Denise Scott reveals how she juggled cancer treatment with the reboot of Mother and Son

Aussie comedian Denise Scott reveals how she got through shooting the remake of Mother and Son while undergoing a “full-on, walloping” chemo treatment.

Looking back now, Denise Scott thinks she might have been a little crazy to shoot the reimagining of beloved Aussie sitcom Mother and Son earlier this year – but she has zero regrets.

First there was the fact that the veteran comedian was stepping into the shoes of Ruth Cracknell – the stage and screen actor so revered that she has a room at the Sydney Theatre Company named in her honour – to play role of the scheming, dementia-suffering Maggie.

As if the pressure and expectation of that wasn’t enough, by the time cameras rolled, Scott was also undergoing a gruelling treatment for breast cancer. Although she knew the long days of shooting would be tough, she elected to press on and in the end found that the project was a welcome – and joyous – distraction as she fought the illness.

“In hindsight, it was probably insane because it was a full-on, walloping sort of chemo,” Scott says. “However, whenever I was actually filming and getting to play Maggie, I felt this inexplicable joy. I felt really happy. Everything else was a bit tricky and I’d worry about whether I was going to get through it and then when I was Maggie … I thought it was thrilling and I love the character and I really enjoyed making her mine.”

Denise Scott and Matt Okine in a scene from Mother and Son.

Fellow comedian Matt Okine, who was the driving force behind the remake and plays Arthur, the son in the title (Garry McDonald in the original), says he was in awe of his co-star – and already reckons she’s worth next year’s Gold Logie.

“If at any stage Denise had said ‘I can’t do this’ then guess what, we wouldn’t have done it and that’s completely fine and understandable,” Okine says. “Denise had constantly said from the get-go ‘I still want to do this, I want to be able to make it work’ and so we did everything we could to make that happen.

“When someone is as unwell as Denise was in that particular situation, there’s never a moment where you can think ‘this is going to be easy’ but somehow she made it easy. Somehow, she made it possible.”

Denise Scott as Maggie in Mother and Son.

Scott says that the entire cast and crew rallied around her, tailoring the shooting to her treatment, and she got through with the help of a body double who stood in for all the tedious and time-consuming set up work, and allowed her to conserve her strength for the actual filming. But the experience may have changed the stand-up comedian and panel show regular, whose acting credits include Winners and Losers and It’s a Date, for good.

“It was sort of like we became one person where I would do the actual filming bit and she would provide all the personality and chat with this exuberance for life while I just sat in the corner,” Scott says. “So between us, we kind of covered the bases. Now I’m thinking I’m never going to do a show without one ever again. It was very nice – you don’t even have to speak to anyone.”

Denise Scott and Matt Okine star in the remake of Mother and Son.

Having made it through production – and with the air date just over a week away – Scott says that as unpleasant as it was, going hard early with chemo and surgery for the “very specific form” of cancer, HER2+, has paid dividends.

“I’m good,” she says. “It sounds a little dramatic – I’ve now got to do six weeks of radiation, and then another nine months of chemo. But it’s more precautionary. They haven’t found cancer elsewhere or anything like that but I’ve got a way to go. It’s very hopeful.”

Okine says that Scott was his first and only choice for the part of Maggie when he first had the crazy-brave idea about a decade ago to reboot the hugely successful sitcom that ran on the ABC from 1984 to 1994 and won Logies for both Cracknell, who died in 2002, and McDonald.

The former Triple J breakfast host, who also wrote and starred in the 2017 comedy The Other Guy, had been on an overseas stand-up comedy tour with Scott when he came up with the idea. Having hit it off with Scott, who is 20 years his senior, and wondering what else they could work on together, he remembered the original series as “always being on in the house” when he was growing up. The proposed new version carried additional ‘what if’ factor for Okine, whose own mother had died of breast cancer when he was 12.

“That was the approach that I took when we were even thinking about it,” Okine says. “The realisation hit me that Denise would be about my mum’s age, and that’s exactly what my family would look like if my mum was still alive, and then the thought was ‘well, Mother and Son’. It was as clear and simple as that.”

But if Scott was rather noncommittal when Okine asked her if he could include her in his pitch to Geoffrey Atherden, the creator of the original series, she wasn’t the only one. Atherden had already knocked back other attempts to revive or reboot the show and Scott didn’t think her name being attached would help to sway him this time.

Matt Okine says that everyone was sceptical of his decision to try to reboot Mother and Son.

“Everyone was sceptical at the start,” says Okine with a laugh. “Geoffrey was sceptical, the ABC was sceptical, everyone was sceptical. It’s like when you tell someone that you going to try to climb Everest, you know that everyone’s gonna be like ‘Yeah sure, you go for it. Just don’t die up on that mountain’.”

Atherden, however, proved receptive to Okine’s 2023 take. The basic premise – a 30-something-year-old-man moves back with his meddling mother as she battles dementia and resists all efforts to move into assisted living – remains the same but it features a much more diverse and inclusive cast, representing not just modern, multicultural Australia, but also the comedian’s personal experience.

Okine says he’s almost bracing for the reaction from fans of the original outraged at the decision to include an immigrant story to reflect his own Ghanaian and European heritage, not to mention the gender-flipping of a key character and including LGBTQI storylines.

“I think that people seem to think that someone else made a show and decided to cast brown people in it to be woke,” he says. “I don’t think they realise that actually I as a show creator decided to make a version of a really classic show where it would basically be ‘what if I was Arthur and what if my mum was still alive?’.

“That’s really what the core of my placement within this show is. I always tell personal stories, and I like to always make things that connect with me, and so when people debase this as some sort of exercise in wokeness, they’re kind of undermining my life, and who I am as an Australian and what my life looks like.”

Mother and Son, August 23, 8.30pm, ABC

Originally published as Denise Scott reveals how she juggled cancer treatment with the reboot of Mother and Son