That stern-faced cameo as Aunt Ellie, the rather joyless real-life inspiration for Mary Poppins in Saving Mr Banks. The suspicious matron in the throwaway 2013 remake of Ozploitation "classic" Patrick. The wife in Disney baseball movie The Rookie. There is no role too small, no movie too silly, no character too insubstantial for Rachel Griffiths not to shine.
“Having pride has worked out well for me,” laughs the much-admired Australian thespian. “If the best thing on the table is doing a talking book, then I’m grateful for the talking book. Of course I am. I’m lucky. I’m a woman living at the beginning of the 21st century in a wealthy country and this is my job. I’m always lucky.”
Rachel Griffiths was well into her 20s before she escaped from the Melbourne suburb where she grew up. “It was like living somewhere the size of Clonskeagh,” she ventures. “Home, school, grandma’s house, all in the same parish. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”
She has certainly made up for that sense of confinement since. Her very global career has seen her master such linguistically disparate dialects as Northern Irish (Divorcing Jack), Californian (Six Feet Under), Bostonian (Blow), and Welsh (Very Annie Mary).
"I'm sure you can find a few bum notes in Divorcing Jack," she says, before splitting vowels on an Ulster-friendly variation of: How now, brown cow? "I remember the night before we started shooting Very Annie Mary. I had been practising for three weeks and I got in a cab and I tried out the voice and the driver said: 'You sound like a Swedish Rastafarian.' "
Almost 20 years have passed since Griffiths stopped off in Belfast to play Divorcing Jack's nun-ogram stripper: "I loved it there," she says. "Everyone was terribly positive and friendly."
Camper van
She subsequently toured Ireland in a rented camper van with her pal and Muriel's Wedding co-star Toni Colette. (Or rather she doesn't quite recall: "It was a bit of a blur that trip. Toni was practically a kid. And I was an irresponsible young adult.")
But director Rebecca Daly's sophomore drama Mammal marks the first time that Griffiths has worked "down south".
Curiously enough, she’s not doing an accent for the Dublin-set drama: “Rebecca has such a high standard for truthiness, as I call it,” says Griffiths. “The character and her world has to have that truthiness. Rebecca had a feeling that if I was thinking about an accent, it would just be a barrier. And I like the idea that the character is an Australian and not fully from or of any place. Because the world is full of people who have ended up in other places, who never really find themselves, and who have nowhere called home to go back to.”
A study of grief and sexual displacement, Mammal sees Griffiths play Margaret, a hermetic, divorced woman whose solitary existence is disrupted by two men: the first is her ex-husband Matt (Michael McElhatton) who informs her that Patrick, her estranged 18-year-old son, has gone missing.
Can it be coincidence that she befriends Joe (Barry Keoghan), a homeless young man about the same age as Patrick, not long after learning of her son’s disappearance?
Daly's painstaking minimalism was a departure for Griffiths, whose best-loved work can often be filed under rambunctious. Think of Rhonda, the party-girl in a wheelchair in Muriel's Wedding (1994). Or Brenda Chenowith, the oversexed, quip-firing brainbox at the heart of HBO's Six Feet Under. Margaret, conversely, simply doesn't do quip-firing.
“It was like she cast a dirty big Labrador in the role of a cat,” laughs Griffiths. “I used to say that to Rebecca and she would say: ‘That’s why it’s going to work.’ I’m used to leaping and slobbering; that’s what I’m good at. I’m hired to drive. I can walk into a scene, break some balls, and cause shit to go down. So playing a character who is so hugely incapable of affecting an outcome and who is emotionally limited was a big challenge for me.
“I kept thinking, should I be doing more? I had no blah blah blah. I couldn’t just talk or tap dance. It wiped away a lot of habits I’ve developed over the years.”
Daly is the latest in a long line of women who have directed Griffiths. She has previously worked with such filmmakers as Nadia Tass (1994's Amy), Pip Karmel (Me Myself I), Sarah Sugarman (Very Annie Mary), Anne Fletcher (Step Up) and Rachel Ward (Beautiful Kate).
Calling the shots
Griffiths, too, has wielded a figurative megaphone on the award-winning short film Tulip and on several episodes of the teen TV drama Nowhere Boys. She has no idea why so few directors are female.
“Traditionally, I suppose, that stemmed from representation. Men were telling male stories. But so much TV, in particular, is now focused on women characters. So there’s no reasonable explanation why things haven’t changed behind the camera.
“One thing I do know is that self-belief can carry you along in this industry and that men do tend to rate themselves higher at doing everything. Whereas women often undersell themselves.
“I don’t know where that comes from. I think that’s changing. My little girls aren’t like that at all.”
She shot Mammal back-to- back with Mel Gibson's World War II film Hacksaw Ridge. It was a rather different directing style. "Mel is like a 12-year-old boy re-enacting something from a movie he saw last night," she says. "He loves to play. He's someone that it doesn't matter when he was born in history: he'd be doing this."
Griffiths' father died during the production of Mammal, an event which prompted her to return to the Melbourne suburb she couldn't wait to leave, with her artist husband Andrew Taylor, and their three children Banjo (12), Adelaide (10) and Clementine (6).
“We wanted them to know their cousins and grandparents,” says Griffiths. “And we wanted them to have the privilege of feeling that they can’t wait to get out of here.”
