Shalom Brune-Franklin has had something of a meteoric rise to fame since graduating from acting school in 2015. (Watch out interview with the Bad Mothers star below.)
From there, she walked straight into a role on Nine’s Doctor Doctor, before heading back to her native UK (she lived with her family in Australia for 10 years), and finding success all over again there.
“I went over there originally to shoot a docuseries for [British writer, director and producer] Peter Kosminsky. I got to play an ISIS bride, so it was wild,” she says. “Following the theme of war, I played a British soldier, on a BBC1 army drama Our Girl. So I have been doing a lot of gun things for the past year and a half.”
Brune-Franklin says it was strange to move back to the UK after a decade away, living in Perth. “I felt like an outsider all of a sudden,” she says. “Everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, you are so Australian!’
“To go from growing up in London, to going to [Perth], with its beautiful beaches, parrots in the trees – and then to go back to England and be sharing a bus with, like, 25 million people! It was like, ‘What?’”
Brune-Franklin returned to Australia last September specifically to film Bad Mothers. She says she couldn’t resist the role of free-spirited Bindy. “I was over in England, they got me to read for a different part. And I was like, ‘No! I don’t want to read for this part, I want to be Bindy!’
“I didn’t hear anything for ages, and then they were like, ‘Yeah, they want to offer you the role of Bindy,’ and I was like, ‘What? Oh my God! I thought this was done!’ ”
The actress is determined to continue to split her time between the UK and Australia, where her partner, who she met while working on Doctor Doctor (he was a producer), is based.
So what’s it like having a long-distance relationship? “If you want a relationship to work, you will launch straight into long distance,” she muses. “Which is also awesome, because you get to travel, and meet up in all these great places, and it’s really cool.
“I am lucky I found the right person. We don’t find it difficult at all – it’s a part of us now, which is really cool.”
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