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From shy to shining

Love My Way's Asher Keddie is a rising star of the drama industry, writes Nicole Brady.

IF YOU had told the teenage Asher Keddie that her wedding would make headlines she'd have gasped in terror. But such is her rising star that her marriage to theatre actor Jay Bowen last month on the deck at the Prince in St Kilda was news.

Not that she would have had time to notice. Three days after the sunset ceremony, Keddie, 32, was back on set in Sydney filming the third and probably final series of the acclaimed Love My Way.

With a cast that includes actors as fine as Claudia Karvan and Ben Mendelsohn, and a program that is genuinely good, those behind Love My Way have never had any trouble attracting media attention.

This time around, though, there has been a noticeable spike in interest in Keddie. Her character, the highly strung Julia, was the standout of the last series as she spiralled into an intense and traumatic breakdown, and there is a sense that Keddie's future is going to be very bright.

On set during a break in filming one of the closing scenes of Love My Way, Keddie is radiant. Lightly framed, she carries herself with a poise born of studying ballet to an advanced stage, only quitting in her early teens because of a repeatedly dislocating knee.

Her features are accentuated today because she is excited by the presence of her new husband at the lunch break - it's his birthday and she pushed him to come up from Melbourne to celebrate.

But there is a lot more than birthday cake on Keddie's plate right now. The reprise of Julia is just the first of her projects to go to air in coming months. Television audiences will also see her in Before Dawn, an ABC mini-series about the life of John Curtin, Joanne Lees: Murder in the Outback on Ten, and in August she and Bowen will star in a Melbourne Theatre Company production of a new Hannie Rayson play, The Glass Soldier. In an industry whose drought has been as severe as the Mallee's, it is testament to her abilities that she has been in steady work pretty much since first stepping on stage 10 years ago.

It is thus surprising to hear memories of an adolescence dogged by shyness. Surely she was one of those teenage girls who knew the world was her oyster? She must have known she was attractive?

Keddie's eyes widen in genuine disbelief. "Oh my god, no. Oh god no. No. No, I was really embarrassed of myself as a teenager. I was very confident with my family but I felt quite uncomfortable with kids my own age."

Raised in Sandringham with her sister, Bronte, four years her junior, Keddie went to St Michael's Grammar where there were regular offers for her to be involved in school plays and musicals.

"I just never followed through. I'd say, 'Yeah yeah, that'd be fun,' and then it would come time to audition and I just didn't want to. I didn't want to perform in front of my school friends. I wanted to be the same, I suppose, I didn't want to stand out at that point ... as opposed to needing to perform. I was always in my own world, quite impenetrable - or so my mother says.

"For instance, I was asked to be the house captain in year 12 and the thought of that absolutely mortified me because I realised I would have to get up in front of forms 1 to 6 to say something each week, and I couldn't swallow even thinking about it. Maybe most actors are like that. I've talked to a number of actors who have a similar story about growing up and feeling insecure."

From this fragile beginning, Keddie nevertheless developed an interest in screen acting. She found an agent and roles in miniseries and television dramas. But the bug did not truly bite until she first stepped on stage - with just two days' notice after a film role made Frances O'Connor suddenly unavailable for an MTC production of Patrick Marber's Closer.

Aged 22 at the time, it seems extraordinary that she had the courage.

Keddie explains: "There's part of me that loves the thrill of that kind of challenge, I just thought, 'As if you'd say no to that.' This was the main stage in Melbourne and I'd grown up going to the theatre and watching plays.

"And it just happened so fast I didn't really have time to panic about it. Before I knew it I was in rehearsal and on the stage and it was the best feeling I'd ever had. Of course, once I discovered it (the stage), I couldn't get off it. I couldn't believe how much I enjoyed being in front of an audience, how much I enjoyed telling a story with that kind of immediacy."

Steady theatre and screen work followed, but Keddie looks back on those roles with some regret. She feels she was so hampered by a lack of confidence that her performances were tight and constrained. She found support in people such as the MTC's Simon Phillips, a director who kept casting her in rigorous and demanding roles.

Phillips, who is working in Germany, says that, even as a young actor, Keddie's sincerity has always been apparent.

"(She is) rivetingly beautiful, of course, but the true beauty in her performance comes from the sensation that she, beyond anyone else on stage, has a simple and clear emotional honesty. She's been well cast in this regard, playing many roles as a young performer for which this was the key quality required, but the point is she was up to it," Phillips says.

Which brings us to Julia, Love My Way's brittle, gorgeous, vulnerable, wicked Julia. Wife, mother, stepmother and, in this new series, sister (played by Justine Clarke), the shades of Julia's life continue to unfold with the complexity and nuance audiences have come to expect from the show.

If Keddie still harboured doubts about her abilities as an actor she shed them with gusto in series two. Her performances as the unravelling Julia were so raw at times they were painful to watch. Surrendering herself emotionally and sexually to a man who treated her with vicious contempt, Julia's self-esteem was pitifully low.

Gritty as they were, the actress relished those scenes. "There was no other way of doing it other than to completely and utterly expose myself. I never felt embarrassed or inhibited by the crew around me, but sometimes I felt like everyone's looking at me and thinking, 'Oh are you like this, do you go through this kind of torment as well?'

"Because I actually quite enjoy doing all that. I find the lighter stuff more challenging to play, the chitchat, do you know what I mean?"

Claudia Karvan, who co-produced the three series, says they knew as soon as they saw Keddie's audition tape - it was the scene from the first series in which she melts down in the middle of Ikea, "I just need storage, Charlie!" - that she was the woman for the job. And no one was surprised at how Keddie rose to the challenges her character faced in the second series.

"She's got the talent to carry a story line like that," Karvan says. "What I found so extraordinary about her portrayal was scenes that were written that could have been quite turgid and overly dramatic, she manages to make them incredibly heartfelt and real. But there is an edge of comedy about them, too. She is a comedian-tragedian - she can do it all."

THERE have been concerned murmurings among fans that series three will air on Showtime, a channel not available on the basic Foxtel platform. Karvan seems truly unaware of this when it is raised.

"I didn't know that, but I have to say I wouldn't be that precious about how it goes out because of the life that it's had. I'm still bumping into people who have just seen the first series on DVD," she says. "This show's a real slow burner and the life of it has been so long that I wouldn't put a lot of weight on its first screening. It's very different to free to air and you can't judge it in the same way."

As to why LMW is just eight episodes this time around, Karvan, who cuddles a small child on her hip during lunchbreak on set, is frank.

"I almost didn't want to work at all, I've just had a baby (Albee is nine months). I've done that before with Secret Life of Us, working with a tiny baby, and it's extremely difficult. So we delayed shooting and made it shorter because I didn't think I'd make it through.

"And we wanted to keep the quality of the story lines. We didn't want it to be too sparse and we really believed in the writing room that we'd get enough story for eight episodes, but it might have been a push for more than that."

The series is billed as the last. Is it really?

"I'd say so," Karvan says in a voice that sounds less than completely certain. "It depends on the response, but I think pretty much that's it ... yeah."

Around an outdoor table filming a barbecue scene that probably represents the close of Love My Way forever, Julia is as gay as the rest of the clan that extends around Karvan's Frankie.

As is the way with scenes featuring all the key characters, it takes ages to shoot and reshoot, so everyone is included. While some of the actors adjust their expressions as the cameras flick on and off, Keddie remains noticeably happy. It seems there is a symmetry at play as the joy of the first flush of married life filters on screen.

"You can't help it, I think it has," Keddie says. "And Julia is happier too. It's interesting, because what the character has been through over the three years that I've been playing her, you know some of that stuff is the stuff I've been going through as well. So for her to get to a point where she's more accepting of herself and the people in her life that she loves and she understands now, it's not dissimilar to the way I feel I suppose."

By Nicole Brady
February 22, 2007
The Age