July 2010

Red Hot Talent

One of Australia’s leading ladies, Miranda Otto opens up about her new movie role and reveals how she almost became Mrs Brad Pitt

by KATHY BUCHANAN

Miranda Otto has starred alongside Hollywood hunks such as Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford and Orlando Bloom, is happily married to Underbelly star Peter O’Brien, and starred in a commercial opposite Brad Pitt. Jealous, anyone?

Gorgeous co-stars aside, it’s an inherited passion for the acting craft that attracted this NIDA graduate to acting. In fact, speaking to Otto in person, you get the feeling that she’d be just as happy performing in a 10-seat theatre as on the big-budget set of a film or a TV show.

“I enjoy doing both film and TV,” says Otto. “If you get on a [TV] show that happens to go for a long period of time, you get to flesh out a character, which is great. It’s quite fun with TV in that the script is being written as you go. You go to work and read the script… you have to work a lot faster, you have to adapt.”

It’s no surprise then that this versatile Sydney-based actress has worked on a wide range of projects with A-list stars, including Michelle Pfeiffer in What Lies Beneath. Otto describes Pfeiffer as “so helpful and supportive, really lovely and generous with her time. Often when you’re working with people who are the biggest stars, they’re incredibly amiable and so easy to work with.”

She also co-starred with Charlie’s Angels’ Lucy Liu in the TV series Cashmere Mafia and Debra Messing in The Starter Wife. Then there’s her attention-grabbing role as shieldmaiden Éowyn alongside Cate Blanchett in the last two films of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

A well-respected actress with flawless porcelain skin, pale jade eyes and famously gorgeous strawberry blonde hair, Otto is considered by many to be the next Judy Davis, and is always up for a new challenge.

Otto’s latest film is South Solitary, directed by fellow Aussie Shirley Barrett and the opening film of the Sydney Film Festival. It was Barrett who cast Otto in one of her first movies, Love Serenade, which went on to win the Camera d’Or at Cannes. She then appeared in a string of Aussie movies, such as the cult films Doing Time For Patsy Cline and True Love and Chaos.

South Solitary also sees her teaming up with her real-life actor father, Barry Otto, who plays her cantankerous head lighthouse keeper uncle, who is very hard on her character.

Otto says that playing Meredith, 35, who is unmarried and in disgrace, was a welcome challenge and allowed her an opportunity to delve into Australian history. “People always think of beaded flapper dresses in the ’20s, but the reality is that most women would only have two pairs of shoes and lumpy homemade skirts. We wanted it to be realistic, so we did research at the New South Wales’ library and looked up a lot of 1920s ads and newspapers.

“You just realise what a difficult time it was. My character Meredith is a modern woman of the day who — like so many women of that post-war generation — can’t get a relationship and misses out on having children. Even though the film is set on an isolated Tasmanian island in 1928, it’s a very modern syndrome.”

Meredith’s unlikely love interest is a returned soldier suffering from shell-shock, played by the handsome Hungarian/New Zealand actor Marton Csokas, who starred in Romulus, My Father. Though the story is set in Tasmania, filming took place on the southern Victorian coast.

“I loved going on location. Even though we were working long, six-day weeks, you just throw yourself into the project. I see dad a lot anyway, but of course it was lovely to have him on set. We were in Portland last October and hit a heat wave. But we were desperate for overcast days, because the plot revolves around bad weather. So we’d be hoping for rain and clouds, and the locals would be so excited it was fine weather for us.”

Otto married Australian actor Peter O’Brien in 2003 in Sydney and soon after, starred in a Logie-winning role opposite him in the Australian TV mini-series Through My Eyes: The Lindy Chamberlain Story. O’Brien, together with their daughter Darcey, were frequent visitors to the set.

“My husband and five-year-old daughter came back and forth from Sydney, so Sunday was family day. I think Darcey’s so used to seeing me dressed up, she doesn’t think about it. When I was a kid I loved Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire — all those 1930s films. I loved all the singing and dancing. There’s a certain naïveté about those films, and as a kid it seemed like a beautiful world.”

Otto moved around in her early years, which may be why she’s so comfortable filming on location. She was brought up in Brisbane until she was seven, then lived briefly in Hong Kong with her mother, Lindsay, also an actress. When her parents separated, she settled in Newcastle with her mother, and visited her actor father in Sydney on weekends and holidays, and put on plays with friends.

Otto was accepted into medicine and excelled in ballet, but ultimately decided to pursue her love of acting. “When we were at NIDA we used to leave these notes on the noticeboards for each other saying, ‘Steven Spielberg called’. So when I did get a call from him saying he wanted me to be in War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise, I couldn’t believe it!”

Otto was three months pregnant at the time and told the director, expecting she’d automatically lose out on the role. However, instead Spielberg said, “Oh great, I’ll write it into the part”. A few months later, Otto was starring in the blockbuster adaptation of the H.G. Wells literary classic.

Although she says, tongue-in-cheek, the highlight of her career has to be a commercial she starred in alongside Brad Pitt. “He was lovely, a very nice person, very down to earth. I can’t remember the exact details, but he was proposing to me in the commercial. It was very funny.”

South Solitary opens nationally in cinemas on 29 July

Favourite Holiday Destinations

Melbourne: “I always love visiting Melbourne. There are food and wine festivals, a fashion festival and the Grand Prix — every week there is something on, particularly in winter. You can wear your coats and get a real taste of the cold.”

Bangkok: “There’s a hotel we love, so we always try to have a stopover there for a day or two. The Sukhothai is just a really nice, quiet hotel with a lovely pool and beautiful rooms. It’s quite low-key and beautifully done — you won’t feel like you want to leave the hotel.”

Avalon: “If you fly into Avalon, you can go straight to the Great Ocean Road. Apollo Bay, near where we stayed while filming this movie, has green rolling hills that take you down to a perfect bay beach. It’s not very built-up and there are lots of places to stop. The whole drive is great.”