Ghosts, bowerbirds and Logie giveaways: Inside the very curious world of Lisa McCune

4 days ago 5

Lisa McCune has 10 Logies, but none of them are in her house. “I didn’t know what to do with them to be really honest,” says the actor. So, she donated them. The awards – including four gold Logies won in consecutive years – can now be found at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

McCune has been such a fixture on the Australian screen and stage that her name means something different to everyone. If you draw a line back from her current show – a wildly comedic spin on The 39 Steps – to the start of her career, it twists and curves, moving between stage and screen, across musical theatre, through drama and comedy.

Lisa McCune is starring in a production of The 39 Steps.

It cuts through Sweat at Sydney Theatre Company at the end of last year, then continues into Taskmaster, through Gloria at Melbourne Theatre Company, The King and I with Opera Australia, then stretches back further – through Cabaret and The Potato Factory, and into Blue Heelers. This list is far from exhausting. There’s more Sondheim, more film, more TV. As a resume, it’s as long as it is eclectic.

“I hope that I’m not too easily put into a box,” she says.

We’re at The European on Spring Street because it’s a familiar haunt for McCune who has performed in theatres across the city. “When I was performing at the Princess, I’d quite often come in here and grab dinner in between shows or next door, and then after the show, we’d sometimes go upstairs and have a drink,” she explains. “I like places like this because just think about all the history that’s here.”

It becomes quickly apparent that stories and history are a key interest for McCune. She points me to an archive of theatre history just a short distance away from where we’re sitting, and lights up talking about Clarice Beckett, telling me that learning about the artist led McCune to seek out her grave. (“Have a bit of a deep dive into her work – she was a really fascinating woman.”) We talk about why the bar next door is called Federici – it’s named for actor Frederick Federici who died while performing in an 1888 production of Faust, and whose ghost is rumoured to still linger in the theatre.

So it comes as a surprise to learn that she’s given such a significant symbol of her own history away. “I didn’t give them away for this reason,” she says, “but I also thought, awards and things like that, I never want to see them on my walls because I never want to be complacent. I never want to go, ‘look at what I did back then, and that was really great’. I feel like I want to go through life asking lots of questions, trying new things.”

She pauses. “I never want to look at anything on a wall and think ‘I’m there. I’ve made it. I’ve done it’, because that, to me, is not what a vocation is.”

Instead, her walls are covered with a constantly changing collection of art. Right now, she is working her way through the city’s different op shops to find different images of flowers. “I’m a real bowerbird,” she says with a laugh. “It’s amazing when people donate things like their grandmother’s old floral paintings that she did for some competition. I’ve got this beautiful tiny gold one, and it’s golden sunflowers in this really ornate frame.”

The idea of wanting to try new things, to not be predictable, is something that comes up again in different ways across the afternoon. We order gnocchi, spinach and steak tartare to share. McCune is the one to suggest ordering the latter, and when it arrives with a side of crisps, she looks at it with interest.

“My kids would love this,” she says, explaining that for her, normally she tends towards vegetables and beans. “I’m challenging my palette,” she adds with a smile, mixing the egg into the steak. She takes a bite and a small piece falls on her plate. “Oh, disaster!” she says, and then: “It is really good.”

McCune is warm, easy to laugh, and occasionally puckish. When photographer Simon Schluter arrives, they greet each other warmly – they’ve worked together before – and after he’s taken a few shots through the window, she looks through at him, says, “ooh he’ll hate this”, then carefully spoons a wad of spinach in front of her top teeth and shoots him a wide grin.

McCune was born in Sydney, grew up in Perth, trained at WAAPA and then acting brought her to Melbourne where she still lives. From a young age, her interest was quite firmly fixed on musical theatre, so she originally thought that was where her career would be headed. “I came out of drama school, and I got a great agent, and she said to me, I think you’re going to do work in television. And I was like, ‘Oh, I hadn’t thought about that’.”

One of her first jobs was a series of ads for Coles supermarkets. “I remember just being so utterly excited by what the camera could do and how that worked.”

Soon afterwards, she was cast in Blue Heelers where she quickly became a household name. “Professionally for me, I was exposed to a lot of really great writers, a lot of really good actors and directors,” she reflects. “So as a young actor, it’s a fantastic place to be because just in and out of the door every week were really great people who were at the top of their game [which] taught me a lot about humility and about working hard and always being respectful.”

Lisa McCune in a scene from Blue Heelers in 1995.

Her love of collaboration has carried through the decades that followed. “I’m not one of those actors that is desperate to do a one-person show,” she says. “I love working with people.”

The 39 Steps has four actors performing a large number of roles. “I think it makes people laugh because it’s so mad … There’s a lot of shadow play, lots of old theatrical tricks to create illusions.”

Lisa McCune and Ian Stenlake in a scene from The 39 Steps.

The play is inspired by the 1935 Hitchcock film, which in turn was adapted from John Buchan’s 1915 novel. McCune stars alongside Ian Stenlake, David Collins and Shane Dundas – the latter two perhaps better known as The Umbilical Brothers. “I’ve been so inspired by the team on 39 Steps,” McCune says. “It’s been so enjoyable creatively”.

As we make our way through the plate of gnocchi, the conversation hops from technology (“I subscribe to this thing called The Rundown – it’s a newsletter that comes out pretty much every day about AI and what’s happening on that day, because it’s just changing so much”), to gardening and the price of coffee.

McCune’s quiet but sharp curiosity and interest in stories spills out beyond her acting. Across the course of the meal, she looks around and wonders about the other people around us – whether they work nearby, whether they are local, whether this is their first time eating here or if it’s a favourite spot of theirs.

She tells me about the book she’s reading – about photographer Max Dupain – and about a recent visit to the remounted French Impressionism Exhibition at the NGV.

“There was this really interesting man, and he had a seat with him. He sat, and he was writing copious notes in a tiny notebook,” she recalls. “And when he stood up to move away from the painting, I said to him, ‘Hello, I find you just as fascinating as the painting. What are you doing?’” The man explained that he was an academic with a focus on art and that he studied the Impressionists. From there, they went on to talk about the paintings around them.

When something grabs her interest, she doesn’t let it stop at curiosity – she digs in and asks questions.

“I just gather bizarre knowledge,” she says with a laugh. “The other day, I stopped in Sydney to talk to some stonemasons working on a building early in the morning. I went up to the gardens to go for a walk … and they told me all about this building they were working on. And then that sent me kind of looking for a book about it.” She pauses. “I love that moment of going, ‘oh, my God, I didn’t know that’.”

This curiosity extends to her family history. About a decade back, she was the subject of an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? which traced multiple generations of McCune’s family. Since then, “every summer when I’ve got a bit of a break over that Christmas period, I’ll delve into it”.

When her research uncovered an address, “I went and knocked on the door in Elsternwick, and the guy that lived there said, ‘Yeah, that family did live here!’, and he invited the old lady down the road,” she recalls. “She came down one Sunday, and we all sat around and she told me about her memories of the family,” she pauses. “Oral history opens up doors that I think a lot of written history doesn’t hold.”

Each year has a different shape for McCune. “I just wake up every day and just think, what’s the phone call that’s going to come today?”

The time in between, however, is very full. There’s her family, her production company, and a driving curiosity that often sends her down a chain of reading and research and questioning.