It’s an unusually hot afternoon in Surry Hills and the actor Miranda Tapsell is standing outside Belvoir Street Theatre, squinting into the sun and wearing a trouser suit that looks fabulous if somewhat unsuited to the weather.
For the past week she has been on a treadmill of photoshoots and interviews promoting Top End Bub, the television series she has co-written and stars in. It’s a busy schedule for a woman who gave birth to her second child only four weeks ago.
Tapsell still manages to look luminous, though her voice is fraying.
“Wow,” she says, glancing down the street while a makeup artist brushes on some powder. “This whole area has changed a lot. When I was here as a student, I remember going to house parties in terrace houses or getting ready for Mardi Gras and getting something cheap to eat. Now it’s got a light rail and sushi bars.”
It was here, at Belvoir, that Tapsell’s acting career began, when Ursula Yovich, now her co-star in Top End Bub, recommended her to the theatre director Wesley Enoch for Belvoir’s 2008 production Yibiyung. She landed the lead role. “I was 21, still in my last year at Nida,” Tapsell says. “It felt like being thrown into the deep end, it was huge for me.”
Tapsell is a Top End bub herself. She grew up in Darwin and Kakadu, the only child of Barbara, a Larrakia and Tiwi woman, and Tony, who was raised in Cronulla, Sydney, before moving to the NT. She was the kind of kid who staged lounge-room plays and dance concerts with her cousins and mimicked voices off the TV.
A school visit from the actor Aaron Pedersen made her realise performing could be a life, not just a hobby. “He did for a living what I was doing in my lounge room,” she says, laughing, crinkling her eyes and nose.
Her drama teacher at Darwin high school pointed her to short courses at Nida, and then to a Bell Shakespeare regional scholarship. Seeing The Servant of Two Masters lit a fuse. She would later perform in the same play at Nida before stepping into Yibiyung at Belvoir. “Everything I’d hoped for as a 13-year-old meeting Aaron Pedersen – it came true,” she says, eyes widening.
Walking around the back lanes of Surry Hills, we’re trying to find another location for the photoshoot. Tapsell has two publicists, her agent, a stylist and her driver with her. This is normal for a TV publicity trail but it’s a lot for a walking interview.
Tapsell is in kitten heels, walking carefully past the abandoned e-bikes and two lost tourists looking for Central station. A hint of spring jasmine is drifting through the air. She’s in good spirits but the interview abruptly stops so she can hurry to a radio station for another appointment.
A week later we meet in a hotel room in Sydney’s city centre. It’s smashing rain outside. Tapsell kicks off her heels and curls up on a window seat overlooking the Royal Botanic Garden.
Theatre remains her “first love”, she says, picking up where we left off.
But it was screen work that gave Tapsell national visibility, first in the mini-series Mabo, then the feature film The Sapphires, the TV hit Love Child (where she earned two Logies) and her film Top End Wedding. The latter, which Tapsell co-wrote with Joshua Tyler, became a word-of-mouth hit for its sunny humour and portrayal of contemporary First Nations characters.
“I’d seen Dallas Winmar write Yibiyung about her grandmother, and Nakkiah Lui put her heart on stage with This Heaven,” Tapsell says. “They made me realise you can’t wait for the phone to ring. You have to be vulnerable and put your own heart on the page.”
She admits she once chased non-Indigenous roles – “because non-Indigenous actors get to be flawed, to make mistakes” – but writing her own work has freed her to explore Indigenous characters in a wider emotional register. “I’m always thinking: am I perpetuating stereotypes or am I empowering my mob?
“That’ll never leave me. But at some point you have to say this is true to me. And part of truth is letting characters be messy.”
That messiness is at the centre of Top End Bub, the eight-part spin-off series picking up after the events of Top End Wedding. Lauren (Tapsell) and Ned (Gwilym Lee) are suddenly guardians of a young girl after tragedy strikes. The show takes them back to Darwin, into the push-and-pull between family obligation and personal ambition.
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So far the reception has been positive, with audiences embracing the characters’ fumbles and missteps.
“People love that Lauren and Daffy [Yovich] mess up. They see themselves in that. So many people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, shared stories with me about losing a family member. That’s been really special.”
Comedy was the vehicle but it carried a bigger intent. “We didn’t realise how much Top End Wedding affected people,” she says. “It made audiences see Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in a new light. That’s how I want to engage in political conversation: through art, through joy.”
If Top End Bub is about juggling dreams with sudden parenthood, Tapsell was living her own version of that while making it. She had her first child, Grace, during early development of the series, and has just welcomed her second, Vincent.
For a moment, her eyes well-up. “I’ve got this beautiful baby boy and I’ve also got this TV series that means so much to me. But promoting it with a newborn … let’s just say there are a lot of invisible night feeds behind the makeup.”
For Tapsell, writing is not a departure from acting but a reclamation of agency. “As an actor you come in late, when most decisions are already made. As a writer and executive producer I get to make those decisions. It’s empowering.”
There is more on the horizon. She is working on a dark comedy by the Gamilaroi playwright Georgia Gillis, directed by Shari Sebbens for Griffin Theatre’s temporary Belvoir home. And she has just wrapped filming the ABC series A Portrait Artist of the Year, co-hosting with Luke McGregor.
Darwin remains at the heart of her imagination, even if she doesn’t live there. She worries about its changing atmosphere – “safety officers patrolling buses with guns, kids criminalised younger than ever” – but insists Top End Bub presents the Darwin she still loves.
“Everyone knows about the heat, the crocodiles, the Bintang singlets. But I wanted to show the pace, the nature, the sense of adventure. The landscape is another character.”
She wants to pass that love of nature on to her children, even in Sydney. “During lockdown in Melbourne, I kept getting photos from family fishing on the beach. I thought: how do I bring that sense of home here? So we go to Brighton-le-Sands, or down the coast. I want Grace to know you don’t need to spend money to enjoy yourself.”
In person, Tapsell is quick to laugh, warm, self-effacing. But she is also clear-eyed about the stakes of her work. “I put pressure on myself: will this help or hinder my mob? But audiences showed me that messiness is okay, that they’ll love Lauren even when she falters. That’s been liberating.”
She takes a sip of hot water, conserving her voice for the next round of radio interviews. “Acting will always be my first love,” she says. “But writing, producing, making my own work – that’s how I feed my family. I can’t wait for the phone to ring. I’ve got mouths to feed!”