WANTED: One prison governor who can disarm electrocution devices, efficiently kill an inmate and stage it as a suicide, steal a dying woman’s pain meds, and still peel off her black leather gloves with a satisfied snap at the end of the day.
Such is life for new Governor Joan Ferguson on Foxtel’s dark Prisoner remake, Wentworth. The manipulative prison boss finally showed her sociopathic depths in a shocking episode last week — pausing only to pat her hair bun into place after dispatching inmate Simmo (Ally Fowler), who was inadvertently about to ruin her schemes.
“She’s single-minded,” Pamela Rabe says of the puppet-master she plays with delicious cunning.
“Extraordinarily strong-willed, highly principled, very demanding, somebody who believes the ends justify the means — everyone is expendable.
“I think she’s utterly convinced she does things for the right reason, but she absolutely demands allegiance . . . and also enjoys extracting facts from people.
“As the scripts come in I’m like, ‘Oh my lord!’,” she says with a hearty cackle.
Rabe, 55, is sitting in a rickety chair at a rustic Northbridge cafe, sipping tea. Her long hair is swinging loose (not a bun in sight), her height is imposing, her movements fluid and feline. Rabe is the first to admit she’s hard to miss.
Wentworth star Pamela Rabe who plays Governor Joan Ferguson, aka The Freak. Credit: Foxtel, Foxtel/Ben King
“When you’re built the way I am and look the way I do you tend to get offered a lot of strong female roles and a lot of those roles are occasionally quite nasty,” she says.
“And they don’t come much stronger or nastier than this. So when the phone call came I was like, ‘Oh! That’s just great’.”
Ferguson is based on Prisoner’s predatory guard dubbed “The Freak”, played by Rabe’s friend Maggie Kirkpatrick.
Rabe says her version of the character, whose “work is her life”, hides many secrets behind her controlled mask.
“I suspect underneath water level, those legs are going rather fast,” she grins. “I think there’s room for unexpected things that can be revealed.”
So do these hidden depths include Ferguson being gay, as the original was?
“I’m not yet sure how completely in touch with all of that she is,” Rabe says after a pause.
“Maybe she is (gay) or she’s just pretending something else. She’s such a player. She gets a huge amount of sexual pleasure out of the games she plays.” (more…)
