Four decades into a stellar acting career, Logie Hall of Fame inductee Rebecca Gibney is more aware than ever of the ephemeral nature of acting success.
Rebecca Gibney is on the move. Always is. For as long as she can remember hers has been a life of perpetual motion, with eyes on what’s next.
“I don’t need to look at the past at all, which is probably just as well. I can’t remember half of it!” the actor says, with a warm laugh.
“People say to me ‘you’ll write your life story one day’ – I’d have to make half of it up! I think as an actor, you learn, forget, learn, forget, learn, forget. I’ve forgotten a lot of my past. I don’t remember what I did last week. It’s not just menopause. I think it’s just me.”
It’s possible she allocates no brain space to wistful self-reflection because kind members of the public do that for her. All the time. The internet is freckled with references to Gibney, 59, being one of Australasia’s most “beloved and celebrated” actors. She’s frequently approached by gushing viewers reminiscing about how much they love a character she played years ago. That could grate on someone so future-focused, but she insists, as good-naturedly as the characters she’s known for portraying, that it is instead always a “huge honour”.
“A lot of the people who continue to support me have been watching my shows for as long as I’ve been around. My audience is a similar age to me and because I’ve sort of just hung around ... I think there’s something comforting about that – to have someone who is familiar.”
Most familiar – going on anecdotal mentions – remains Julia Rafter, the loving matriarch from family-oriented comedy drama Packed To The Rafters that ran from 2008-2013. Though she generally plays characters who are “fairly likeable” this was the role Gibney pegs to have “secured me the spot as mother of Australia”.
The mother of Australia is in fact a Kiwi. Levin-born, she was still a teen when she made a move that would define the rest of her life – crossing the Ditch to Australia to try to make it as an actor. Though never her intention, it would be more than three decades before she returned home to Aotearoa on a more permanent basis.
“I always kept thinking I’ll come back eventually, but I just kept working,” she reflects. “I kept getting job after job after job, and they were quite often long running jobs.”
In addition to Jules Rafter there was mechanic Emma Plimpton in the outback medical drama The Flying Doctors; forensic psychiatrist Dr Jane Halifax in Halifax f.p. and Detective Sergeant Eve Winter in The Killing Field. But eventually she did return home. For work.
In 2016 she was based in Queenstown, filming the second season of Wanted, a drama series she created with her husband of 23 years, Richard Bell, when the couple’s son Zac fell in love with New Zealand’s laidback lifestyle. “It was our son who went ‘You mean if I roll down that hill and then crawl through long grass a snake’s not gonna get me? I’m never leaving.’
Soon afterwards the family bought a house in Dunedin and Gibney started supplementing her Australian commitments with appearances in local productions. She’s since done the requisite appearance on The Brokenwood Mysteries and underpinned three seasons of TVNZ’s Under The Vines, starring alongside Charles Edwards as two unprepared city slickers who inherit a failing vineyard.
That’s not to say she’s stayed put though. Her career is very much still based in Australia and with Zac having now left home, Gibney and Bell have upped sticks again, recently swapping Ōtepoti for a rural spot further north in Marlborough’s Rai Valley. “We’re sort of halfway between Blenheim and Nelson, it’s absolutely beautiful. I’m very happy.”
Growing up privy to his mother’s success it’s perhaps no surprise that Zac has sought out a career of his own in the arts. He’s just about to graduate from Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School – and “go out into the big wide world”. It’s a prospect about which both mother and son have some understandable trepidations.
“I think it’s actually dawned on him that it is going to be hard, jobs won’t necessarily fall into his lap, he’s going to actually have to get a normal job because it’s a tough industry,” Gibney reflects. “It’s hard for him because he has grown up watching me working very hard, but fairly constantly. So there’s a kind of misguided idea that that’s what the world is like and it’s not; the majority of actors are out of work for a lot of the time.”
Despite the near-constant adoration, the baseline reality of the industry is something even Gibney is attuned to. Returning to the close-knit industry where she got her start has meant getting reacquainted with both the opportunities and limitations of a small pond.
“We work incredibly hard here ... Maybe because we are from such a small place, it makes us more determined to leave our mark on the world. There’s massive talent here,” she says.
“The sad thing for me is we don’t invest enough in our arts community, financially. We don’t get enough assistance from the Government, and it means that people leave and go overseas because it’s the only way they can have a career. Even I have to keep going back to Australia because the money’s better and the work conditions are better.”
Even so, any apprehension about Zac’s career choice was quelled when she saw him on stage and, moreover, recognised that he’s found what it is he loves to do. “You have to do what you love. You have to find your joy. For me, as a parent, I just want to encourage him to be who he needs to be. I’ll always be there for him. Both my husband and I just feel very grateful that he is so kind. I mean, he’s talented and all the rest of it, but he’s kind and genuine and empathetic, a good soul.
Being a good soul is something Gibney values, it’s one of the things she credits the longevity of her career to. In August this year, Gibney became only the fourth woman in 40 years to be inducted into Australia’s Logie Hall of Fame for acting. She credits her endurance to a simple formula, built on advice doled out early on by her Flying Doctors co-star, Maurie Fields, “I always make sure that I’m always on time. I’m never late. I’m very well prepared, and I make sure I’m really easy to get along with.
But moving with the times is imperative too.
“I also recognised as I got older, that if I don’t start creating my own work, it’s likely that I may not work. So I’ve stepped behind the camera and I am an executive producer or a producer on most of the shows that I’ve been attached to, not to have total control, but just to have control over my own destiny.”
Destiny it seems, awaits on stage. In 2025 the small screen mainstay returns to the theatre for first time since 2006, in Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Circle Mirror Transformation, a humorous and heartbreaking play by Pulitzer Prize-winning American Annie Baker. The code switch is exciting and terrifying in equal measure, though Gibney’s been heartened by her son’s advice that “excitement and fear are the same emotion. You just have to switch around”.
Approaching 60, Gibney is determined to switch things up. “I want to challenge myself. I want to do things that are going to take me out of my comfort zone. If we don’t keep learning, I think we stagnate. I think that’s when you die, if you don’t keep moving. If you don’t keep changing, you might as well just give up.”
Contrast also motivated her next project, A Remarkable Place To Die. The four-part murder mystery set in Queenstown sees Chelsie Preston-Crayford star as Anais, a savvy detective who eschews a promising career in Sydney to return home and unpick the mystery surrounding the deaths of her father and sister. Gibney supports as Veronica, Anais’ brittle and volatile mother with whom she has a strained relationship. The impenetrable character is so dissimilar to Gibney’s go-to territory that her first instinct was to turn the role down.
“I rang Philly [de Lacey], who is the creative producer and said, ‘Look, I just can’t relate to this woman. I don’t like her,’”
“Veronica’s nothing like me. She is brutal, and she is closed off and she is selfish. I had to keep going back to try to find things about her that I could relate to ... I really did have to draw deep and find reasons why this woman was the way she was and find a humanity about her.”
A comprehension of human fallibility is one of Gibney’s most closely held tenets. One instilled at an early age. The youngest of six children, she grew up in an environment characterised by what she classifies as “fairly severe domestic violence”. As a result she lived with severe anxiety for many years, but says as she’s aged she’s come to a place where she’s been able to work through it.
“I had a mother who constantly instilled in us that when people do bad things, it’s not necessarily because they’re bad people. In my father’s case, he was disease addicted. He had alcoholism, which caused him to do terrible things. So I learned to forgive very quickly and show compassion from a very young age.
Gibney’s life approach is now coloured by eternal optimism. “I’m a great believer in non-judgment, and I think things will always get better because things always did.
“For me, every day is a gift, and I make sure that every day I wake up and just in my head say, ‘Thank you’ for giving me another day and may I help be a bit of a guiding light when people are struggling. Particularly the world at the moment is very sad and a bit dark. If I can spread a bit of positivity and a bit of love and a bit of silliness – that’s kind of my goal.”
This spirit of goofiness sees her posting online joyous videos of her, clad in lycra, dancing around her living room singing along to songs by New Radicals with a dumbbell as a microphone. The woman who for so long has only looked to the future is trying to live, and dance, in the moment.
“I know it sounds a bit cliche, and it’s a bit woo-wooey and all that, but practising gratitude is just about waking up and going. ‘I have hands that work. I have feet that work. I have a fairly healthy body. I’m not going to obsess about gaining a kilo or two. I’m not going to obsess about the lines around my eyes, you know?”
But life’s a moveable feast so she’s not obsessing about changing her mind either. “If I feel like getting a bit of Botox, I will. At the moment, I haven’t and my lines are getting deeper, but I’ve earned the laughter lines. I’ve cried a lot, but I’ve laughed a lot. So I think I just wanna be grateful for that, for every single moment.
“We get stuck in routines, or we do the same thing and particularly when you get to my age we stop learning. So, I want to learn new dance moves. I want to learn to ski properly. I want to go to different places. I want to keep moving – forward.”
A Remarkable Place to Die premieres on TVNZ1 and TVNZ+ on November 3. Three seasons of Under the Vines are available on TVNZ+
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