AACTA Screen Fest Wentworth Panel
The AACTA Wentworth Panel 2 is now available on YouTube. Panel two features more of your favourites from WENTWORTH Season 8 (Foxtel) – Kate Box (Lou), Kate Jenkinson (Allie), Katrina…
Wentworth Season 8.1 Behind the Scenes Photos
Added 18 photos to the Wentworth Season 8 Behind the Scenes gallery. Click here to see them all.
Wentworth’s Joan star hints people will ‘suffer’ as villain’s memory finally returns
EXCLUSIVE for dailystar.co.uk: Wentworth Prison fans watched as Joan Ferguson finally remembered who she was after spending much of the eighth season believing she was Kath Maxwell, and actress Pamela Rabe promises plenty of fall out in the final season
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)
Wentworth Prison star teases “pressure cooker” season 8 finale and 2021’s last ever episode
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…)
Pamela Rabe | Interview for metro.co.uk about the final Wentworth season
Metro Interview: Wentworth Prison star Pamela Rabe only returned if Joan and Vera would have scenes
Duncan Lindsay shared his latest exclusive interview with Pamela Rabe for Metro.co.uk earlier today:
Wentworth Prison star Pamela Rabe reveals what made her return and her favourite scene
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…)
Foxtel Interview: Wentworth Season 8: Part 1 Finale – Pamela Rabe On The Freak’s Freak Out!
WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
Wow, what a journey it’s been for the character who came back from the dead! After we were teased with a glimpse of Joan ‘The Freak’ Ferguson, played by Pamela Rabe, in last season’s finale of Wentworth, this year she returned to our screens, although much different to what we’d seen before.
After being mugged in episode two, she claimed to have no memory of who she was or what she’d done – something plenty of people (including fans!) doubted. However, in the final moments of the gripping finale to season eight’s Part 1, it appeared that Joan was speaking the truth as we witnessed her horrified realisation of her past evil deeds. In a twist, however, this has occurred after her committal hearing, where it’s already been decided that she’s in a fugue state. It’s a situation ripe for the character to use to her advantage.
Pamela Rabe talks to us about her character’s return to the show, her journey in the first part of season eight and what it bodes for her in the second and final instalment!
Foxtel Insider: What appealed to you about returning to play Joan, who we all thought was dead?
Pamela Rabe: The first thing that appealed to me was just the opportunity to work with who I consider the most wonderful work family I’ve ever had the pleasure and privilege to collaborate with. I just wanted to make sure that the reasons for her return were grounded in something that could be credible for an audience and that’s tricky when she’s required to handle some of the more gothic, melodramatic aspects of the storylines.
Having said that, it was just then a really great challenge to be able to tackle: who is she if she’s not the person that she and the audience remembers? It ended up becoming very rewarding, learning about the aspects of this character that we’d all created, how they would manifest, you know, without some of the obvious things like the black gloves and the glint in her eye.
Insider: For pretty much the entire season of Part 1, no-one – neither the characters in the show nor the fans! – knew whether she really did have amnesia. How did you approach playing that?
Pamela: I think probably the same way that Joan would if she was trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes! But that’s actually the dilemma for her, really, isn’t it? The little girl who cried wolf. If you’ve been a master at playing people and playing games, how do you convince people that you’re not? [However] even with memory loss, she’s still the same person and she has the same intelligence and knowledge of the world in a way – she just doesn’t remember aspects of her own behaviour. She understands that she is not to be believed in a dangerous place where the alliances that you make and the things that you do really affect your survival rate. It’s a real dilemma but, as I say, a delicious one to tackle.
Wentworth may be getting a spin-off series!
How Wentworth held us captive until the very end
Wentworth finished filming – forever – on September 4. A few days later the set, in the western suburbs of Melbourne, started being demolished.
“The Victorian Government have plans for that site, we always had to move out of there this year,” Wentworth producer Jo Porter tells SMARTdaily. “But we’ve relocated sites once before (the show’s first three seasons were filmed in Coburg.)”
The big question – is this really the end of Wentworth? The show returned to film 20 episodes to bring the hit drama to a conclusion. The first 10 episodes (filmed pre COVID) aired this year – episode 10 airs tomorrow – with the final 10 (filmed under COVID-safe restrictions) airing in 2021.
While the show’s intensely passionate fanbase still have another year of episodes to come, there’s already wishful thinking from fans about a spin-off.
Even Pamela Rabe, who returned as Joan ‘The Freak’ Ferguson this season told Smart “to be honest I think there’s still life in it yet. I wish those stories would keep going.”
Porter is leaving the door slightly open for some kind of continuation in the future.
Behind the scenes of Wentworth – Kate Jenkinson and Pamela Rabe. Pic: Jane Zhang
“Never say never,” Porter says. “It feels like this chapter of the show has finished. This season has had a big spike in audience domestically. We’re getting new audiences all the time. There’s a few characters who survive, there are possibilities but at the moment we’re focusing on this being a beautiful bow to draw a close to this chapter.”
Next year’s final episode will be episode 100 – Wentworth began in 2013 as a reimagining of Prisoner, which ran between 1979 and 1986 with a remarkable 692 episodes – back then they’d film between 80 and 100 episodes a year. (more…)
TV Week Interview “It’s fun being evil” – Pamela Rabe on The Freak’s reign of terror
‘Scaring people is wonderful’
Pamela Rabe, the woman behind “The Freak”, speaks out
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…)