Longtime mates-turned-Wentworth co-stars Pamela Rabe and Marta Dusseldorp get candid about their enduring friendship and closing the chapter on the beloved Aussie drama WENTWORTH (s8, part 2) Starts August 24,…
Wentworth star Pamela Rabe has promised some suffering for the other characters in the final season after her character Joan Ferguson finally remembered who she really was.
In the season eight finale, which aired on 5STAR on Wednesday night, Joan had a breakthrough with her memory after believing she was Kath Maxwell since her head injury, and glimpses of her past – including her time in prison and as the governor – all flooded back.
The Australian prison drama will return for its final season next year and, while she refused to give too many spoilers, Pamela made one thing clear: Joan’s recovery will affect everyone.
Speaking exclusively to Daily Star Online, the 61-year-old said: “Now that you’re carrying all those parts of yourself at the same time, which bits will win and, if they manifest, how will they? Who will recognise it and who will be affected by it?
“Who will suffer from it – or even benefit from it?
“That’s really the crux of the dilemma she has now, if and when the old Joan will resurface.”
Joan’s memory returned after flashbacks from her childhood (Image: Freemantle)
Johnaton Hughes published an exclusive interview for radiotimes.com today:
Pamela Rabe also reveals how the hit Australian drama kept calm and carried on through two Melbourne lockdowns.
After weeks of violence, twists and tension, Wentworth Prison reaches its explosive eighth season finale on Wednesday 7th October on 5STAR, and stakes for the inmates could not be higher as the show edges towards the last ever episode in 2021.
The gritty Australian drama, a reboot of cult favourite Prisoner: Cell Block H, was saved from the axe in 2018 by campaigning fans who persuaded Foxtel network not to lock up the show and throw away the key as originally planned.
Committing to two more years to complete the story and bringing iconic villain Joan ‘The Freak’ Ferguson back from the dead, Wentworth Prison is now on the home stretch to its final season – so what can we expect from this week’s sign-off?
“There is a sense of pressure from the repression of Joan’s amnesia,” says Pamela Rabe, the award-winning actress who plays Joan, speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com. (more…)
Duncan Lindsay shared his latest exclusive interview with Pamela Rabe for Metro.co.uk earlier today:
No character’s journey in any recent TV show has been quite as complex and morbidly fascinating as that of Joan Ferguson in Australian prison drama hit Wentworth. And during the eighth season, we have seen a much more vulnerable and challenging side to the character, who has lost almost everything about her and is certain that she is Kath Maxwell.
It’s something that Pamela Rabe, the majorly talented star behind the icon (or is it the other way round?) found highly difficult as she returned – but it was a process she enthused to Metro.co.uk that she thoroughly enjoyed.
She smiled: ‘As I’ve said to you before, it’s always a joy with that group of people. It comes with all its challenges – when they push the character to extraordinary extremes and take away her memory, it’s hard to hold on to a character who is credibly the same person for the audience.
‘So we had to make decisions on which characteristics, qualities and appearance remained the same even if her memory of her actions had disappeared. It was a great challenge – I wouldn’t call it a joy but exciting and good, hard work!
Joan/Kath has been on an incredible journey (Picture: Channel 5)
‘We’re all like that here. As every season builds to a finale, there’s always someone going through high octane laundry press moments – Danielle (Cormack), Nicole (da Silva), Tammie (MacIntosh) – we all go through it. It was my turn for it to come round! (more…)
Even when Joan The Freak’ Ferguson was buried alive in Wentworth three years ago, fans of the hit Foxtel drama series still weren’t convinced she was dead. For Pamela Rabe, whose chilling performance of Ferguson saw her win a Logie for Most Outstanding Actress in 2018, she was certain she’d filmed her final scenes and The Freak had gone for good. While she came back “to haunt (nemesis) Will Jackson” a few times in flashback scenes in the next season, she decompressed from portraying one of Australian television’s darkest characters through comedy (starring in limited series Pitting Adelaide) and her beloved theatre work. But if anyone could cheat death, even when buried in the bush, it was The Freak. Not only was Wentworth saved from being axed in part after fans campaigned for its return, but Rabe got the call back too for the series’ final season, which started filming this year and will play out until 2021.
“I assumed Joan was gone, and she’d gone out with a bang,” Rabe tells The BINGE Guide.
“I was as surprised as anyone to get the phone call but I’m thrilled it happened. I didn’t expect to come back to Wentworth, and I don’t think many of my fellow cast members knew until I rocked up to the set again.
“The story wasn’t finished, not just the Joan Ferguson story but the whole arc of the show. The writing department at Wentworth lay seeds for a very long arc of stories. That long arc wasn’t finished yet. I’m thrilled for them they get to finish this off properly and I’m lucky they considered Joan Ferguson to be a part of that.” (more…)
It can be mesmerising to see the beauty of what is known, rather unimaginatively, as Photo 51. The photo – resembling a monochrome, mandala-like artwork – was crucial to the discovery of the structure of DNA. It is also a pivot around which Anna Ziegler’s 2008 play Photograph 51 revolves.
At one point the central character, English scientist Dr Rosalind Franklin, stands with the photo in front of her face, staring into its mysteries and potential revelations. Well might we all: as Pamela Rabe notes, this photo is about the secret of life – and the play, which Rabe is directing for the Melbourne Theatre Company, explores that secret at both the scientific and more personal, philosophical level.
The photo, taken in 1952 as part of Franklin’s investigations, is an X-ray “diffraction image” of crystallised DNA. It was vital evidence to identify the structure of DNA – but, in what remains a controversy, Photo 51 was shown without Franklin’s knowledge to another scientist.
The 1962 Nobel prize for medicine went to James Watson, Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin’s colleague, Maurice Wilkins – the man who had shared the photo. The three men – and the play tells us a lot about men of those days – used the image to develop their prize-winning chemical model of DNA while Franklin, with quiet, professional dedication, had unknowingly persevered with her own meticulous work on the problem.
Pamela Rabe and Nadine Garner during a break in rehearsals. Photo: Eddie Jim
Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958 when she was 37 – five years after Crick, Watson and Wilkins published their findings in Nature, and four years before they received the Nobel. In the play, these men and two others convene with Franklin to discuss “her place in history”. In one unbroken, energetic act, the play slips between locations and scenes; our imaginations conjure the worlds evoked by the words, especially Franklin’s. (more…)
There's a new interview with Kate Atkinson about the Wentworth season finale on NT News. Here's the part about Pam: Apparently there is no coffin that can hold Joan ‘The…
Almost had a heart attack after seeing the last few seconds of season 7! Best news 2019 so far! Check out this nowtolove.com.au article for everything about this fantastic Wentworth season finale + a short video of Joan’s return!
Jo Porter about the episode:
Source: nowtolove.com.au
Deaths, shock returns and LOTS of tears… Everything that happened in that heartbreaking finale.
It’s shock, after shock, after shock in Wentworth’s explosive season finale!
And before you continue reading, we have to warn you:
MAJOR, MAJOR, MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD
Fans have been left reeling after the death of two inmates… and the shock return of The Freak!
That’s right. The Wentworth season seven finale has just aired, and it ended with the mother of all cliffhangers: the return of The Freak!
Just when we thought we couldn’t be any more flabbergasted, along came a final scene, which showed Joan Ferguson (Pamela Rabe) alive and well, seemingly living rough and presumably quietly scheming her revenge.
We’ve got ACTUAL chills!
What this means for Will (Robbie Magasiva), Vera (Kate Atkinson) and Jake (Bernard Curry) is anyone’s guess. But all we can say is thank goodness this show got a last-minute reprieve and was picked up for another 20 episodes, because now we’ll actually get to find out!