Perfect on the outside, chaos within: Teresa Palmer taps her heart of darkness in ABC drama

Teresa Palmer is heavily pregnant with her fifth child and positively glowing (as usual) when she joins me to talk about her role in The Family Next Door, a six-part ABC drama series in which she plays a woman who moves into a quiet suburban cul de sac near the beach and rapidly proceeds to blow it all apart.

“At its core, The Family Next Door is about the tension that exists between perception and truth,” says Palmer, who plays Isabelle, a woman who arrives in Pleasant Court claiming to be a journalist looking to write a travel piece, but whose real reason for being there will wreak havoc on the tight-knit community.

“All these people in this cul-de-sac have crafted these perfect little lives on the outside, but on the inside they’re dealing with trauma and chaos and shame and longing. The series peels back that glossy facade, and it’s very revealing, which is wonderful.”

Isabelle is not an especially likeable character, though. She lies and steals and hides her true motives. She stomps around, emanates rage even when she’s eating her food or drinking a beer, and immerses herself in ice baths any time it all threatens to become too much (which is often).

Dominic Ona-Ariki and Palmer in the series.

“I think there’s a self-centeredness about Isabelle,” she says of her character, whom she describes as a disruptor. “She has such a mission that she’s eagle-eyed focused on, and it doesn’t matter the ruin that is left in its wake – she is chasing something with this reckless abandon, and it’s not necessarily the best thing for everyone.”

Based on a novel by Sally Hepworth, the series has been adapted by Sarah Scheller (The Letdown, Strife) and is directed by Emma Freeman (The Newsreader, Fake). And while it has distinct echoes of the work of Liane Moriarty – whose Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers and Apples Never Fall have been so successfully adapted for screen in recent years – there’s a pleasing and more grounded nuance to the way the characters and relationships are portrayed.

Bella Heathcote plays Ange, the real estate agent with ambitions to become a developer and transform the sleepy seaside town. She leases the short-term rental to Isabelle, lives next door, frantically curates a perfect version of what she wants life to be, and hovers over the cul-de-sac like something between a guardian angel and a tyrant.

Bella Heathcote’s Ange is the unofficial guardian angel/tyrant of Pleasant Court.Credit: ABC TV

Her husband is Lucas (Bob Morley), a handsome photographer-surfer-layabout, who may or may not be having an affair. Lawyer Fran (Ming-Zhu Hii) is married to Nigel (Daniel Henshall), a depressed and lethargic PhD candidate. Lulu (Jane Harber) and Holly (Maria Angelico) run a vegan cafe. Essie (Philippa Northeast) is struggling with post-natal depression and exhaustion after the birth of her second child, and with the fact she and husband Ben (Tane Williams-Accra) are so broke they’ve had to move back in with her mother, Barbara (Catherine McClements).

Everyone’s kids, meanwhile, run from yard to yard on ad hoc play dates, while the parents take every opportunity for impromptu drinks on deck chairs as the summer heat bakes the bitumen and sprinklers sprinkle.

It’s Neighbours meets Home and Away, with a dash of something much darker – the Australian dream teetering on the brink of a nightmare.

“There are cracks beneath the surface for all these people, and Isabelle’s presence is the breakdown to break through,” says Palmer. “I mean, there’s absolutely no sustainability in living this veneered life without actually getting under the surface, so I think my character is necessary for the growth of everyone.”

Not that she’s judging. “I actually feel like I identify with all of them,” says Palmer. “There’s little pieces of each one of these women that I can relate to.”

Relatability is Palmer’s secret sauce. Though she’s been working steadily as an actress since 2006, the 39-year-old has also built a parallel identity as a blogger, podcaster and social media personality with a focus on wellness and motherhood.

Ming-Zhu Hii, Lily Cao Milburn and Daniel Henshall in The Family Next Door. 

In January, she and her partner (American actor/filmmaker Mark Webber) and their kids (her boys are eight and 11, her girls are four and six) relocated to Byron Bay.

“We’ve always split our time between Los Angeles and Adelaide,” she says. “That was always the back and forth, and also wherever I’m filming – we would all just move to the location. But I was like, ‘All right, let’s get pregnant and go to Byron Bay, put the kids in school and buy a house.’ And that’s what we’ve done.”

Byron seems the perfect backdrop for the yummy mummy persona Palmer projects in her web presence. And by her own reckoning, it’s not just a projection. “I have this joy-filled life, my dream life,” she says, and somehow it doesn’t come across as boastful.

But her choice of screen roles couldn’t make for a starker contrast. Isabelle is a dark character full of rage, fuelled by trauma in her past. In the Disney+ series The Clearing, loosely based on the true story of Melbourne cult The Family, she was an adult wrestling with the complex relationship with the “mother” (Miranda Otto) who had abducted her as a young child. She has, in fact, been drawn to dark roles since the very start of her career, having made her debut in 2:37, a film about a suicide at an Adelaide high school.

“I am drawn to these darker characters who have an evolution from the start to the end,” she says. “In The Clearing, my character was a broken flower, a little bit lost. But in this, there’s such a drive in Isabelle. It’s unrelenting, and then there’s an aggressiveness to the character, which is really exciting to explore.

“I really love that trauma shows up and manifests itself in different behaviours. There’s no right way to deal with trauma. Everyone handles it differently.”

On the surface, it would appear there’s not a lot of trauma in her life. So what does she draw on for these roles?

Whine o’clock: Ange (Bella Heathcote), Lulu (Jane Harber) and Essie (Philippa Northeast) chew the fat. Credit: ABC TV

“It’s funny, I always try to derive from my own past experiences,” she says. “Of course, I have little traumas and things I went through that were not necessarily easy in my life. Me and my mum growing up together, just her and I, and her having schizo-affective disorder, it wasn’t easy. But I still had the best childhood. All I knew was love. And these characters don’t have that.

“And even though my childhood looked different from some of the other kids I went to school with, I had the best relationship with my mum, and I had all these wonderful childhood experiences where I just got to have this really playful, awesome mum who kind of let me get away with anything, and it was epic. I wouldn’t change anything. But obviously, there’s untapped feelings that I can draw upon in these roles.”

Playing the darkness is what she excels at, she feels. “I find a simpler character much harder to portray. Comedy would be harder for me. But the dark, traumatic roles, I find that much easier to tap into, for whatever reason. And also it reflects something real: the inner chaos and trauma and grief and rage and all those things. People are told to keep things neat and quiet, but I like emotional mess and telling that story.”

On the screen, you mean, or in real life, too?

“On screen, on screen,” she says urgently. “It represents real experiences, but I would like to not have that bleed over into my life.”

The Family Next Door premieres 8pm, August 10, on the ABC.

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