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,…
Belvoir St Theatre’s artistic director Eamon Flack remembers the moment he first read The Cherry Orchard by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov.
“It was on a verandah in Perth in my first year in drama school,” he says. “I was lying in a friend’s hammock. That was exactly 20 years ago. I remember a funny feeling of familiarity I had with it and some sort of excitement. It’s funny, I haven’t thought about that for a long time.”
Flack’s connection with the 117-year-old play, which he is directing from his own adaptation for a season at Belvoir St Theatre that starts on Saturday, came from memories of his peripatetic childhood.
“My father had a knack for getting retrenched or fired, or for resigning in high dudgeon,” he says. “And so we kept having to leave where we were at. You’d connect to a place and then you get kicked out of it and you have to move on to the next one. I moved five times before I was eight and my response was just being a dreamer.” (more…)
Before this interview I actually felt a bit nervous and realised it’s because I just binged season eight of Wentworth. How does it feel to play a character who provokes such a visceral reaction?
By the time my work meets its audience it’s always a good 6-12 months after it’s finished so I’ve generally well and truly moved on and [the reaction] takes me by surprise. Generally speaking, people are pretty good. Just occasionally I see a shift in eyes. Some people hyperventilate a little bit but I’m not sure if that’s more to do with the fact that somebody they’ve had in their loungeroom for a binge session has suddenly materialised in front of them or whether it has something to do with the terror Joan Ferguson wreaks.
Pamela Rabe | Photo by John Appleyard (2017)
Thinking about one’s ability to change, is it a case of once a villain, always a villain?
Well, that would be sad, wouldn’t it? We all have a — probably never more so than now in the middle of a pandemic — a desire for things to be normal and not to change. So maybe if people want to put things in a box. I haven’t found that personally. If it’s a question of a professional “once a villain, always a villain”, that’s certainly not been the case. I’m lucky enough to work across a lot of different media doing a lot of different roles that stretch me in different ways. But I don’t ever take for granted the great gift and privilege it was to play that villain. I’m certainly not the first person to say villains are wonderful to play. (more…)
Here's a snippet of the upcoming new episode 2 of "Face to Face with David" Season 2 with Pamela Rabe. There's still no new date when it will be out…
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…)
The make-up room on the set of Wentworth, has a row of headshots of all the cast. At some point during shooting the latest season, the cast started replacing the photos of themselves with photos of themselves as young children. Pamela Rabe, who plays Joan “The Freak” Ferguson, stuck up a photo of herself as a four-year-old. “I’m gazing at the camera with a very Joan Ferguson expression with a lollipop in my mouth,” Pamela, 61, tells TV WEEK with a laugh. “I’ve just realised that look has obviously been in my arsenal for a very long time!”
That expression has terrified and enthralled Wentworth fans ever since Joan arrived as the prison’s new governor in the show’s second season. She’s quite possibly the scariest woman on TV, something Pamela thinks is “wonderful”.
“You try to tell stories that people can be engaged with and entertained by, but also to feel something,” she says. “So if people feel scared, that’s as good as anything.”
There are times when Pamela has witnessed the fear on people’s faces when they’ve seen her standing in front of them.
“Just occasionally you get a little squeal, a little hand clasped over the mouth,” she says.
Growing up in Canada, Pamela was still very young when she realised that baddies were the most fun to play on stage or screen.
“I played Goldilocks in kindergarten and that didn’t go well,” she remembers. “In second grade, I was handed the Queen in Alice In Wonderland, and I thought, ‘Oh, there’s no turning back from this.”‘ (more…)