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No one could accuse Heather Mitchell of being typecast. Over the past 40 years, the performer has developed a dizzyingly broad back catalogue, with more than 100 screen credits to her name, not to mention her work on stage. She has danced with company Force Majeure. She’s won Helpmann, Green Room, AACTA and Logie Awards. Her IMDb page, which dates back to 1981, shows she has worked steadily since that date, with multiple projects each year.
The NIDA graduate is on the board of the Sydney Theatre Company. She is a cancer survivor and ambassador for the Australian Research Centre for Cancer Survivorship. In 2019, she became a Member of the Order of Australia. She’s an artist and poet. Her memoir, Everything and Nothing, was published by Allen & Unwin in 2023. As Toni Collette says in the book’s blurb, “Is there anything she can’t do?”
Mitchell’s path to success, however, has not been linear. The body of work outlined above, she notes, “happened among a messy life, during huge ups and downs, times of great financial insecurity. But on paper, it looks great.”
You’re not going to have a stagnant life. You’re going to get up every day, keep alive, help other people and do things that give you joy and pleasure.
HEATHER MITCHELLSuccess is mostly hard graft and perseverance – plus that extra something that makes a person run towards a challenge, not away from it – and Mitchell is a strong believer in being ready to pounce on an opportunity when it presents itself. That’s where her internal drive comes in.
“Of course, life will give you things – it just will,” she says. “You’re not going to have a stagnant life. You’re going to get up every day, keep alive, help other people and do things that give you joy and pleasure. Things are going to happen, I have no doubt.”
Mitchell dials into our interview from Auckland, where she’s currently touring RBG: Of Many, One. It’s a one-woman show about American lawyer and associate justice of the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a role Mitchell has played in three separate productions since 2022.
We’re meant to be speaking about the upcoming release of Stan’s* The Killings at Parrish Station (a series so terrifying at times, I had to watch it through my hands). But I can’t help asking her about the experience of playing RBG over the past four years, and whether it hits a little differently with this particular American presidency (Mitchell started in the role while Joe Biden was still president).
“Absolutely,” says the 68-year-old. “Each year we’ve done it, it’s changed. When Trump got in, it was like, ‘Oh, that won’t last.’ People were laughing at him in the show. Now, people are audibly crying and cheering as well.”
Even on Zoom, Mitchell is poised, focused and self-possessed, so I can only imagine the gravitas she brings in person. And she’s certainly not afraid to take on roles with plenty of chew. In The Killings at Parrish Station she plays Georgia Cooke, a police detective who’s been institutionalised for 37 years after working on a grisly massacre at a remote desert research station. To all intents and purposes, Cooke has lost her life. Over the course of the show, we learn what drove her to be shut off from the outside world for decades, isolated from family, her career in tatters.
The show is set across two timelines: the present day, and 1987. Mia Wasikowska (Tracks, Alice in Wonderland) plays Cooke in the ’80s, working on a case that gets ever more horrific and fantastical, eventually prompting the young detective to question her grasp of reality.
Because of scheduling issues, Wasikowska had to film all her scenes first, which meant Mitchell could watch rushes to get an understanding of how the younger actor was treating the character. “I’ve known Mia for 20 years,” says Mitchell. “I worked with her on one of her first jobs, actually. She is a master at economy. She’s very internalised as an actor. So I could get a feel for what she was doing.”
The role’s focus on a woman with a lifetime’s worth of demons required Mitchell to reflect on what the first five years in an institution would be like, and then the next 10. “That’s one of the things about getting older,” she says. “You’re dealing with your past, and you’re dealing with what you hope the future might be. But the future gets smaller as you get older. So you’re not thinking that much about the future except, ‘I hope I can still stay here.’ ”
Inhabiting a character, then stripping that character off when the curtain drops, comes easily for Mitchell. She’s more fascinated by the way things in her personal life will start to mirror those of a character she’s portraying; her choice of music, or books, for instance. “When your mind is focused on particular things, you start observing very particular things,” she says.
In RBG, the subject of cancer is tackled throughout the show. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life was surrounded by cancer for decades, and during a run of the play in 2022, Mitchell was diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time (the first was in 2004). “There were things that were in the show that were happening also in my life,” she says.
When I ask what the camera can give her that the stage cannot, and vice versa, Mitchell talks about the unpredictability of the stage, the lack of a safety net. It must be an intoxicating feeling, I venture. “No matter how prepared you are, anything can happen. So it’s a trust exercise, really,” she says.
Over a long stage run, she says, an actor can really get to know their character. They may only spend a couple of hours a night in their skin, but they repeat that for weeks, months, sometimes years. Film moves much faster, despite the opportunity for multiple takes. “On a film set, you aren’t gonna get to do it again. You’ll get this one chance. So you have to be razor sharp in a way. It’s a different kind of focus. I try not to think about the camera. It’s more about who I’m with in the scene, or what I’m doing.”
Many actors have a ritual or superstition when preparing to perform. For some, it’s sex, drugs and/or booze. For Mitchell, it’s a fried egg. Whenever she’s touring a theatre show, she takes a little induction cooktop and frying pan so she can cook before she performs. “An hour and a half before the show, I have my meal, and then I have my warm-up, then I get my wig on,” she says. “It’s all part of the ritual.”
Mitchell doesn’t sit in the past much, but she says it’s wonderful to be in an industry where every experience helps to inform the next one, as do her own life experiences. “It’s about your environment. And if you work with wonderful people, you’ll feel wonderful about things, and therefore you’re attracted to more fabulous things.”
Are age and experience bringing more choice in the roles she’s offered? Not really, she says. But since she passed 60, she’s observed that there are many more interesting roles written for older women than there used to be. As little as five years ago, she would read scripts where the mature woman would often be unnamed, with no backstory – set dressing, in other words. Now, they’re people with a history and a life.
“People are very interested in writing about ageing,” says Mitchell, “because not all women approach it the same way. Some are comfortable, some are not. I see ageing as a privilege. It’s a really sad indictment of our culture if getting older is frightening.”
A strong believer in women supporting each other, Mitchell’s advice for young female actors looking to follow in her footsteps is to keep stoking their internal drive.
“I think within each person, there’s a little home fire,” she says. “Every day, you need to blow, keep that ember going, because all of a sudden, something’s just gonna happen and you’ve gotta be ready for it. That’s the nature of this industry. And that’s the only truth I know.”
The Killings at Parrish Station streams on Stan from June 24. (*Stan is owned by Nine, publisher of this masthead.)
Hair and Make-up by Nikki Anderson; Styling by Penny Hunt
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