When writer Elise McCredie came to Teresa Palmer with the role of The Kindred cult survivor Freya in The Clearing, the actress took little convincing to take on the part – despite the dark subject matter and the disturbing places it would take her.
“I was completely riveted by the world that they set up,” Palmer tells WHO over Zoom from her home in LA.
WATCH: The Clearing Official Teaser | Disney
The opportunity to work back in Australia with a stellar cast and crew of women was also a big drawcard for the podcaster, author, and mother to four young children – Bodhi, 9, Forest, 7, Poet, 4, and Prairie, 1 – with her husband, actor and director Mark Webber, who has a son Isaac, 15, from a previous relationship.
The shoot for The Clearing turned out to be as rewarding as it was taxing. As WHO discovered during our chat, multitasking (she breastfed during the interview), mummy time and the support from her family is the key to making it work.
You’re extremely busy, not only with your family but all the other projects you have. How do you manage it all?
I’m exhausted, honestly. I don’t know, I’m just very tired. I have to have a daily non-negotiable. My husband gets an hour to himself and I get an hour to myself. So he goes to the gym. I do not do that! I take my hour to have a bath and I listen to a podcast. I lock the door and no-one is allowed to ask me anything – that’s mummy time. My mum’s usually here too and it’s just a divide and conquer … I’m really busy.
You seem to be doing a pretty good job of the juggle. How beautiful that your mum can spend so much time with you…
She raised me as a single mum, it was just me and her. She gets lonely on her own and all she wants to do is be with the children. She says, “They keep me young” and I love her energy with the kids, she is so gentle and kind.
Were your kids on-set with you?
They tend to visit me on-set a lot. My little one was just a baby so I was breastfeeding her, and I was also breastfeeding the [then]three-year-old at the time too, actually. My son, Bodhi, plays the best friend of my son in The Clearing. It was wonderful having them around. I think it lifted the spirits of the crew because the subject matter was so dark, to have these little kiddos running around, having giggles and cuddles with the crew, it sort of lifted the morale. It was a breath of fresh air. But I put the boundary up that they couldn’t be around the darker stuff.
With the intense subject matter, how did you decompress from that and become their mum again?
It was challenging. The storyline is really, really heavy and explores the misuse of power and the cycle of abuse, and largely through the eyes of my character. So I was having to marinate through all of these feelings and this emotional complexity – it was really haunting. These things have actually happened to people and there are still modern day cults, so I found it pretty confronting.
I had no other choice but to leave the work at work because I really didn’t want to negatively impact my children. What I did was I would use the car ride home to really switch out of the headspace, I would put on music and converse with the driver, and just try to lighten things up. But it would haunt me in my dreams … I was dreaming about it and almost every night, I would wake up in a cold sweat and have to remind myself, “It’s all right, this isn’t real, you’re playing a character.”
Oh, wow! I bet it was nice to be able to give all your babes a cuddle on-set then.
Definitely. I have four platinum blondes. The running joke was: “There goes The Kindred kids from the cult.”
Stream The Clearing now on Disney Plus with a mth-to-mth no lock-in contract. Subscribe here.
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