Robyn Malcolm in After the Party, which has been picked up by Australian and British distributors.
Robyn Malcolm in After the Party, which has been picked up by Australian and British distributors.
A desire to see women playing interesting characters their own age was one of the motivating factors for Robyn Malcolm to create her latest TV role.
Malcolm, best known for her role as Cheryl West in Outrageous Fortune, returns to our screens tonight in After the Party, a gritty new drama about a woman who accuses her husband of a sex crime against a teenager, but no one believes her.
For the first time in her career, Malcolm has taken on a leading role behind the scenes, developing the series with writer Diane Taylor.
She told Paula Bennett on her NZ Herald podcast, Ask Me Anything, that the two met when Malcolm auditioned for a role in a movie Taylor had written.
“I auditioned for a character who was in their fifties and... it seemed like I was the right person for the part at one point, but the director came in and cast a young actress to play the character that I was up for, and she was in her early thirties.”
Malcolm said this was not the first time this had happened to her, and the experience made her “furious”.
“They call it aspirational casting. So apparently a 55-year-old woman out in the real world doesn’t want to see herself played by a 55-year-old woman. She wants to see herself played by a 35-year-old.
“So we went, okay, well, what are all the things that make us uncomfortable about women in their fifties? And why don’t we put them on screen?”
Malcolm and Taylor spent two years shaping the character of Penny and the story around her. Already, After the Party has been picked up for international distribution in Australia and the UK, with more opportunities likely now that it is going live.
Malcolm is hardly slowing down. She has kept busy in recent years, including working on the Apple TV+ show Black Bird, as well as starring in Far North earlier this year alongside Temuera Morrison.
Robyn Malcolm. Photo / Supplied
Reflecting on her career, Malcolm credits acting with saving her life in a lot of ways, as it helped her deal with issues she had as a teenager around body image and shame.
While she feels there is a better understanding and openness around mental health now, Malcolm said that it was difficult when she was growing up to tackle the problems she had with an eating disorder.
“I would binge and then not eat and throw up and binge and then not eat. I’ll never forget: it was two o’clock in the morning. I was just a wee poppet, like 12, in the dark, in the laundry where the freezer was, eating ice cream and sobbing, not able to stop.
“I guess you’d call it a food addiction, but then in the morning I would have to try and purge or I would then starve myself for days. And then it was that cycle and it went on for years and years.”
She said one piece of advice, which she received from Dame Jane Campion on the set of Top of the Lake, had put her relationship with acting in perspective.
“In a rehearsal, I was being this absolute overacting car crash, and she came up to me, put her hand on my forearm and said, ‘I already love you, I know you can act, you don’t have to prove it to me - just give me you.’
“And I remember getting really teary and going, ‘But that’s not what we do as actors. The reason we became actors is so we didn’t have to be us.’
“And she went, ‘That’s the trick. You think you’re being somebody else, but to really communicate what’s going on, you’ve got to give them you.’
“And I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I was putting masks on to be an actor, but actually what I was doing was giving an audience me. And the equation of that really helped.”
Listen to the full podcast to hear more from Robyn and Paula.
Ask Me Anything is an NZ Herald podcast, hosted by Paula Bennett. New episodes are out every Sunday.
