4 hours ago
2
Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Paula Arundell. The Helpmann and Green Room award-winning theatre, film and TV actor is best known for her work in the Australian production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
POLITICS
Even a decade ago, it was rare to see non-Anglo faces on Australian stage and screen. It’s changing now, but how was it when you started out? When I graduated from NIDA, I remember being offended by a couple of people who just assumed I could sing and dance.
Because you’re black? [Nods] As a result, I refused to do either. Then [in 2001] I was at the Sydney Theatre Company rehearsing Chekhov’s Three Sisters. It was myself, Melita Jurisic and Rose Byrne playing sisters. There was no allusion to what our father and mother had gotten up to: we were sisters! I loved it. I was doing Chekhov – and I’d always wanted that. But then, when I went downstairs for lunch at Sydney Dance Company, I saw they were holding auditions for Hair and someone asked me what time I was going.
Because they assumed you could sing and dance. Yes! I could hear the music in there, and remember going, “Oh, dammit!” There I was, upstairs, rehearsing and crying my eyes out, and they were downstairs singing and dancing, and I had a moment of “What am I doing?” I kinda wanted to be in there singing and dancing, too!
“I do not sing and dance. But now, perhaps, maybe, I want to.” ″What have I done?” [Laughs] I was determined to not get pigeonholed, but I’m always going to feel a bit different; I was adopted by a white family.
Is it true your adoptive father was in politics? Actually, both of my fathers were in politics. My adoptive father worked for the local council [in western Sydney]. My biological father was, apparently, a prominent businessman in Zambia, who led a coup with four other people in Lusaka in the ’80s. I went to look for him about three years ago. My [Irish] biological mother had sent me his name and said, “You can look him up: he was a great man, written about in a book that was supposedly a New York Times bestseller.” I thought, “Oh, wow, he’ll be easy to find.” I went online to look him up and the first piece of writing I found about him was very informative. It wasn’t until I was halfway through it that I realised I was reading his obituary. He’d died nine months before.
Oh, that’s really sad. I lost it; it hurt a lot. My adoptive father had died 25 years earlier. That was painful and this pain was the same. It confused me incredibly because I didn’t know my biological father: I didn’t understand why I was crying so much. I spoke to my Indigenous friend here in Australia and she said that with the stolen generations mob, they can have the same feeling. You’re grieving the “what if”.
SEX
Do you have “a type”? I’ve never had a type, but I can tell you a funny story.
Oh, I love a funny story. So my first love – my first boyfriend – was named … let’s call him “Bob John Bob”. The name of the father of my child is also “Bob John Bob”.
Wait, what? You have a Bob fetish? They’re both drummers, too.
You cannot make this up. And they both have long hair! One’s white and Irish; the other one, the father of my child, is brown – half Maori, half Irish. I met him in a bar where he was playing one night. They back-announced, “And that was Bob John Bob on the drums!” I was like, “What? Bob didn’t tell me he was playing a gig.” So I went up to him at the bar and was like, “You are not Bob John Bob.” And he said, “Yes, I am.” I said, “Wait, the Bob John Bob I know is a drummer, too.” And he went, “Is he from Blacktown?”
Oh, my god! They knew each other? Yes! He said, “We know about each other because we go to the same drum shop and our accounts sometimes get mixed up.”
Of course they would. So that’s how we met.
Have the three of you been in the same room? No. The universe would explode and just go, “Paula, time for you to move on from Bobs.”
MONEY
What was money like growing up? Scarce. It was hard because my dad was the sole income-earner. I remember he’d saved all this money and we were about to go to Disneyland in Paris and Europe on this six-week trip. We had the brochures on the table. So exciting. But then, after years of speculation and tests, my mum was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and we had to cancel everything. Our house had to be made wheelchair-accessible and rails were put in everywhere.
Injury. Disability. It costs, doesn’t it? It really does.
How would you describe your attitude towards money now? There’s incredible anxiety around it. This was such a turning point in our lives in a lot of ways: being on the cusp of something really good happening, then realising tragedy is going to come. I tend not to save for holidays because I think if I do, someone’s going to be diagnosed with a disease.
What has been your worst-paid gig? [Pauses] Next question!
Best-paid? Voltron, a movie that will be released next year.
