ScreenWize

She has a pilot’s license, speaks German, travelled the world as a teenage model, and married a Hollywood star. It seems that life couldn’t get much sweeter for Jacinda Barrett, born and raised in Brisbane. Yet the actress, who has a house in Los Angeles and who has played opposite leading men like John Travolta, Zach Braff and Colin Firth, has been hanging out to show her home country just how far she has come. “I really wanted to do an Australian movie,” she says from the lounge of a Sydney hotel. “It was so weird to me that I hadn’t made a movie here, and it was definitely something I had to seek out – Australian scripts were not coming after me at all.”

Part of Barrett’s problem is that she started her career out of the country and has never looked back. With a television debut on MTV’s reality television show The Real World: London and feature film credits like Ladder 49, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and New York I Love You, she’s far more recognisable in Britain and America. “My work is definitely better known in the USA than it is in Australia,” she says, “and it’s been easier for me to get work in the States. So I had to set about getting an Australian agency and got them looking for a movie. I love Australian movies!”

What they found was Matching Jack, the new Nadia Tass film, which provides a deeply challenging role for Barrett. Starring opposite Irish actor James Nesbitt, Barrett plays Marisa, a young mother who discovers that her ten-year-old son Jack has leukaemia and that her husband David (Richard Roxburgh) has had multiple affairs throughout their marriage. About the only help she gets is from Nesbitt’s character Connor, who’s son Finn (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is in the hospital bed next to Jack. The story provides a double dose of tragedy for Barrett’s character to deal with, yet she found one of the hardest aspects of the role getting her native accent back in shape. “Surprisingly it was really hard to do my Australian accent,” says Barrett with a voice that lies somewhere over the Pacific – perhaps nearer the Californian border than the coast of Queensland. “It was harder for me than doing an English or French accent because I had to find where it was inside me, rather than just add it on.”
Interested in acting since she was a child, Barrett was sidetracked by winning a Dolly cover-girl competition that led to an international career as a model. “I’ve always acted, and I remember changing high schools to go somewhere that had a good theatre programme and loving it,” she says of her school days, “but then I had the opportunity to go to places like Paris and Tokyo. At that age, travelling and working as a model was such an intoxicating idea, I decided to go see the world.”

The three years away from home changed Barrett’s life forever and left her with an enduring sense of adventure and a thirst for travel. But after her stint in reality television and a small film role, she decided to put her talent to the test at drama school. “I decided that if I was going to do this acting thing, I better see if I had the wherewithal to stick with it. It’s such a tough profession. So I took the money I had saved from modelling and went to theatre school in England. And I never took another modelling job after that.”

Although many see her stint in reality television as the starting point of her career, Barrett believes it was of little use in getting her any further in the acting world. “It had no correlation with my career, which is funny because it seems on the surface like it would. It was such a life time ago in any case, and it honestly never helped me,” she declares. “I had to go and audition for parts like anyone else, and win them. And just like everyone else I had to start on the lowest rung on the totem pole and work my way up. No-one is going to give you a part in a movie because they saw you in a reality TV show, and there are fantastic actors who’ve done much bigger things than reality TV and they cant get work! If anything, it’s more of a hindrance because you have to go and prove that you’re serious about being an actor.”

In 2004 Barrett married actor Gabriel Macht, (best known for playing the The Spirit in Frank Miller’s film of the same name). The couple have a daughter – now three years old - named Satine, who travels everywhere with her jet-setting mother. The experience of having her own child was critical in taking on the part of Marisa in Matching Jack. “I don’t even know how I would have approached the role not being a mum.” She says. “ It definitely informed every choice I made in the movie.” But being a mum isn’t slowing the internationally minded Australian down. She’s shortly back on the plane to America to start promoting the feature film Middlemen, a crime-comedy that she stars in, with her husband and legend James Caan. The sweet life clearly isn’t over for a while yet.

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon