Rachel Griffiths: What I learnt from Julia Roberts, Johnny Depp and sex workers

Rachel Griffiths is an Oscar-nominated Australian actor with a diverse body of work stretching back 35 years. Her latest drama series is Madam, running on Nine, for which she is the star and executive producer.

Fitz: Rachel, you can call me an embarrassing mealy-mouthed fanboy with a typewriter if you must, but to cut to chase, I’ve followed you for yonks and love your work, including Madam.

RG: (Laughs) Thank you ...

Rachel Griffiths: “I think I’m much less modest than you think.”Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

Fitz: But to head back on the track winding back, I know you were knocked back from entry into NIDA, only for a very short time later to score one of the two breakout roles in the iconic Muriel’s Wedding with Toni Collette. When that happened, and you turned into a “STAR, darling!” – following it up with an Oscar nomination by the age of 30 for your role in Hilary and Jackie, did you allow yourself some savage retributive joy and yell, “Not good enough for NIDA, huh? Well, look at me now!”

RG: No, not really. I had taken a harder route, but probably a much better route for me, which I was grateful for. With no NIDA, I joined [a Geelong-based community theatre group] the Woolly Jumpers, as part of a travelling troupe around Victoria. Just going from school to school with different audiences meant that instead of NIDA lecturers, it was my audiences who taught me what a good actor is.

Fitz: How do you mean?

RG: You learn how to deliver lines to best effect. You learn ... timing. Hold the line an instant longer, or give it quicker, or deliver it differently. Work it out. You learn how to amp your charisma up, because you’re trying to keep Year 9 students in Warrnambool schools from throwing empty Coke cans at you. I am sure they wouldn’t have but they definitely had a bullshit meter. So you’ve got to be compelling and you’ve got to be kind of percussive and exciting and surprising and you’ve got to give them a jolt every now and then to keep their attention. So I think I learnt so much more on that circuit than being in the gilded cage of NIDA – which, when I think about it, would have broken me down before building me up, and probably flattened out my quirks and jerks. I would have felt, you know, like I had to learn to speak like this [she puts on a posh tone] and be a dramatic actress. So if anything, I went into a different kind of blender that amplified my quirks and jerks. And I just don’t think with NIDA training I could have gone to that audition for Muriel’s Wedding and got the role.

Fitz: And it worked! Muriel’s Wedding takes Australia and the world by storm, and you’re away. I ask you gently to please park your modesty and ...

RG: I think I’m much less modest than you think ...

Fitz: Well, you’ve obviously got something that makes us in the audience lean forward. I, for one, don’t know how to define it. For every 10,000 actors treading the boards, you’re the one right up the front, killing it in role after role. Quite seriously, I know you’ve got it, and you know you’ve got it. We all know you’ve got it. But what is it? How do you define what it is that you’ve got?

RG: The best actors have a kind of vibrational frequency that sort of creates the eyeball energy vortex that makes you watch them. And there are great screen actors that don’t necessarily have that vibration for theatre, and great theatre actors that have the wrong frequency for cinema. I guess I have learnt how to modulate my frequency for what is required.

Fitz: (Uncertainly.) Is there an easier way of explaining it?

RG: Well, you’re asking technical stuff, and going deep, but among actors we call it “special sauce”. The great thing about the special sauce is, it really can come in all sizes and colours and shapes, because you can have a whole bunch of pretty people, and only one of them is really kind of vibrating on the right frequency, and that person will be the movie star. And the people that vibrate at Brad Pitt’s level or Nicole Kidman’s level, or Naomi Watts’ level, they are the real stars. Somehow, they have the vibrational stardust that amplifies charisma, and makes you watch them.

Fitz: You worked with Julia Roberts on My Best Friend’s Wedding. When you were working with her, did you think “Jesus wept, Julia, you’ve got special sauce.”

RG: Yes. She’s, like, special sauce, extra tasty. She’s amazing. She is amazing. She was the first big movie star that I worked with, and she was the real McCoy from the first. She’s just got it.

Fitz: Johnny Depp, when you worked with him in Blow?

RG: Well, Johnny is such a character actor. When he walks into a room, does he have it? Onto a set? Look, probably. But he’s also such a mimic, like he creates these characters. The Johnny Depp you meet on set then completely disappears into his role, and he’s kind of a puppet-master for the character that he’s created. You never see into Johnny’s soul. You never see into Johnny’s heart. There is a creative construction taking place before your eyes, which is why he’s so amazing.

Fitz: Tell me about him being a puppet-master?

RG: He’s all about the creation of a character. And he’s so extraordinarily, inventive, from the make-up to the hair to everything else. Like, I’m sure he tries on 50 pairs of shoes before every role to find the shoes right that make him feel like he’s stepping into the shoes of that character. Did John Wayne need to try on 20 pairs of boots before his film roles? I suspect not.

Griffiths with her 2002 Golden Globe for her performance in Six Feet Under.Credit: REUTERS

Fitz: I once asked Hugh Jackman if the magic we all see onscreen ever continues when the cameras have stopped rolling? His answer was, not often, though he did tell me a truly magical story about him and John Travolta with a film crew, recreating the famous Travolta’s Greased Lightning scene [from Grease] in the middle of the night on the freezing streets of LA – just for fun – while filming Swordfish. Did you and Toni Collette relive some of your wonderful chemistry, recapture the magic, after Muriel’s Wedding was over?

RG: In that case, sort of. Toni and I were on that juggernaut for a couple of years, and I did spend a lot of time with her, including just the two of us doing a road trip around Ireland, which was wonderful. But overall, as a mature actor – particularly when you move into television, and you’re working 75-hour weeks, having babies, breastfeeding, getting pregnant and having more babies – it’s not like you all head up to the Playboy Mansion when the shoot’s over. You go home ... Once you’ve seen what’s behind the curtain, and you know that the Wizard of Oz is just a normal guy, well, then, you know it’s your family, your friends and your roots that count, and you don’t need more magic and more bullshit. You just need to sometimes be told by people who know you who you are. And that’s been my way of not losing my mind, Fitz.

Fitz: And it was that desire for a home life which sent you down the path of shooting TV series, rather than films, in the first place?

RG: Exactly. The problem with movies is, you are always having this intense time, with all kinds of wonderfully creative people ... just before everyone packs up and heads off in different directions. It’s not even like a circus because at least with a circus, you’ll stay together and go to a new town. I’d always be in tears packing up to drag my five suitcases to the next destination, to meet the next bunch of people, and not long after my Oscar nomination I said to my manager: “I can’t do this any more. I can’t just be somewhere for six weeks and meet all these amazing people and then I never see them again. How am I ever going to meet someone if I’m f---ing packing up from one town and shunting off to another? Like, how can I find my soulmate? How can I have my family? How can I build a life?”

Fitz: Which, oddly, sent you Six Feet Under ...

RG: Yes. My manager sent me the script. It was coming out of the fax while I was staying at a little beach house in Palm Beach, and I just loved it from the first. And the best day of the lot was the first day of the second season. The show was a hit, and I was working with the same people, playing the same character, on the same set, in the same town. And it’s all hugs and kisses and, “Oh, my God, the band’s back together!” And it’s stable. Suddenly, I could build a life and invite someone else into it. Andy [husband Andrew Taylor] and I could start to plan a life together, with kids, living in LA.

Fitz: And lived happily ever after, if now back in Melbourne. I’ve got one more question before we get to Madam. In protest at the opening of Victoria’s Crown Casino, you turned up, topless. Your mother and I both want to know: “Darling, what the hell got into your head?”

RG: I was just really cross. I was really cross about the tender process, cross about Jeff Kennett, who’d cut funding to so many regional arts companies, including my beloved Woolly Jumpers. I didn’t like the casinos model which, worldwide, seemed to be either money-laundering for nefarious people or fleecing very vulnerable people. I decided to do a very female protest – not just angry with a banner. I wanted it to be pretty, with an image that was pretty. So I went as Jesus, topless (with a crown of thorns).

Fitz: In that case, your mother and I forgive you. And now to the Madam series – which, if you care, I love – where you play an American woman living in New Zealand who decides to run this entirely new thing, a brothel, run ethically.

Rima Te Wiata, who plays the brothel’s co-owner Jules, and Rachel Griffiths as Mack Leigh in Madam.

RG: Yes, it’s loosely based on a true story. These American producers developed it and, miraculously, they found just the right group of creative people to make it in Auckland, so it all went from there. This woman needs a side-hustle so she can balance her life out and provide for a kid with special needs. And then it draws in the lives of the workers and clients, and looks at what the whole industry is truly about.

Fitz: I’ve always loved the line from Gustave Flaubert, “that man has missed something, who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust,” and this series makes the case that the entire sex industry has its place, and is about a whole lot more than sex?

RG: Yes, it provides a range of services for a huge variety of clients. Women might have a view that men would only go to a brothel for kink and to do things that their wives don’t do. And [as my character says], “Yeah, but for some men that’s telling them they’re hot and stroking their hair.” It’s not that they’re not actually getting sex at home. They’re not having anyone look in their eyes and going, “You’re hot, baby”.

Fitz: But the very character you play is not providing that for her own husband, which is how she discovers he’s visiting a brothel, which she can run better. You have great sympathy for those wives and their sheer exhaustion.

RG: Yup. I want perimenopausal and menopausal women to absolutely recognise the desperation and fatigue and crankiness of my character, not because she’s a bitch, but because this is where she’s at in her life, and she’s seen every dream she ever had slip through her fingers like the last grains of sand, and she’s only just holding it together, right?

Fitz: Sort of. But ... “perimenopausal”. What is that?

RG: Oh, my God, don’t print that, that you don’t know what perimenopause is! It is the psychological and other symptoms you have of menopause before you stop your periods.

Fitz: (Sheepishly.) Ah-HA. Now I know. Thank you. In the distance, I just heard someone shout “CUT!” and I think it was my wife. On behalf of us all, we wish you many quirks, jerks and twerks for decades to come, and we glory in how far you’ve come from and since Warrnambool and Porpoise Spit.

Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist. Connect via Twitter.

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