Gina Riley, performer, 54: Ten Questions

Gina Riley on ditching her Kath & Kim alter-ego for good - and her year of “leaping at anything that’s offered”.

TWAM 12 Dec 2015

Recently you played Catherine in ABC-TV’s The Beautiful Lie and next year you’ll play Clara in the stage show North by Northwest. What’s it like to simply perform rather than create and produce, as you’ve often done?

It’s been the year of leaping at anything I’ve been offered. All these great jobs have come my way. I love it, but I always want to keep writing and if you write something, you have to produce it as well.

Did the phenomenally successful Kath & Kim years have drawbacks for you and your partner-in-comedy Jane Turner?Kath & Kim took over our lives and there was no room for Jane and me to do anything else. It is a big workload when you create, write, produce and are in something. But it’s rewarding because you get to use different parts of your brain. The performing is a small part of it.

You finished off with the 2012 film Kath & Kimderella, which wasn’t entirely well reviewed and made $6,150,771. How do you look back on that? Note the last dollar. It was bit of a flight of fancy, a bit of a last hurrah. We had a ball making it and the money was respectable for an Australian film, I would say.

Are Kath and Kim gone for good? I think Jane could play Kath forever, but 95 per cent I think it’s over for me. Doing “25 and five-quarters” – Kim’s age – has taken its toll and I’m too old for it now.

It must be gratifying that some of the lingo, like “hornbag”, has entered the Australian lexicon? It’s fantastic but only now do we think, “Oh my God, that’s quite a thing.” As it unfolded Jane and I were so busy we didn’t notice its impact. Then you’d walk down the street and hear people using words that you’d written a year before.

In Open Slather, a recent sketch show for the Comedy Channel produced by your husband Rick McKenna, you played Gina Rileyano, a wickedly funny take-off of The Real Housewives of Melbourne star Gina Liano. Is it true that she loved your version? Yes, she was very gracious. I was relieved – I don’t want to ruin anyone’s day. One of the lines I say as Gina Rileyano is: “It takes a village to get me done.” When I met her I said, “It took me four hours to look like you” and she said, “I’ve got it down to 40 minutes.”

You showed off your terrific singing voice this year in the stage musical Nice Work if You Can Get It. Where did that come from? I had classical training for years, but I am no classical singer. It was good grounding in understanding your voice and breathing. I’ve done a few musicals; I love to have a bit of a sing.

You’re very private – for example, you don’t talk about your experience with breast cancer. Why is that? I am a character actor, that’s what blows my skirt up. You get offered a lot of gigs as yourself but I’m not interested. I can say whatever I need to say by doing a character. I am a little bit shy in a very public forum when being myself. It’s probably old school but I don’t tweet and I’m not even on Facebook. I can’t bear it, it makes me tense.

Kim would have been tweeting 24/7, don’t you think? Kim would wake her daughter Epponnee Rae up to do another tweet. She’d make her have her phone in her bed.

If your 19-year-old daughter Maggie wanted to go on stage, what would you say? I would say beware, but there’s no stopping anyone. She would have my blessing if she really wanted to. And yes, she’s interested.

North by Northwest, State Theatre Melbourne, from January 29