So, Rachel Griffiths, what’s an Australian national treasure like you playing an American in a New Zealand comedy about sex work?
“Are you questioning the geography or your little industry?” replies Griffiths wryly from Melbourne, having interrupted her packing for the Monte-Carlo Television Festival to talk.
There, as the star and an executive producer of Madam, she’ll be representing the show, which is in the official selection for the event’s Golden Nymph award against some heavy hitters from the US, the UK and Europe.*
“Well, they definitely had me at, ‘Do you want to come and play with a bunch of Kiwis?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ Then I’m like, ‘Wait, I should read it first.’”
As Griffiths found, Madam is based on the true story of Antonia Murphy, an American who migrated from San Francisco to Whangārei with her Kiwi then-husband and a disabled son who required constant care. Taking stock of local sex work laws, she opened an “ethical” brothel named “The Bach” in the town in 2016. It closed a few years – and many headlines – later.
Still, the venture won the Ivy League-educated Murphy plenty of international attention, especially after she wrote a piece headlined “I’m An Ethical Pimp” for the Huffington Post website.
She had already published a book about her artisan farming efforts on the outskirts of the city. She has a memoir about her sex work entrepreneurship coming out later this year, timed for the international release of the show.
The series of 10 half-hour episodes tweaks Murphy’s story and character. Griffiths plays Mackenzie “Mack” Leigh as an American but less of an Ivy Leaguer.
“Antonia had a very, very privileged education and upbringing economically, and I guess I took her out of the 1% and made her a bit more of a kind of Sheryl Crow mom, kind of California crunchy. I thought ‘How does the girl with the Ivy League, Rolls-Royce education end up in a small town in New Zealand?’ was its own story and there was just kind of enough in the show.
“I probably made her a little bit more everywoman – the menopausal woman who’s just really tired, and tired of carrying the emotional load for her family.”
The show shifts things from Whangārei to an unspecific NZ town, one populated by some familiar faces: Martin Henderson is Mack’s husband and Rima Te Wiata, Kura Forrester, Robbie Magasiva, Danielle Cormack, Carmel McGlone and Mike Minogue make appearances.
It was created by actor-writers Shoshana McCallum and Harry McNaughton and its directors include Madeleine Sami and Peter Salmon, who, with McCallum, created the Emmy-winning 2020 short iNSIDE.
McNaughton says they had Griffiths on their cast wish list right from the beginning of the project. “So, when the news came that she was going to do it I was shocked. I mean, she’s just iconic, right?”
Griffiths’ career kicked off with the classic Aussie comedy Muriel’s Wedding in 1994 (see below). She spent long stints on American television dramas Six Feet Under and Brothers and Sisters. In more recent years back in Australia, she has also worked as a producer and director, and helmed her first feature Ride Like a Girl, about Melbourne Cup-winning jockey Michelle Payne, in 2019.
As an actor, she has been offered a few “madam” roles before. This was the first she liked.
“I’ve passed them all up because there’s always this kind of male gaze about it. Even when the rah-rah is, ‘Oh, it’s female empowered’ when it’s an all-male show-running team, all straight and the women are kneeling in phone boxes sucking on prosthetics which will live on the internet forever. So, no thank you.
“I just thought making it a comedy was so much part of shifting it to the female gaze.”
She hasn’t done a lot of comedy in her 30-year career. In Madam, she’s very much the straight woman to the Kiwi characters. She found scenes opposite Te Wiata, who plays the manager of the motel where Mack sets up her knocking shop, a particular challenge.
“She would have me in stitches. It was cruel. Kiwis are just the masters of this gorgeous kind of humour. I don’t think it’s as acerbic and mean, perhaps, as the Australian sense of humour that really lives in the put-down.
“Kiwis have this kind of mad, mental, kind of lovely ribbing that’s like how you tease your cousins knowing that you’re going to see them next Christmas. No barb ever lands so deep that the wound doesn’t heal. I think Australians put the knife in a bit more in their humour … Even in something like Muriel’s Wedding, the knives are out.”
*The show won the award for “Best Creation”.
Madam screens from Thursday, July 4, 8.30pm (double episode) on Three and streams on ThreeNow from the same day.
Muriel’s Wedding – the 30th anniversary
Rachel Griffiths (Rhonda) looks back on the Abba-powered Aussie comedy which was her breakthrough role.
This year marks 30 years since the release of Muriel’s Wedding, the classic Australian comedy-drama and international hit. It was a career breakthrough for Rachel Griffiths and Toni Collette.
Griffiths played Rhonda, an old high school classmate to Collette’s wedding-obsessed Muriel. They bond as they escape their troubled lives in Queensland’s Porpoise Spit.
The film, written and directed by PJ Hogan and complete with a memorable karaoke performance of Abba’s Waterloo, still holds up today. Griffiths has a theory why.
“It was way ahead of its time in terms of exploring that the defining relationships of young women are often each other and not men. And that was a very, very radical idea – that you don’t really remember your boyfriend you had at 19 but you do remember your female flatmates and who you did that rite of passage with – your uni friends, and the conversations you had as you were launched into the world.
“It was definitely a very rare film for being about a person outside the norm, traumatised by their childhood – all sorts of words we know now. It just plugged into a lot of themes that just were really lacking representation but are now very shared.
“I’ll never forget. Sharon Stone went up to Tony Collette at an opening and said how much she loved Muriel’s Wedding and said to Toni: ‘I was Muriel. I was Muriel.’ I’m like ‘Wow, even Sharon Stone was Muriel.’”
Griffiths also had a fan encounter in New York, where a man came up to say the film had changed his life. “I said, ‘Can I just ask why? Why does this resonate so much?’
“This guy said, ‘Well, it’s kind of about the Aids crisis.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘You’re gay, you’re from Cincinnati, the town hates you; you have to leave. You move to New York. You find your tribe, you find your best friend, you’re living your dream. You’re self-defining. Your new friends are your family because your family hate you, and then one of you gets Aids. And then your family turn up and they carry you back and stick you in the bungalow and are deeply ashamed that you’re dying of Aids. And as you’re dying in Cincinnati, you just hope one of your friends will get past your religious mum at the front door and carry you back to New York, where you can die with your friends.’
“He literally told me this on a street, and I was just like, ‘Wow.’ There was an archetypal journey in there that spoke to so many people.”
So, any special plans to celebrate the anniversary? “Maybe I need to book a girls’ weekend to the Gold Coast. I might have to put that on my to-do list.”
Muriel’s Wedding is available on Prime Video.
