Matt Day on making new series Strife with Asher Keddie amid 30 years of Muriel’s Wedding

When actor Matt Day made Muriel’s Wedding nearly 30 years ago, he didn’t have very high hopes, but reveals how that lucky break is still changing his life.

Matt Day admits that a few things that have been making him ponder his age lately.

First of all there’s the fact that Muriel’s Wedding, which gave the now 52-year-old his breakout movie role, hits a significant milestone birthday next year.

“I can’t believe it’s been 30 years,” he says a little incredulously over Zoom call from Perth, where he is filming the kids’ movie, Runt. “It opened doors for everyone who was involved in that film. It’s kind of remarkable.”

Then there’s his two teenage sons with journalist wife Kirsty Thomson, who constantly bamboozle him with their screen-savvy, Gen Alpha ways.

Matt Day and Asher Keddie as former married couple Jon And Evelyn in the comedy-drama Strife.

“I suddenly feel very old,” he says. “For me, it’s when they try and show me something on their phone and I have to hold it at arm’s length to be able to see it. That’s the one thing about children – they make you acutely aware of your obsolescence.”

And lastly, there’s the “wrapping my head around the fact that 2012 is now considered retro”. His new TV show, Strife, based on the Mia Freedman memoir Work Strife Balance released that year, traces the rise of Australia’s first women’s website. And although it’s now nearly decade later, the events and trends of the time are still basically current affairs to Day.

“All the young people on the set were like ‘wow, were phones really this small?’,” Day says with a laugh. “Wasn’t 2012 yesterday?”

Actors Kenneth Branagh (R) & Matt Day in 2002 TV documentary film Shackleton. Picture: Branagh/Actor Day/Actor

The six-part BINGE original series reunites Day with Asher Keddie, who he last worked with on the 2011 miniseries Paper Giants: The Birth Of Cleo, in which she played Ita Buttrose and he played ladies’ man lawyer Daniel Ritchie. This time around, Keddie is magazine editor turned blogger Evelyn Jones, the character loosely based on Mamma Mia founder Friedman, and Day is her soon to be ex-husband Jon, with whom she co-parents two teenage children.

“It’s always great fun playing a scene with her because she’s always really sharp,” says Day of his co-star. “She’s very smart and she’s always trying to get the best out of the scene and best out of the actor she’s working with.”

Strife is driven by Keddie’s mercurial, complex Eve, who is desperate to make her trailblazing website Eve Live a success in an era of rapidly changing technology, while negotiating a marriage breakdown and struggling to relate to her teens. Day was thankful that Jon wasn’t portrayed as the villain of the piece and rather as a relatable, decent level-head man who just wants the best for his family.

Australian actor Matt Day stars in Strife.

“There’s a little bit of a fun police element to him, I suppose, but I think he’s a very patient man,” Day says. “He has to be having been married to Evelyn and I think he’s doing the best he can with the situation and trying to keep the family functioning even though they’re now separated. I think there’s more to explore, hopefully in another season if people enjoy this one.

“He’s a character I can understand and he certainly not unlike a lot of people that I think the audiences would know.”

Jon does arc up, however, when Evelyn discovers that the more personal and confessional her posts on Eve Life are, the more audience engagement she gets, prompting her to share more of her life experiences, including falling out of love with her husband and the trials of raising teens. Day, who has been married to Kristy, executive producer of 60 Minutes, for 24 years, can sympathise.

Actor Matt Day in scene from television program "Shackleton". /TV/programs/Titles/Shackleton

“It would be incredibly frustrating,” Day says of the prospect of having dirty laundry aired publicly. “Imagine being a married to a writer, who’s just digging up your life the whole time. I guess you can’t really copyright it because it’s real life but I kind of related to him.

“One of my favourite lines in the piece was when he said, ‘I was perfectly happy being unhappily married’. I think that was very much a clue to his personality – he is very much a pragmatist.”

Day, who describes himself as “the guy on the beanbag in Muriel’s Wedding” on his Twitter bio, says that people still bail him up to talk about his role as the geeky Brice Nobes in the comedy-drama three decades later.

“For me at the time, I think it was a week’s work, if that, and I remember thinking ‘honestly, who’s going to want to see this film about a depressed girl who loves ABBA?’” he says. “I had idea that it would become what it did.”

Like his co-stars Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths, Muriel’s Wedding, quickly followed by the film festival favourite Love and Other Catastrophe’s kickstarted Day’s international career, leading to an extended stint in the UK in the early 2000s and roles in Shackleton, Spooks, Hotel Babylon and The Hounds of the Baskervilles. After eight years of travelling around the world for work, Day returned home and hit the jackpot again opposite Justine Clarke and Ben Mendelsohn in the award-winning Foxtel drama, Tangle.

He says that veteran actor Sam Neill, with whom he appeared in the Outback Western Sweet Country, once offered him the sage advice that “the key to having a successful career is having 50 lucky breaks”.

Toni Collette and Matt Day in Muriel's Wedding, which opened doors internationally for both actors.

“So much of this job is about good luck – and that was one of my early lucky breaks,” Day says of Muriel. “But then pretty much all of the jobs are lucky breaks.”

And while he says he’s not one for nostalgia, he says he finally succumbed to curiosity long after his co-stars and went to see the musical version of Muriel’s Wedding, which introduced the story to a whole new audience.

“I remember sitting there and the lights coming down and it was like the universe had kind of folded in half, and it was such an existential experience to sit there watch this new generation of young actors come out and this story that you were part of so many years ago,” he recalls. “It was very strange and discombobulating.”

Day says his career, which also incorporates regular theatre work such as the acclaimed Melbourne Theatre Company’s Sunday, which will be revived for the Sydney Theatre Company next year, also already exceeded his initial ambition to be a “jobbing actor”.

“I was really lucky that I stumbled across it when I was young and thought ‘yes, this is what I want to do’ and that I was young and naive and didn’t overthink it and thought I could do something with it,” he says. “I have been really fortunate that I have so far. It’s been beyond my expectations and touch wood it keeps going for another 30 years.”

Strife streams on BINGE from Wednesday.

Originally published as Matt Day on making new series Strife with Asher Keddie amid 30 years of Muriel’s Wedding