The weather in London is freezing, and Toni Collette, who arrived a couple of days previously from sweltering Sydney, peers, aghast, through the windows of the hotel room where we’re meeting, at the leaden sky. ‘It’s so cold! I’ve never done this before but when I got to the hotel it was 8.30am, miserable and rainy. I called my parents to tell them I’d landed. I said, “I love London, but I’m going to bed!” and only got up to have a massage at 5.30pm.’
You learn a lot about Collette, 52, from this conversation. She’s down-to-earth, she loves her mum and dad and – like many women in midlife – after years of family obligations she’s just starting to permit herself some slack. When she was younger, she shied away from people telling her – correctly – she was gorgeous. Has she got better at accepting compliments? ‘I have! I’ve been very good at giving and taking care of other people,’ she says, with her signature throaty chuckle. ‘Now I’m getting very good at receiving care.’
Dress, Buerlangma. Gloves, Dents. Bangles, Dinosaur Designs
A genuine A-lister, Collette has starred in everything from Muriel’s Wedding back in 1994 (‘That film will never go away. People love her, I love her’), to The Sixth Sense, which won her an Oscar nomination, as well as About a Boy and Little Miss Sunshine, to Knives Out. In person she comes across as slightly hippyish. She’s constantly doing cat-like yoga stretches and appears totally unaffected, swearing constantly. After we meet, when she appears on The One Show, host Vernon Kay apologises to the audience for her ‘potty mouth’ – she said ‘s**t’ – only for her to swear again, mortified.
Today, she lives in an upmarket beachside suburb, but she’s very much in touch with her working-class, no-nonsense roots in down-at-heel Blacktown, Western Sydney. One of her two brothers, who both have white-collar jobs, still lives there and she visits often. (‘It hasn’t gentrified much.’) Her dad Bob was a lorry driver, her mum Judy worked in customer services. ‘They’re good, grounded people.
We “Westies” are considered very uncouth, very daggy,’ Collette says. ‘Do you know what that means?’
I do – it means shabby and a tad uncool.
‘Exactly! Not that that should have anything to do with anything, but in terms of what we are as a family and where I grew up I am like some kind of alien. The trajectory of my life is so magical and bizarre and I’m so f***ing grateful. Not Grammy-speech grateful – honestly grateful because it’s not what my life was.’
Dress, Edeline Lee
We’re here to discuss Collette’s latest role (‘I can’t remember every film I’ve done any more, which is weird because when you’re younger you think you’ll never forget anything’) in Mickey 17, directed by Bong Joon Ho, whose black-comedy thriller Parasite swept the 2020 Oscars, with awards including, for him, best director. The new sci-fi film is, as Collette puts it, ‘tonally all over the place, but in the best way. I really wanted to work with Bong. The first time we zoomed I had sweaty pits because I was so nervous.’
Part dystopian horror, part comedy, Mickey 17 is the tale of a mission, led by megalomaniacal failed presidential candidate Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his scheming wife Ylfa (Collette), to colonise an icy distant planet. Mickey, played by Twilight’s Robert Pattinson, is an ‘expendable’ – a worker assigned life-threatening chores because every time he dies he’s replaced by a ‘printout’ replica of his body, with his emotions and memories uploaded on a hard disc.
While Mickey is tackling monsters in sub-zero temperatures, Kenneth and his wife luxuriate in their space-station quarters. Ylfa is ‘a 1950s housewife crossed with a smiling assassin’. As Collette describes her, she is clearly the brains behind the operation. ‘There’s a hyper-femininity to her and she uses that gentle, snake-like presence to manipulate her husband and pull the strings. He just needs a little help. They completely love each other – Bong said, “I want it to feel they’ve either just had sex or are about to jump into bed together.”’
As a fake-tanned billionaire, Kenneth bears a striking resemblance to Donald Trump (his supporters wear red, Maga-style baseball caps). ‘He’s an amalgamation of different characters. I’d rather not give that real-life buffoon any more airtime,’ Collette says with a roll of her eyes.
Toni with Mark Ruffalo in Mickey 17
The satire is often dark, but filming in Hertfordshire – you’d never guess from the extraordinary sets – was nonstop giggles. ‘Mark Ruffalo had me crying with laughter daily.’ And what about Pattinson, dismissed by some as a ‘hunk’, but here pulling off an acting masterclass? ‘The guy’s a genius. You can see him as this sweet, daggy young guy he was once and think how weird it must have been for him stepping into heartthrob land. It must be so frustrating for actors whom others attempt to pigeonhole, when he’s so capable.’
Being pigeonholed is a fate Collette has avoided brilliantly. In person, she’s low-key glam, with long, glossy blonde hair and immaculate make-up, wearing an obviously designer white blazer and black trousers (‘These are borrowed, I’m going to have to give them back’). Yet, on screen, she’s always dodged playing personality-free arm candy for more complex characters.
Collette agrees: ‘Those arm-candy parts are where characters go to die. But things are changing a lot. In my industry they talk about older women becoming obsolete and casting younger ones, but my career just gets better. I don’t know how I ended up in this position, but it just keeps on happening.’
I’d say it’s because Collette held out for the (small number) of decent parts available, where the way her character looked had no bearing on the plot. ‘I’ve always thought what happens internally is more important than external stuff,’ she shrugs.
Collette is in London to start filming a top-secret project. How does that work when her children – Sage, 17, and Arlo, 13 – are on the other side of the world? Presumably, though she won’t say, they’re with their dad, drummer David Galafassi, another Aussie, whom she divorced just over two years ago after 19 years of marriage (they’d been separated ‘for a substantial period’ and he’s since been snapped embracing another woman). She won’t discuss the split but says, ‘You grow the most from the most difficult challenges. If you do that you feel so strong. So, you need to see them as an opportunity rather than from some victim perspective.’
At the Paris premiere in February, in a dress chosen by YOU fashion director Sophie Dearden-Howell
‘The children couldn’t come with me – the school year’s just begun in Australia,’ she says of the family setup. ‘It’s fine – once I start shooting I’ve got a little break in the middle so I can go back. We used to travel together and last year they came on two jobs with me for a bit. I’ve just had a big chunk at home, so it balances out, but it’s still pretty painful. I don’t like being away from them at all – thank god for FaceTime!’ Motherhood has made her even pickier about the jobs she chooses. ‘I think, “Is this worth leaving the house for?” It has to speak to my soul, otherwise I’d rather stay at home with them.’
She rolls up her sleeve to show me a tattoo (she has eight in total) of their names, spelt in childlike calligraphy. ‘It’s a copy of my daughter’s writing when she was five,’ she says. Do they have the performance genes of their parents? Collette nods. ‘My daughter’s got an incredible singing voice, so we’ll see. I’ll support them in whatever they want to do.’
Collette could hardly say otherwise, as her parents allowed her to quit school (‘I was pretty good at school’) at 16 to pursue acting. ‘I’m sure my parents were worried, but I was pretty strong-willed. I had such big balls at that age, I was like, “I don’t need a backup.” It’s so weird because I had no access to this world at all, I didn’t know how to enter it. But I had this belief of somehow finding work.’
Her instincts were correct. Apart from a brief spell delivering pizzas, she’s acted nonstop. Barely into her 20s, she won the life-changing role of dumpy, lovable Muriel, longing for a wedding, and the film became a global smash. Collette is honest about the effects of sudden fame – for a period she suffered from panic attacks. She also partied hard. ‘My god, the things I did!’ she beams. ‘I’ve shaved my head six times, the first time in Mexico, when I was 25. I just wanted to do it and the cleansing aspect of it felt f***ing great. It felt like a fresh start.’
There have been misses. We’re speaking just as the UK has gone crazy for Mad About the Boy, the fourth film in the Bridget Jones franchise, a role originally offered to Collette. She rejected it because she was in a Broadway show, so it went to Renée Zellweger. Then there was the time she failed to progress further than a meeting with fellow Aussie, director Baz Luhrmann, about what was to become another mega-hit, Moulin Rouge!. Is she ever tormented by such what ifs? ‘Never! You get what you’re meant to get, and everyone has their own path.’
Dress, Edeline Lee. Gloves, Dents
She’s clearly not wild about air-kissy Hollywood and avoids awards ceremonies such as the Oscars. ‘I’ll go if I have to, otherwise I really won’t.’ Disappointingly, there’s no WhatsApp group where Aussie superstars such as Collette, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and Hugh Jackman chinwag – ‘I know them all to say “hi” to, but we’re living our lives.’ She still hangs out with her old school friends – though her best buddy from those days now lives in London. ‘Once I get over the jet lag, I’ll have time to play,’ she says, grinning.
No one stands on ceremony around her – which I can well imagine as, unlike most A-listers, she evidently has zero ego. ‘“Don’t you know who I am?” That’s not me. Sometimes when people don’t recognise me, they’re like, “Oh god, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realise.” I’m like, “Are you for real? You don’t have to apologise. I actually prefer it.’’’
Her humility and laidbackness are entwined with a fascination for spirituality. She loves numerology, and tries explaining the significance of her birthday, 1 November (01/11), but the jet lag overwhelms her and she peters off, giggling. She is also into astrology (‘I used to hate being Scorpio because we feel everything so deeply, but now I wouldn’t live any other way’) and meditates regularly.
‘Every single time I meditate I have an experience of oneness with the universe. For a while it freaked me out and I had to stop, because there was a sense of surrender and it felt like dying. But now I love it because I believe that’s what we are – all from the same source. We’re all one love.’
Dress, Buerlangma. Gloves, Dents. Bangles, Dinosaur Designs
With such a mindset she had no anxieties about celebrating her 50th birthday, shortly before she announced the end of her marriage. The date fell during the filming of Mickey 17, thus necessitating two parties: one in London, another on her return to Sydney. ‘It was a joyous time. I felt really trepidatious about 40: “I’m 40 – how can this be?” Two friends died around that time and for a long while I really worried about death. But now I have total calm and acceptance about it. It’s healthy to think about death; it brings context to life. So turning 50 was a total breeze. There was complete joy, a sense of freedom, a real appreciation of life, seeing things clearly and feeling like I was in a really good place.’
She is thrilled ‘conversations’ are starting about midlife female sexuality – see the aforementioned Bridget Jones or Nicole Kidman’s latest film, Babygirl. ‘I’d love to read Gillian Anderson’s book . She’s really vocal about all that and I admire her.’
More generally, Collette loves getting older ‘because you don’t give a s**t. I’d like people to enjoy my work, but there’s no time to care about what others are thinking of you. You waste so much time doing that when you’re younger. Just live your life.’
Mickey 17 will be released in cinemas nationwide on 7 March
Muriel’s Wedding (1995)
Collette stars as lovable misfit Muriel from Porpoise Spit, Australia, whose only dream is to marry. Worth it for her Abba renditions alone.
The Sixth Sense (1999)
She was nominated for an Oscar as Lynn Sear, the divorced mother of Cole (Haley Joel Osment), a young boy who sees dead people.
About a Boy (2002)
Sad and hilarious as the ‘daft f***ing hippie’ mum of an oddball outcast (Nicholas Hoult), playing opposite Hugh Grant. Excellent British accent to boot.
Hereditary (2018)
One of the scariest demonic films ever. Collette is a grieving mother in meltdown. Her screams, as her husband (Gabriel Byrne) burns alive, still haunt viewers.
Knives Out(2019)
She is howlingly funny as the new-age yet money-hungry widow Joan, who owns Goop-like company Flam, in Rian Johnson’s whodunnit.