Australian actress PETA WILSON once portrayed a deadly assassin in television’s La Femme Nikita, but her latest film role takes her in a very different direction. ALASDAIR DUNCAN recently caught up with Wilson, to talk about her methods of getting in character, and her plans for the future.

Dean O’Flaherty’s debut feature, Beautiful, is definitely not typical Australian film fare – a twisted drama about life in the suburbs and the secrets behind manicured lawns, it’s equal parts Desperate Housewives and Donnie Darko. One of the film’s most compelling characters is Sherri, a beaten-down not-quite-housewife portrayed with painful intensity by Peta Wilson. This role, she says, is not one she herself has lived, but it’s still a familiar one. 

Sherri spends much of the film contemplating escape from her violent, live-in boyfriend. “I’m not that woman, but I’ve met that woman,” Wilson tells me. “I remember as a young girl, meeting the mothers of my friends who would just be somewhere else – oppressed, sad, unloved and lost with no identity. Sherri looks after the house, she looks after the kid, but that’s it. Where’s the joy in her life?”

When preparing for a role, Wilson begins by asking questions. “I’m a complex girl who’s had many experiences and travelled a lot, and that has made me very curious,” she tells me. “When I do a character, I have to embody the character, but in order to do that, I want the character to have the depth of complexity that I do. The whole point of a suppressed woman like Sherri is that she is complicated – she has a lot going on beneath the surface and no real way of expressing it.”

Wilson trained in the Stella Adler method of acting – famously employed by the likes of Benicio Del Toro and Marlon Brando – and the most important part of this, she tells me, is the rigour it demands. “I’m very surgical in the way I work,” she says. When given a script, Wilson will sit down and write the story of her character’s life, creating an in-depth history so she can be present in the role the moment she arrives on set. “Whatever the actors throw at me, I can then react as the character would, based on the biography I’ve written,” she tells me. 

Listening, Wilson says, is also critically important for an actor, a fact that was cemented for her after an encounter with Robert Downey Junior. “I met him once and I asked him why he’s so great,” she tells me. “And he told me that he never stops listening. He said that he listens when someone else is speaking, and then listens to them when he’s speaking. His attention is always on the other person.”

Wilson has several projects, including a forthcoming television pilot, on the go, but the one she’s most excited about is a movie called The Secret Worlds Of Vera Lune. Wilson’s own fledgling production company secured funding for the project, which is based on a script by Italy’s Michael De Jiacomo.  “It’s set in the world of the opera, and I play a woman who’s very vulnerable and has a nervous breakdown. Michael is a surrealist, but at the same time, he’s written a very modern film.”

BEAUTIFUL is in cinemas Thursday Mar 5. Check out www.thebeautifulmovie.com for more information.

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