she recounts not one but two stories about going “bright red” while meeting other celebrities. (Deborah Mailman and her namesake Tilda Swinton, who starred in a movie with her boyfriend, actor Dev Patel. “He was like, ‘Get a photo!’ And I’m bright red and look sort of manic and she’s there being like, ‘This is awkward.’”)
52 Tuesdays won the Best Director prize at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and kickstarted a collaboration between Cobham-Hervey and Hyde that continues to this day. The actor calls Hyde a “mentor”. The filmmaker will direct Cobham-Hervey’s adaptation of author Miriam Toews’s novel Irma Voth; Cobham-Hervey was just at the Cannes Film Festival to seek funding.
“Movies are such a miracle to make happen at the best of times,” she notes, but particularly Irma Voth. “It’s three different genres, it’s very unusual, it’s about Mennonites. I didn’t make it easy,” she laughs.
Cobham-Hervey first encountered Toews’s work on the set of Foxtel series The Kettering Incident, in which she starred alongside Elizabeth Debicki. “We would do banana bread and books and she gave me [Toews’s novel All My Puny Sorrows], and I loved it so much.”
Working on the script for Irma Voth has been equal parts terrifying and exhilarating, a project borne out of her frustrations with the industry.
“I love acting so much and I would love to do more of it, but you have to wait. And you have to be picked,” Cobham-Hervey explains. “It’s very hard to not be in control of when you want to work or what stories you want to tell.”
She says this with a frank pragmatism. “I’ve been so grateful [for] every job I’ve had and the roles that I’ve been able to do, and that people have trusted me with their scripts and stories. But when I imagine what jobs I would love to be in and what stories I’d love to tell, I feel like they haven’t necessarily materialised. And I think you have to create them then.”
For four years, Cobham-Hervey lived in LA with Patel. They met on the set of Hotel Mumbai in 2016 and have been dating ever since. They love to watch movies together and have a pact not to see two recent festival releases, Past Lives and Passages, without the other present, in the event of one partner being on set or on the road. (Some couples have deals not to binge Game of Thrones or Succession unless they are together; Cobham-Hervey and Patel are hopelessly devoted to indie cinema.) During the pandemic, the pair relocated to Adelaide and Cobham-Hervey spends her limited free time with her family.
“My mum is going through some health things,” she says. “So I think for the next few years I’ll be based out of there, in some capacity.” Cobham-Hervey has just returned from a holiday with her parents and brother to Europe: a whistlestop tour of Portugal, Spain, France and England. The holiday was a “big adventure to go and do something beautiful together”, she says, but it is also nice to be home.
“I love Australia so much. And I know you’re not meant to admit that you love Adelaide, I feel like you always have to be like, ‘Oh it’s so uncool’. But I do! I think it’s really changing as a city, and it’s a great place to make stuff. It’s quiet and there’s a real sense of the ability to create.”
Cobham-Hervey loves writing in her home town – it’s where she honed her recent live theatre show, Two Strangers Walk Into A Bar, which she will present at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this month – and spending so much time with her family. “It is weird having parents in the same industry. As much as they’re my parents, they’re also dear friends. Being able to sit around the dinner table and say, ‘Oh, I’m writing this scene and it’s not working. What should I do?’.” She smiles. “They’re my constant collaborators.” It’s good to be home.
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is streaming on Prime Video now.
More Coverage
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout