Asher Keddie: ‘I just don’t know how to embrace the party’
Gold Logie winner Asher Keddie is proving her own fears wrong as she brings a complicated character to life in a haunting new series.
A rather major milestone birthday is looming for Asher Keddie next year.
And while the Gold Logie winner is completely at ease about turning 50 in July, ready to embrace all that entails – what Keddie isn’t primed for is just how to celebrate. In fact she’s feeling quite overwhelmed as the date continues to inch ever closer.
“People keep asking me what am I doing for my 50th and I’m like ‘When’s that? Oh hang on – it’s next year’,” Keddie says, laughing.
“I’m just under so much pressure from my friends and family and I’m like, ‘well, I don’t know. You organise something’.
“I mean, some of my friends plan trips overseas and really extravagant things. I’m feeling too shy to organise something like that. I just don’t know what to do.”
But, she’s not shying away from the big 5-0.
“I mean, I’m certainly embracing the age – and while it comes with its challenges, it also feels the most relaxed and assured time of my life,” Keddie candidly shares, before adding with another laugh: “I just don’t know how to embrace the party.”
Another joy has been shedding the fears she held 10 years ago that the roles would dry up as she headed into her late 40s. They were most definitely unfounded, given in the last decade, after farewelling her Logie-winning role as Dr Nina Proudman in Offspring, Keddie’s continued to explore a wide variety of complex characters from roles in The Cry, The Hunting, Stateless, Nine Perfect Strangers with Nicole Kidman, Melissa McCarthy and Luke Evans, and then teaming up with Bruna Papandrea and her Made Up Stories team again for Binge original Strife which will air later this year.
“I think that’s so outdated now (the notion that roles become few and far between) – the landscape has changed so vastly for female creatives,” Keddie explains.
“The introduction of streaming has created so many more projects and opportunities – it’s changed enormously.
“I absolutely worried about that 10 years ago when my colleagues, in their mid-to-late forties, were talking about their frustrations.
“But, not only don’t I not feel that frustration now, I feel galvanised by any kind of obstruction or challenge.
“I feel like audiences are also embracing the fact that stories about women in their 40s, and 50s, and 60s are incredibly complex and interesting. Thank goodness.”
Keddie will next be seen as Sally Morgan in Prime Video’s adaptation of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. She’s another complex female character to add to her already lengthy list. The avid bookworm places Holly Ringland’s best-selling and emotionally compelling novel in her top 5 favourite-ever reads. So she knew she just had to be a part of it.
“A few months after I finished reading the book, for the first time ever in my career, I put my hand up,” Keddie explains.
“I’d heard that Bruna had the rights to the book, and I said to my agent, ‘Just tell her I really like it.’
“And my agent asked, ‘What character?’ I said, ‘Sally’ and she said, ‘Well, she’s hardly in it.’
“I said, ‘I know, that’s OK.’
“(But) I’d be lying if I didn’t say that when I read the script and saw she was all the way through it, very much a part of the shaping the story and the plot, I was really very happy. That was the icing on the cake.”
Keddie also confesses – just like the everyday devotee – she worries what will happen to a beloved book when it’s adapted for screen. But given it was in the very safe hands – again – of the powerhouse of Made Up Stories and screenwriter Sarah Lambert from Love Child and Lambs of God fame, Keddie was at peace.
Ringland’s evocative and beautifully crafted tale of the titular Alice who, at age 9, tragically loses her parents in a mysterious fire, has been translated perfectly for the small screen. Thornfield flower farm – which production assumed they were going to have to design and build from scratch, until they stumbled across a grand, almost fairytale home in Scone, NSW where they planted native flower crops – is picture perfect. The enthralling drama spans decades and dark themes are interwoven as Alice goes to live with her grandmother June at Thornfield, where she learns there are secrets within secrets about her and her family’s past. And while her voice has been silenced, the native wildflowers and plants provide a way to express the inexpressible.
There’s a tremendous ensemble including Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Leah Purcell, with Ayla Browne and Alycia Debnam-Carey as young and adult Alice respectively.
Not to forget Hollywood megastar Sigourney Weaver as June. Keddie says the Aliens star was “warm and grounded and beautiful to be with”.
“I so enjoyed watching her performance – apart from working with her, which was, which was an absolute privilege and really enjoyable,” Keddie says.
Equally enjoyable was reuniting with former on-screen Offspring love Alexander England, who is Sally’s husband John, despite the emotionally taxing nature of many of their scenes. “We work really very, very easily together and closely and honestly and – this isn’t always the case with actors – but between us there’s just no judgment,” Keddie shares.
“And the ease between us means we have a great rapport and we like to laugh a lot. Some days there wasn’t a laugh to be heard – because we just were really focused.
“It was the kind of project where having that familiarity – not only Alex, but with (director) Glendyn (Ivin) and Sam Chipman our cinematographer, and also the folks of Made Up Stories – there was just a sense of feeling very safe to explore what was often really confronting and challenging material.”
Lost Flowers’ filming traversed Australia and so Keddie spent a fair whack of time living apart from her Melbourne-based family – artist husband Vincent Fantauzzo and sons Valentino, eight, and 12-year-old Luca from his previous marriage. They visited her in Sydney and she tried to ensure no longer that a week would go by without seeing them.
“It’s the way it is now though, my little one I used to take everywhere with no matter where I was shooting,” Keddie says.
“But he’s eight now and is in year two and he’s got to go to school and I want him to. I can’t be selfish like that and sort of drag him around all over the place anymore, unfortunately.”
Of course, there’s always FaceTime and messages which – as any working parent understands – is a blessing and a curse.
“I have six Facetimes a day – on set and after work,” Keddie shares, with a laugh. “And then I’m like, ‘I’ve got to go learn my lines for the next day’ and he’ll be like ‘No, hang on, mum’. It goes on and on even if you are in separate towns.”
Keddie was enjoying downtime with her family when we chat over Zoom in the weeks after filming on Strife had wrapped.
Next on her to-do list was heading to Queensland to work on an as-yet to be publicly released project, reuniting with Offspring producer Imogen Banks.
Oh, and that little matter of planning a party.
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart premieres on August 4 on Prime Video.
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Originally published as Asher Keddie: ‘I just don’t know how to embrace the party’
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