Cara Nash
Actress Stef Dawson experienced her first taste of performing not via any amateur stage production, but strangely – and dangerously enough – participating in a sport called vaulting. “It’s basically gymnastics on horseback,” Dawson laughs when we meet the actress in a Redfern café for coffee. “It was a pretty crazy sport I did growing up. But it was performing and I always had that desire. I did that when I was quite young, but even as a kid, I did NIDA breakfast club. Mum would drive me up to Sydney once a week. Bless her!”
Those weekly drama classes paid off with Dawson going on to work in numerous theatre productions and short films before landing her first television role on an episode of All Saints, directed by Daina Reid. “I played a girl who fell off a horse and became paralysed… which was very appropriate.”
After a string of further guest appearances and a role in the Australian feature Wrath, the actress packed her bags and headed to LA. “The first time I made a trip there was on Thanksgiving and there was no one around,” the actress recalls. “It was like this alien landscape, and I was by myself. It was pretty tough, but I was so determined and passionate about wanting to do this that it was exciting. It’s the mecca of the entertainment industry so there’s amazing opportunities, but with great opportunities also comes great rejection. But the great thing about LA is that if you work really hard, things will happen if you don’t give up. That’s the beauty of it.”
While Dawson’s is no overnight success story, things certainly did happen when the actress landed the role of Annie Cresta in a little franchise called The Hunger Games. “I’d fallen in love with the books before I even knew there was a film,” the actress relays, “and [when the auditions came about], I knew the character inside out. I made some out there choices and stuck to my guns in the way I saw Annie. It’s very easy to be swayed by what you think people want or what’s written on the page instead of going by what you believe in your heart is the right way.”
With the latest instalment of the franchise in cinemas now, Annie was always one of the story’s most intriguing and warmly loved characters. Traumatised by her own experiences in the Games, Annie was constantly battling her memories and fears, but never lost compassion. The character was one Dawson fiercely identified with. “I was in a really bad way,” Dawson says reflecting on her own headspace when she took on this role. “I’d been dealing with death and family illness so there was a lot of hardship and grief going on in my life. I was in a place where I was struggling and they were all the things Annie was going through as well. As people, we have a jar of pain that we try to keep a lid on the whole time and with Annie, it’s constantly bubbling up and she’s trying to keep it together. The battle is surviving her own mind, and that’s what I was trying to do as well.”
While Dawson had a firm hand on the character, she was less prepared for the epic fan reaction. “The moment it was announced, all my social media exploded,” Dawson laughs. “My Twitter and Instagram went off! I didn’t even know how to work them properly. My phone got so hot that it died. I put it in the freezer and just sat on the couch rocking myself and trying to process the fact that things had changed a little bit.”
It may have seen her social media sky rocket, but it also saw other opportunities begin to open up. “It definitely made people aware of me, but it’s still about working your butt off to get the part,” Dawson grins. “I have had offers since then, but how hard you work doesn’t change. You still have to fight for things.”
Outside of The Hunger Games, Dawson has shot a number of films including Creedmoria (“It’s a darkly comic coming of age story about a teenage girl growing up in Queens in the eighties”), The Paper Store, which co-stars Penn Badgley and Richard Kind (It’s about a super bright girl who can’t afford to go to university, and screws over the system a little bit, which is awesome”), and The Lennon Report, which chronicles the night John Lennon was assassinated, largely from the perspective of the individuals who were trying to save him. “I play a lady called Barbara who was a young nurse basically running the emergency department,” Dawson says. “She’s a real lady. A lot of people came out of the woodworks to talk about that night who had never spoken out about it before.”
As for the reason she’s back on home turf, Dawson has been shooting the highly anticipated ABC series Cleverman, a futuristic sci-fi drama being directed by The Sapphires’ Wayne Blair and whose cast includes Iain Glen, Frances O’Connor and Deborah Mailman. “Wayne has been a dear friend of mine for a long time,” Dawson says. “He called me up on Skype and asked what I was up to. He told me about the idea and I was pretty blown away. It’s like nothing Australia has seen before and it’s something that will appeal on an international level too. The show deals with the concept of otherness and how others are treated within society. I really wanted to be a part of that and give voice to really important stories within that show.”
The actress consistently has her feelers out for Australian projects. “We do incredible work in Australia and I look forward to coming back for the right roles and working on stories that need to be told.” One such story, Dawson tells us, she has just discovered on her trip back home and involves Australia’s first female bushranger. “I definitely would like to be involved in getting certain stories out there in whatever way I can.”
While it’s been a whirlwind trip for the actress, she’s not complaining. “Since The Hunger Games, it’s been an amazing, intense time,” Dawson smiles. “I’ve been working really hard without a whole lot of downtime, but I’m hungry to work. I don’t have a lot of time off and I think I do need to work on balance! But it’s what I’ve wanted to do for such a long time.”
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 is in cinemas now. Cleverman is set to screen on ABC in 2016.
