Miranda Otto has played many characters deserving of a cult following. There was Dimity in her early movie Love Serenade, warrior princess Éowyn in The Lord of the Rings, and Aunt Zelda in the recent campy witchcraft series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
But in her latest, The Clearing, a cult following comes with her character.
In the mini-series adaptation of JP Pomare’s book In the Clearing, she plays Adrienne Beaufort, a character the New Zealand writer based on Anne Hamilton-Byrne. As the head of notorious Australian sect the Family, Hamilton-Byrne claimed she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, while preaching a New Age mix of Christianity, Hinduism, and space alien theory to her followers.
Otto may not be playing Hamilton-Byrne, but her big hair, big glasses and dramatic make-up suggest the show isn’t fudging any connection to the real figure.
“Yeah, I guess people could say that there are visual similarities,” Otto tells the Listener. “I really didn’t think about her. I’ve done so much research on other cults and I guess it’s been a fascination for me over the years. So, realistically, for me it was more about drawing from lots of other material that I could find and a lot of it is the script and imagination, to make up this character for myself.”
But the hair and the specs …
“Well, that’s not actually my hair,” she laughs. “The look was so great. I loved it.”
The real Hamilton-Byrne adopted more than a dozen children – some of them were offspring of cult members – dying their hair blonde and raising them as her own as part of a plan to face a coming apocalypse.
The Family was raided by Victorian police in the late 1980s, but Hamilton-Byrne largely escaped punishment for her actions, which included dosing her “children” with psychiatric drugs and LSD. She died in 2019, the year Pomare’s mystery thriller, his second, was published. It followed documentaries, books by cult members and other non-fiction works.
In the Clearing, though, took a novelistic approach and jumped between time periods, the present focusing on the abduction of a child, which might have ties to the “Blackmarsh” cult from years past. Its echoes of the real-life Family combined with its narrative sleight of hand make it easy to see why its Australian producers grabbed the screen option, with Disney+ taking it to the wider world. The show comes complete with a cameo by the Melbourne-based writer in a scene where Adrienne is addressing her following.
“I was really impressed by the level of detail but also how recognisable the scene was – it felt exactly like a scene pulled from the novel, as though I was stepping into this world I’d dreamed up years ago,” Pomare tells the Listener by email. “I don’t know if I’ll give up writing just yet, but after it airs, I expect a call from Taika for a lead in his next film.”
Pomare is chuffed about how quickly his first page-to-screen adaptation has happened. “I was shocked when I got the news. I couldn’t really process it at first. The most surprising thing was the speed with which it went from an option to in production, to cut and in the can, ready to watch. I think it was two to three years after publication, which is lightning speed in this industry.”
A preview of early episodes in the eight-part mini-series suggests the script has added a few more balls to the narrative juggling act in the novel. Pomare is OK with that.
“Film and TV demand more content, more storylines, more story in general, so I expected the producers and writers to expand upon the source material. My view on this is to let the experts do their thing. I have no experience with screenwriting but I know it’s a distinct skill from novel writing, so I’m just excited to see where they’ve taken it.”
Those episodes also suggest it’s a series big on atmosphere and some chilling performances, especially from Otto as the cult leader whose blonde brood calls her “Mother”.
“You don’t really see female cult leaders,” she says. “So it was a very interesting character to get to play. Like, how would a woman take on that role? How would it be different from a man?
“I realised she was someone who was so unable to emotionally feel anything – [suffering] such a vacuum of emotion – that she was feeding off other people’s emotions. It felt very vampiric.
“I started out with her being quite cold, but then we found that if she was at times kind of warmer and sweeter, that was sort of more disturbing.”
Jeffrey Walker, who is one of two directors on the show with Otto’s half-sister Gracie Otto, agrees The Clearing might be a Victorian extension to the wintry Aussie gothic shows that have come mostly from Tasmania in recent times, such as The Kettering Incident and The Gloaming.
“We’ve definitely tried to create a visual mood. As much as this is an Australian story, we just didn’t want it to feel like it’s an Australia that’s been depicted over and over again.”
The show also arrives at a time when there is talk in Australia of imposing a quota on US streaming platforms for local content. The Clearing is Disney+’s first Australian drama after a couple of sports documentaries and Walker is currently making the company’s next – The Artful Dodger, about the character from Dickens’ Oliver Twist winding up in the penal colony. Still, The Clearing is a foray into dark territory for a brand synonymous with family entertainment.
“Yeah, it was amazing to see that classic Walt Disney font at the bottom of the script … We’re in a new era.”
The Clearing is streaming on Disney+.
