Catherine McClements has hit her era of chill. A time when she can approach work with a little more joy and a little less angst. She recently wrapped up filming on Dalliance – a sexy six-part drama series set in Sydney, centred around a group of friends making sense of their love lives into their 60s.
“I’ve really enjoyed the work recently,” she says, adding there were some challenging moments on the show. “I had to do all these sex scenes. When I got on, I asked, ‘Can she do something else other than have sex? Couldn’t she have a job or something?’ But the whole trajectory is that she discovers sex in her 60s, and what it can be.”
McClements and scene partner Kirk Torrance worked with an intimacy coordinator – a job that didn’t exist when she started screen acting in the 1980s. “When I look back, it would have been nice to have someone to talk to about that at the time,” she says.
The cast of Dalliance are all seasoned Australian performers, including Heather Mitchell, who also co-produced the series, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham and Georgie Parker. It feels like a move back towards the type of television that’s made to watch episodically, not to binge while scrolling through Instagram.
“It’s television at its best,” says McClements. “It’s got this beating heart that’s about human beings interacting with each other. It really comes from Heather’s soul, and I think all the female characters, when you look at them, are facets of her personality. In a funny way, it’s like every character that she’s played in her career.”
McClements says television has changed over the years, with more actors investing their time in the medium. When she graduated from NIDA in 1985, she says no one wanted to do TV. “It was either theatre or film – TV was the poor cousin.” But things have changed. It’s now a place for experimentation, she says, with a little more room to move in the narrative. “Television’s becoming a great place for creativity. At the moment, there’s just so much content.”
What has never changed is the immediacy of the format – where writers and directors can see something happening in real time, react to it and turn it around to be relevant on screen: the kind of short-lead flexibility that movies can never tap into. “I found with television, you could see something on the street, and you could put it in the show,” McClements says.
McClements has two children [with husband, actor Jacek Koman] – 19-year-old Quincy and 24-year-old Coco – who she says she’s constantly learning from. Now they’re older and don’t rely on her so much for their daily survival, she’s trying a lighter touch – a broad, but loving scope for failure and success, that allows the pair to make their own way as they see fit. “I try my best to stay out of their lives now,” McClements says, adding there’s not much she can teach her kids that they haven’t taught her already.
Spender shirt. Zara jeans. Senso boots.Jesse-Leigh Elford
“I’ve learned so much from them. I mean, when I look at Coco, I see a woman who hasn’t been damaged,” says the actor. “When I grew up, it was a bit dangerous in the suburbs of Melbourne. But for her, it’s not. They have the language, the camaraderie … She’s teaching me a lot about what people should and shouldn’t expect.”
Coco recently picked up The Secret Life of Us, which McClements worked on, and has started watching it independently and, says McClements, “unironically”. The show, which was hugely popular back in the early 2000s, focused on a group of friends and lovers who lived in the same apartment building in Melbourne’s St Kilda. Between Joel Edgerton, Deborah Mailman, Vince Colosimo and Claudia Karvan, there was a lot of energy on that screen. “My daughter was watching it as if it were made now, and I thought, ‘Gee, isn’t that interesting?’”
It’s one of those shows that hasn’t dated, and has a lot to give to people now growing up in a time that doesn’t always feel so positive. “Yeah, it was a real seminal piece,” McClements says, adding that Coco also views the TV series Gilmore Girls on repeat and refuses to watch anything new. McClements believes it’s because the world’s slightly scarier now. “I think [shows such as] Succession are very stressful. I watch it because I’m a professional. But I don’t watch it for joy, I can tell you that.”
While she’s worked steadily on-screen since the mid-80s, it was a three-year stint on ’90s police drama Water Rats, along with a star-studded cast, including Colin Friels, Steve Bisley and Aaron Pedersen, that threw her into the limelight. The show was shot completely on film – rare in this digital age – and ran for roughly 26 episodes a season.
Since then, she’s enjoyed a constant career on stage and screen working on shows such as Tangle, Total Control and The Family Next Door. What’s it like to look back on a career as stacked as hers, with so much left in the tank? “That’s the thing about acting,” she says. “We always live on slightly unsatisfied, slightly on hope, and potential … it hasn’t died yet, unfortunately. I think that’s contract work in a way, isn’t it?”
A big draw of working in television is the flexibility and possibility of working multiple times with the same director on different shows. While shooting The Family Next Door, she reconnected with director Emma Freeman, who she’d worked with on Tangle. “I’m finding there are more quality TV miniseries being produced now – as opposed to long seasons that keep actors tied to a single production,” she says. “This allows us to work on a few projects at once, and you can weave in and out of crews, which is very nice. These days you get more of this collaborative experience.”
McClements says she doesn’t watch herself in anything she’s worked on. She stopped when she started having kids. “It would put me in a terrible mood and I thought ‘I’ve got to bring up these little kids’, and so I stopped watching.” I ask if obsessing over her own performance may hinder her a little in the role. “I think so,” she says. “You know, some people watch themselves and they do improve. People watch it on set. They watch to play back what they just did.”
She says she prefers to be a little more immediate. “Because the pleasure comes from working with someone else and creating a world that’s imaginary, that you’re both living in; that you can be emotionally free in. But it’s a contract with the other actor. We’re both living it, and you’re sort of tricking your body into believing that world’s for you. It’s fun.”
McClements also reflects on the privilege of working with actors who have a similar outlook to hers when it comes to the creative process. “It’s about that connection, the creation of that universe when you’re inside something, I really appreciate another actor who is interested as well.”
The 60-year-old-actor is learning at this point in her career how to celebrate and get lost in other people’s creative success. It’s a process of softening and feeling secure in herself. She says a big part of that is granting herself the space to relax, zoom out and take in the whole landscape. “I think there’s a real pleasure as you get older in appreciating other creatives and what they’re making,” she says. “You know, the director, the editor, the writer, the lighting designer.”
It’s those elements of their creative contribution that she may not have been able to understand before but now, with the blinkers off, can appreciate. That comes with time, she says, and learning not to panic. “Coming out of film school, you think you have to know everything about everything. But now you can just really enjoy calling on the expertise of everyone else. It’s such a pleasure.”
She remembers something Australian actor Martin Sacks (Blue Heelers, Wentworth, The Survivors) said to her once on set: “Everything now I do is just cream on the bun.” At this stage in her life, it’s exactly where she’s at. “I feel like I’ve run through the forest and shut the gate,” she says. “I made it, and now I can enjoy it.”
Dalliance premieres on Paramount+ on August 27.
