By Dov Kornits
Talented young Australian actress on the rise Josephine Blazier brings bundles of barbed charm and energy to the new Australian black comedy Audrey.
“I was like, this is the most cathartic feeling in the world,” young Australian actress Josephine Blazier tells FilmInk. Appropriately enough, Blazier is describing the storm of sweet emotions that rumbled through her during the shooting of her first film as an actress. Blazier literally came out of nowhere to take the plum role of Kate Kelly in director Justin Kurzel’s fascinating rethink on the Ned Kelly legend with his underrated 2019 drama The True History of the Kelly Gang. It was a casting call sent out to high schools in her area that prompted Blazier to shoot her headshot through to casting Nikki Barrett, which ended up scoring the aspiring actress a self-tape request, then an audition, and finally a role in the film itself.
“The experience of working with Justin Kurzel and [actors] George MacKay and Sean Keenan on this very, very erratic, unpredictable, experimental set was life changing and very therapeutic…and very, very batch shit crazy,” Blazier admits. “From that point onwards, I just had to pursue it. I emailed Nikki Barrett after we finished the shoot and I was like, ‘Hey, do you know any agents?’ Nikki hooked me up with five of the best agents in Sydney, and I had my pick. That was it basically. Amazing.”
Dropping out of WAAPA and studying acting in both Australia and the UK, Josephine Blazier has been working fairly steadily ever since, with roles in the Australian TV mini-series The Gloaming and Fires, and the international Prime series Silver and The Book of Dreams. “That’s been out now for ages,” Blazier explains. “I had an amazing experience working on it. It was incredible. In the crew room, it was a German and Irish, but mainly German, creative team. All the creative heads were from Munich. It was so much fun collaborating with people with a different kind of ethos to Australians. It was much more collaborative than any other experience I’d ever had in Australia, to be honest, and the budget was bigger too.”
After warming up with those smaller roles, Blazier now gets to really spread her dramatic and comedic wings with a major part in the cinder-black local comedy Audrey, which marks the big screen debuts of hard-working TV director Natalie Bailey and screenwriter Lou Sanz. Blazier is the eponymous teen, who suddenly and tragically falls into a coma (don’t worry – Blazier doesn’t spend the entire film horizontal), a fact which is bizarrely seized upon by her desperate, horribly opportunistic former soap star mother, played with comic verve by Jackie Van Beek. Shot fast and on the fly, Audrey represented a major change for Blazier. “It was guerilla filmmaking,” the actress explains. “Prior to that, I’d worked on some higher budget stuff, but I’d played smaller roles. I was used to warming up with the whole scale of things. Whereas with Audrey, it was much faster. I think pretty much every single scene in the entire film was either the first or second take.”
The tone of Audrey is incredibly dark, with Jackie Van Beek’s outrageous wannabe Ronnie Lipsick surely rating as one of the worst mothers to ever (dis)grace a cinema screen. “I know what it’s like to be a daughter of a single mother,” Blazier says. “That’s my life experience. And somewhat desperately, I can empathise with Ronnie’s desire to ‘succeed.’ I mean, in her case, it’s completely selfish because her life has not succeeded the way she intended to. But I can empathise with a mother’s desire for their child to exceed beyond what they were capable of achieving.”
Blazier’s empathy for her cinematic nightmare of a mum is wholly appropriate considering that the actress actually had to portray Jackie Van Beek’s character as a younger woman in the film’s wickedly amusing flashbacks. “I think during the first or second week of shooting, they were like, ‘This is the best way to do it,’” Blazier explains of the rather ambitious “casting” decision. “I really enjoyed doing that. I really enjoyed copying Jackie’s mannerisms too. That was the last day of shooting when we shot that Logie Award acceptance speech. That was literally maybe 40 minutes before we wrapped for the entire shoot. So, by that point, I had watched Jackie for seven weeks and I knew how she played Ronnie, but also her little physical quirks.”
Taking on a bigger role in a film like Audrey has been exciting for Blazier. “The Audrey promotion has been the first time that I’ve really done a festival circuit with a film,” she explains. “It’s been really eye-opening in terms of meeting other like-minded people who are developing projects. It’s been very exciting and inspiring and I’m definitely just consuming a lot of content this year. I would love to develop something that I’m also in, but I am aware that it’s the same with producing as it is with acting: once you get involved, it’s not immediately happening overnight. You can be involved and invested for a long time.”
For a young actress, Blazier has a particularly evolved take on the acting process and profession. “If you’re coming at it from the right place, it’s often the rawest place,” Blazier offers. “People want to manipulate themselves in order to relive something that they might not have relived or they might have buried. And they like to keep in touch with their past self and their present self and their future self. It’s one of the very few tools for people to access parts of themselves and get external validation because they’re doing it… it’s like you get paid to be an attention seeker, which is unlike pretty much any other job. But having said that, you can definitely go about it in the right and the wrong way. I always used to say to my agent years ago that actors are the worst people to be actors because you have to be simultaneously incredibly sensitive and incredibly resilient. You need paper-thin skin in order to access everything for a role, but you must also be thick-skinned because of how brutal the business is.”
Josephine Blazier, however, has a plan on how to remain on track. “I’m always learning,” the young actress says. “It’s really easy to forget how to act when you’re not working.”
Audrey is in cinemas now. Click here for our review. Click here to read our interview with Audrey screenwriter Lou Sanz.
