Where do you call home right now in your life?
London is home for the meantime – I made a more permanent move here in 2018. Before that I had spent many years finding myself in London to work on films or in theatre, so I’d end up spending up to six months of the year here and then the other months scattered around the globe. I realised London was my home the first time landing at Heathrow felt like I had landed somewhere totally and utterly familiar, and that comforted me deeply. Even the bad airport coffee and drive to my flat made me feel nestled in something that spoke of home. I had loved ones close, and the city was starting to make sense to me. So I moved here.
Which room do you spend most time in?
Honestly, my bedroom. I try to prioritise sleep (sometimes that is a total lost cause with strange shooting schedules) but my bedroom is very soothing to me. There is plenty of room to roll out my yoga mat. I often nestle up on a chair in there to read scripts, to get away from people; I might take my coffee back into bed if I have the day off. So it sees the most of me of all the rooms.
Where was home for you as a child?
The first few years of my life were spent in 18th in Paris. Then we moved when I was nearly six to the southeastern suburbs of Melbourne. Absolutely worlds apart in terms of the childhoods they offered me. My Australian childhood was a sunny safe place. My best friend lived a five-minute walk away. We walked to school together every morning. There was a milk bar for lollies and and a chicken shop for hot chips and a big green park at the end of our street where kids played AFL football all Saturday.
Can you describe the first place you lived when you moved away from the home where you grew up?
My first real move, when I left and didn’t really come back home, was to shoot my first film, The Great Gatsby. I had just finished acting school and while I had been in university I lived partly out of home, partly in cold share houses, partly with a boyfriend. So my big grown-up move was to work on that film. I had just turned 21. I lived in an apartment in Surrey Hills, Sydney. It was a very bare little flat, but I thought it was perfect. It was part of a complex, with a brick balcony and a little plain kitchen. I bought a huge casserole dish from a charity shop the second day I was there because I had grand plans of being a grown-up and slow-cooking. Of course, all I did was work and party and subsist on takeaways and the very, very good coffees I could find from the many excellent Sydney cafés on my street. [More at Source]