by Dov Kornits
“I haven’t read a book since I had a bunch of kids, but I did read the script,” laughs Teresa Palmer when we get an audience with her as she promotes her leading role in Aussie romcom Addition, adapted from the 2008 book by Toni Jordan. “Once I knew I was doing the job, I went back and read the book, and then it became like a bible for me.”
A veteran of book adaptations (Berlin Syndrome, The Family Next Door, The Last Anniversary), Palmer acknowledges that when adapting novels into scripts “…you do have to kill your darlings. But I think Becca Johnstone did a really good job of adapting it in a way where it still feels so similar to the book. And then I got to immerse a lot of what I read from the book into the character; into the performance.”
In Addition, Teresa Palmer plays maths wiz Grace, as great at addition as she is tormented by OCD. “I don’t deal with anxiety on a personal level,” says Palmer. “However, it orbits me. It’s all around. So many people in my life deal with anxiety and I’ve had many conversations with friends.
“I think something that this movie taught me was that if you’re a support person or an anchor for someone navigating this, rather than coming in and trying to fix and presenting all the ways that you can solve issues, just being a safe place for that person to land where they can unload to you and you can just reflect back to them, that’s really hard. ‘I see you’. ‘I hear how hard that must be’. And just allowing them to unload and take some of the burden off of their shoulders.
“I had to really siphon from all these different experiences I was hearing about in my life, as well as from our director, Marcelle Lunam, who has her own experiences with anxiety. I had to pull inspiration from the story she was telling me, and then I went on to YouTube and I watched a couple of videos of a woman dealing with intrusive thoughts and counting and OCD, and she was very honest about how they show up for her and her life.”
Although the character is certainly an odd duck due to her OCD, Grace is also not afraid to go out into the world, especially when she meets British tradie Seamus (Joe Dempsie). “Even though I couldn’t relate as much to the anxiety, what I could relate to is that she’s so many colours and so am I. I think that there’s a tendency to put people in boxes or label people as an extrovert, an introvert, someone who’s all over the place.
“I like to always say that I have ADHD tendencies. I did actually fail the ADHD test. I realised, ‘oh, we’ve all got little tendencies that make us beautifully unique and human’. And I love that. I’ve got one kid who likes things ordered, and then I’ve got another kid who thrives in chaos, and we’re all just so complex, which is really cool.”
Never busier – with a recent announcement that she has been cast in the God of War series adaptation – Palmer and her family are now based in Byron Bay. “We have a rule with the family, which is togetherness. Many years ago, when I first started, I was speaking to a couple of kids of parents in the film industry and they said the hardest part was being left behind. They wished that the parents took them, and that really struck me. And so, the constant for us is that we are together, we are the home. And sometimes our home is in Melbourne shooting something and sometimes our home is having an adventure in Vancouver, which we’re about to go do. Sometimes we get to be in Byron Bay and I’ll drive to the Gold Coast and shoot things and the kids are in school in Byron. We just make it work. As long as we are together, we all feel really good.”
Addition is in cinemas 29 January 2026
