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From Love My Way to Bump, Claudia Karvan has won hearts playing complex, progressive mothers, women facing parenting challenges with humour and honesty. But the role of a single, empty-nester in an SBS Digital Originals short-form drama took her to another maternal space, and reduced her – and the entire cast and crew – to tears.
“Homebodies is a love letter to the parent,” says Karvan. “I’d never seen anything like Nora’s journey. I think, as do all parents of teenagers and children in their early 20s, there’s so much energy and sacrifice and love and sleepless nights that go into raising a child, that a lot of people have an expectation that, ‘Oh good, now we’ll be friends and I’ve earned this.’
“Then you get to that period of life, and you go, ‘Oh, now I’ve got a whole other mountain to climb.’ With Nora, there’s self-pity and inflexibility, and disappointment, and she’s hanging on to the past, which I think a lot of parents will relate to.”
In A.P. Pobjoy’s Homebodies, co-written by Charlotte Mars, directed by Harry Lloyd, and premiering this month at the Festival Series Mania in France, Karvan is Nora, a lonely artist living with a strange secret in a country town, when her transmasculine son, Darcy (Luke Wiltshire), comes home.
For Pobjoy and Wiltshire, the story is deeply personal. Although both had supportive parents during their respective transitions, the reckoning with the childhood self, and what they refer to as a “second coming out” when re-visiting their home communities (Killaloe in Far North Queensland for Pobjoy; Gowrie Junction in rural western Queensland for Wiltshire), can be a confronting aspect of the trans experience.
While filming a pivotal scene between Nora and Darcy, the largely queer-identifying crew were crying as hard as the actors.
“We’re not hiding any of the hurt,” says Pobjoy. “The crew all dropped their tools and watched. It was just two people in a lounge room talking … and it was like a big gust of wind went through the house … Luke and Claudia, what they bring to that scene, and to the whole show, is such a force and such craft. I was standing there crying. You could hear a pin drop, it was incredible.”
Adds Wilshire: “There’s just so much sadness. They’re coming from exactly the same point of view. They’re begging each other, ‘Please see me! I’m here!’ and they’re not ready to see each other yet. But there’s so much love behind that scene.”
Pobjoy cast Wiltshire after auditioning more than 90 other transmasculine actors from around Australia.
“There was something about his chemistry – the way that he moved, his voice,” says Pobjoy. “He brought a lot of introspection to Darcy, who is quite reserved and shy sometimes. I think we’re used to seeing big, bold, loud and proud queer people on screen, and Darcy is quite the opposite.”
The hour-length feature, comprised of six 10-minute episodes, and filmed in Oberon and Portland in rural NSW, blends intense relationship drama and comedy with a supernatural element, to explore the “ghosts” that haunt mother and son, in very different ways.
“It’s about learning to accept a history between you and your family and being able to hold it within you,” says Pobjoy. “It’s about being able to feel whole again, and knowing that there is no shame or trauma in who you are.”
Launching Homebodies on SBS ahead of International Transgender Day of Visibility Day on March 31, the creative team hopes that it starts conversations within families.
Says Karvan: “The resistance to letting go of the past is a self-sabotaging thing. Nora is hurting herself by not surrendering to a foreign emotional landscape.”
Pobjoy wants families to reconnect, however difficult. “I hope people feel empowered. I hope they laugh. I hope they cry. I hope they call their mum. And I hope parents watch it and they call their kids.”
Homebodies premieres at 8.25pm on Saturday, March 28 on SBS and streams on SBS On Demand.
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