You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead

by Hardy, Marieke

  It’s there forever for me, like a time-lapse camera of puberty, like a flick book any stranger can thumb through to watch my boobies grow in fast motion. All the bad haircuts, the ravaged skin from poorly applied makeup, the period where my face was so full and pudding-like it appeared as though I was orally smuggling a pair of hackey sacks. The speech impediments, the costumes you can tell I’m agonisingly self-conscious in, the thickly knit monobrow. If my parents had really wanted to dissuade me from a career as an adolescent actor they need only have said, ‘Listen, you’re welcome to do it—but we’re going to compile a “best of ” reel for your twenty-first birthday and it will feature you wearing too-tight leggings and a polo neck and rescuing a wombat and anyone who sees it will never want to have sex with you again.’

  In school I was monotonously in every production. Carey Baptist Grammar did Man of La Mancha in 1990, a musical theatre show about a man losing his mind and chasing windmills which seems a torturously apt analogy for the tumult of adolescence. There are really only three main roles—Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and Aldonza—and outside of a few speaking parts for priests and jolly inn-keepers the majority of minor roles are either town drunks or whores. There’s nothing like being in a high school production where fifteen teenage girls are cast as a chorus of prostitutes. All those hormones on stage, intermingling like an oversexed gumbo. The Herald Sun letters page would have a field day.

  The year after that we did My Fair Lady. They cast two Elizas, one who could sing and one who could act. I was the acting one. Given my Saturday mornings at the National Theatre Drama School (inhale, collect air in diaphragm, look meaningfully to back of room) I KNEW HOW TO PROJECT (exhale), so they had little choice but to allow me the role. Unfortunately, every time I opened my mouth to sing children in the front row wept. It’s widely understood that in the previews a heavily pregnant woman in the stalls went into labour during my rendition of ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’. Rebecca Leitch was the singing Eliza, and later in life she went on to have a long and successful career in opera. We swapped roles on alternating nights, star to chorus, star to chorus. I’d watch her slay them with ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly’ in her rich alto while I overacted as a florist wench and fashioned character traits that would make me stand out, like an alarming tic of the eyelid or a cartoonish limp.

  My parents gave me the ritual card and flowers on opening night. My mother had written in the card: ‘Chookas for the run, Miss Eliza Doolittle. And remember: P. E. E!’ This stood for ‘Projection! Eyes! Energy!’—three essential parts of an actor’s journey, though I can see how a passerby catching a glimpse of the card may have simply assumed I had bladder issues and even as a teenager needed to be reminded by my mother to urinate before taking the stage. My parents were there at every performance, never wavering in their support, always driving me home with constructive criticism along the lines of, ‘Well yes, I can see how a racegoer at Ascot might get so excited they spontaneously vomit into a pot plant, but I’m not sure it’s the best thing to pull focus from Rebecca like that when she’s trying her hardest to hold a high note.’

  In A Midsummer Night’s Dream I played Flute—a man who dresses up as a lady, then changes back to a man again, which confused pretty much the entirety of Year 5—and in the next year was shunted to the role of Phebe the shepherdess in As You Like It, while the far more beautiful and talented Elissa Elliott took the part of Rosalind. Phebe was a thankless role, requiring mostly that I race about swishing my petticoats through a forest made of cardboard trees painted by the Year 7 art class, the community service chain gang of high school. My love interest, Silvius, was a very nice boy named Ashley Warmbrand who stood at least a head shorter than me. ‘Sweet Phebe, do not scorn me; do not, Phebe,’ he would squeak in an unbroken quaver, staring determinedly at my chest. I spent the majority of my time glaring hatefully at Elissa Elliott from the back of the stage and years later experienced an entirely mean-spirited pang of satisfaction when I saw her on television advertising fungal creams.

  My stage career took me to Eeny Meeny Miney Mo, an amateur theatre piece that boasted as being ‘written, staged, directed and performed totally by the Agora Players!!!!’ which in theatre speak means ‘we couldn’t afford the rights to a real play so just made up our own!!!’ The cast age ranged from fifteen to forty, and the show was a mish-mash of sketches about ‘relationships’ written mostly by a young cast who had experienced very little outside of holding hands with James Grant on a playground swing. There was one particularly intense sketch called ‘Feelings’ which involved us all pairing off in the dark and writhing around while somebody in the wings played panpipe. This was my favourite part of the show because I was partnered with an intensely handsome hippy actor in his twenties named Sim and we pressed up against each other with a breathy, unscripted urgency. I looked forward to ‘Feelings’ with an unhealthy intensity. I think one night I may have actually cried when the sketch finished.

  I moved out of home at sixteen and started doing idiotic things like shaving my head and wearing nightgowns over baggy old men’s suit pants. It was the ’90s. A sweep of adolescent girls were doing the same thing, aping Courtney Love’s kinderwhore style and pretending with sneers and middle-finger salutes that they knew how to play guitar. I stopped being offered roles as a sweet, lisping girl next door and started auditioning for parts as mental patients and homeless teenagers. On Stingers, an undercover police drama starring Peter Phelps as a man who very much liked rolling across car bonnets in a butch fashion and yelling things like PUT THE GODDAMNED GUN DOWN, I played a pregnant junkie who held up a service station with The Secret Life of Us star Samuel Johnson. The makeup department was instructed to put traces of white powder around our nostrils ‘for authenticity’. On Raw FM I was a lesbian stripper who wore nothing but ruffled underpants, feathers and a jaunty waistcoat. On A Country Practice I played a demented character named Yesterday Hubble—spawning the immortal line of dialogue, ‘I thought I told you that yesterday, Yesterday’—and stalked an otherwise respectable doctor who climbed out of a hospital window to escape my unhinged lust. Yesterday Hubble ended up running away with a man in a trenchcoat who kept lizards as pets.

  On The Bob Morrison Show—a series starring a talking dog, and another to which my father was attached so I mustn’t say anything too unkind or sarcastic—I was a gothic psychopath, making one whole episode’s worth of life a misery for Elissa ‘just three easy applications and you’ll say goodbye to fungus for life!’ Elliott, who had irritatingly and to my mind unfairly again landed a leading role over me. I relished delivering acerbic comic put downs to her character’s face like, ‘Is that your real hair colour, or do you use bleach?’ (Hush, my father is reading) and probably put more bile and viciousness into the character than was originally intended. I even tried to adlib a few pertinent barbs related to my inner turmoil regarding all the parts she’d rudely stolen from me but I’m fairly certain my aside, ‘And in what sort of shit-crazy universe would Rosalind wear a push-up bra and Esprit bodysuit anyway?’ ended up on the cutting room floor.

  Without much success I competed for roles against the infinitely more successful Melissa George (Home and Away), Radha Mitchell (Sugar and Spice), and Rebecca Smart (The Shiralee). Rejection after rejection began to crack my once impenetrable confidence. The inevitable downward trajectory my parents had suffered was making its inherited presence felt.

  And then, of course, there was Neighbours. Neighbours, a series that has been on Australian television for exactly eight hundred and seventy three years—Doctor Karl Kennedy began life as an Indigenous dot painting on a cave wall, true story—chronicling the lives and loves of the residents of an unassuming yet dangerously lively Erinsborough court. Between good neighbours becoming good friends, as the theme song insistently informed us every weekday, there were weddings, car crashes, pregnancies, and the odd explosion that mysteriously occurred directly when ratings seemed to be taking a leisurely dive. Every Australian a
ctor in the history of time has played a role in Neighbours at some point, however small. Russell Crowe played bad boy Kenny Larkin. Ben Mendelsohn played somebody forgettably named Warren Murphy. Greg Fleet—one of the finest and most interesting stand-up comedians in the country—breezed through his role of Dave Summers, a character famous only for running down one of the show’s most popular cast members, Daphne Clarke, and killing her in a splatter of PG-rated blood and gore, which is to say a single delicate arc of tomato sauce against the windscreen.

  On Neighbours I played a small-time crook named Rhonda Brumby, living proof that ten years after Russell Crowe’s appearance the writers were still fairly creatively challenged when it came to naming characters. Rhonda Brumby was fresh out of ‘juvie’ and full of the sort of cartoonish bad girl swagger usually seen on cockney skanks parading around the set of EastEnders employing rhyming slang instead of real words. I actually got to say the line, ‘Don’t sweat it, boss—I’ve got the old bag wrapped around my little finger’ and nod menacingly. I was running a stolen goods racket out of Marlene’s antique shop (Ramsay Street was a badlands in those days) and eventually sent packing after a hair-pulling scrag fight with a character called Bianca Zanotti. The inmates of Wentworth Detention Centre had nothing on our tussle. We slapped at each other, shrilly squealing things like ‘Oh yeah? Well how do you like this, moll?’ until I tumbled to the carpet, humbled and subdued and ready to be packed back to reform school where I would presumably Turn Over a New Leaf on the off chance my agent could negotiate a returning role.

  I had sat around the Neighbours green room with the other actors, who were convinced they’d be able to throw together a markedly improved script in a pinch and had no issue whatsoever with undermining the tireless plotting work of their story department. I had rolled my eyes in a comradely fashion over the clunky dialogue and D-grade storylines, and was thus mortified when a month or so later I landed a job as a storyliner and sat in the writer’s room listening to the script department make equally poisonous fun of the actors. It was an all out faction war, with the major casualty being the show itself. Tauntingly, the actors would change all-important lines whilst on set, breezily throwing away plot points on the spur of the moment in order to slot in private jokes. In retaliation, the storyliners would conjure up increasingly absurd and humiliating scenarios for the actors to play out. The end result was a show full of characters wearing ludicrous things like fishing waders and lampshades whilst trading adlibs and making no sense whatsoever.

  The production company responsible for Neighbours decided in a burst of inspiration to install the writing department out at the studio for one day a week, so the actors could have access and discuss ideas for stories and character arcs. This should by all means have been a seamless exchange and friendly, bridge-mending process and probably would have been if the majority of actors weren’t so blindly ignorant of the scripting method itself. They’d come to us, one by one, with poorly hidden agendas about getting kissing scenes with cast sexpot Kimberly Davies (‘I just think my character would really connect with Annalise as a person’) or wildly inappropriate storylines about heroin addiction and AIDS. Actors always wanted to play heroin addicts or AIDS victims, simply so they got the chance to rub red makeup under their eyes and deliver dialogue in dramatic, award-winning gasps. One of the very pretty male leads came to see us for a long discussion about where his character was going and how ready he was for some truly meaty storylines.

  ‘I just . . . I want a chance to stretch myself, you know? Really—go to some dark places,’ he said to us, gazing through the glossy, floppy fringe currently sending thousands of TV Week readers into gusset-dampening swoons.

  We took him at his word and spent the next week plotting a story that was, for Neighbours circa 1996, relatively dark. We gave him cancer. It was television cancer, yes, which meant that it would probably never be properly named or treated and that it would only last for about eight weeks before everybody moved on to worrying about Harold Bishop’s upcoming tuba recital, but for an actor on a 6 pm soap it was at least a chance to show off some good ‘staring death in the face’ performing. Characters with cancer get to cry, punch paper thin walls in fits of anguish, and scream things like ‘Tell it to me straight, Doctor Karl. How long have I got?’ before collapsing in a dramatic faint. If he wanted dark places, this story had ‘Silver Logie’ written all over it.

  The next time we all met out at Channel Ten, we pitched the story to him. He listened to the whole thing impassively before chuckling quietly to himself as though there had been a dreadful misunderstanding yet we as simpleton writer folk weren’t to know any better.

  ‘I didn’t say,’ he explained slowly, just to make sure we were taking it all in, ‘that I wanted to cut my hair.’

  As he left the room he glanced at me, annoyed and hurt that as a fellow actor I hadn’t helped him out in some way; understood that when he’d said ‘dark places’ he’d actually meant kissing scenes with Kimberly Davies that went for longer than three minutes. There was the sense that as somebody who had worked alongside the cast I should have been better equipped to fly the flag for them behind enemy lines.

  I had seen the looks on their faces as they entered and noticed me there at the table, sitting with the much maligned script department and plotting the next degrading episode in their career.

  Traitor, I could feel Lou Carpenter thinking. Scab.

  Suck it up, Lou, I thought meanly in return, unwilling to be tarnished. You should hear our nickname for you when the producers leave the room.

  It was the first time I had felt a real chasm between myself and the acting world and I felt a stab of regret, as though I may have been making a dreadful mistake and leaving my people behind. Every time I sensed myself veering away from the punishing treadmill of auditions and headshots I made a desperate grab for the nearest role available, no matter how demeaning. I accepted walk-on parts as feral protestors, voice-overs for Cadbury’s. I even spent five fairly gruesome evenings covered in fake blood screaming hysterically at the aftermath of a car crash for a road safety commercial about dangerous driving. My character was a daffy passenger who distracted her chum to the point where our vehicle ploughed into another car and killed its driver, leaving a crying baby motherless. Our tagline: Concentrate or Kill.

  The whole world of film sets was intensely familiar and difficult to leave. Sedentary, conventional childhoods involving tennis lessons or catching the bus to school were things other, more well-adjusted friends from normal families had experienced. For months at a stretch I had lived on location, away from home. Colac, Echuca, Broken Hill. I had grown up too fast. I had lived in hotel rooms with scant regard for the discipline of schoolwork, surrounded by adults at all times. I had drunken nights with crewmembers and been stung by the insidious politics of the production office. On location, there was a reckless ‘school camp’ feel—everybody went to the pub after wrap and cheated on their spouses. What happens on tour, etcetera. It set an unhealthy foundation for relationships for years to come, and that transient sense of believing that you can inhabit and abandon a family within a matter of months.

  Then the roles began to fall away. And over time I stopped chasing them with that panicked feeling of missing out. I no longer went to castings. I stopped reading scripts. My loyal agent held on for a valiant number of years before she realised that I hadn’t updated my headshot since I was seventeen and there was utterly no point sending a twenty-five-year-old along for the role of pre-teen runaway Amber ‘Giggles’ McCoy.

  Yet an acting past haunts you in the way no other shameful previous professions do. Loose on a wild weekend in Surfers Paradise, a topless barmaid in a strip joint stopped me as I walked past.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, little brown boobies jiggling beneath the disco lights. ‘Weren’t you on The Henderson Kids?’

  It wasn’t as bad as the blindly offensive opener ‘Didn’t you use to be . . .’ but was awkward regardless. At least she h
ad a reference point. For a long time people would stand in front of me, trying to figure out where they knew me from. ‘You went to Deepdene Primary School, right?’ they would ask, certain that they knew me from childhood, a familiar face amongst the sandwich triangles and asphalt. ‘No . . .’ I would say politely, affecting a mirroring puzzled look, and implying with murmurs we’d figure it out together one day in the near future and marvel at how we’d ever managed to let such an obvious fact slip our minds.

  Twenty-five years after the shoot, the cast and crew of The Henderson Kids held a reunion party. Everybody gathered together on a freezing Melbourne Sunday afternoon to compare stomachs and breeding capacities, in that way adults do. There were all the former child actors of the cast, jostling noisily in a bar, looking tired, looking smeared with drink, looking, if you squinted, a little like the fresh-faced stars of a 1986 television show who had been filled with air and then deflated again, like a packed away bouncing castle. Some were still acting. Some presented Play School. Some were addicted to heroin. We exchanged comradely smiles and sympathetic stories of the dire state of the Australian film and television industry, or at least the parts of it that no longer employed us. Behind us, on a projector screen, were images of our more successful and wholesome past. Freckled, buck-toothed, ringleted, these kidlets from promotional shots in happier days rotated slowly like relics from a happier world.

  I felt for those still in the game. They seemed lost. You could see them trying not to look at the younger, better-looking versions of themselves as they talked up their walk-on role in the MTC production of Uncle Vanya, or three-week guest spot on Packed to the Rafters.‘I just did a corporate video with Iain Hewitson,’ said one haggard gentleman, who had played a member of feisty onscreen BMX gang the Brown Street Boys. I felt suddenly grateful for that chasm between my old life as an actor and the one I led now, doling out poisonous barbs and settling debts with people like Elissa Elliott and Peter Phelps from the privacy of my own home. With writing there is an inherent freedom, the ability to be your own boss and keep working when nobody is watching. More importantly you can write in your underpants. You can act in your underpants too, though I’m fairly certain my days of acting in underpants—my own or anybody else’s—are over. Perhaps I’m still just waiting for that phone call from my agent, the one telling me the perfect role has finally arrived and I’m to drop everything at once and claw my way back to D-grade stardom.