Photography: Jae Frew, © SPP 2024, and ©After The Party Productions Ltd, 2023.
At 59, the working life of multiple award-winning best actress Robyn Malcolm has never been busier.
Between winning a slew of best actress gongs and nominations for her portrayal of Penny in the New Zealand television drama series After the Party (which she co-created with writer Dianne Taylor), she’s been back-to-back with work – including a lead role on an Australian television series, details of which are still under wraps.
We catch up on Zoom after a night shift filming. Robyn gives me a tour of her accommodation, cuppa in hand, and apologises for yawning. It’s a sweet tiny house in the middle of a vineyard in southwest Australia where, on her morning walks, she’s been stomping her feet noisily and carrying a stick – as advised by the locals – resulting in five tiger snake sightings at last count. “They feel the vibrations, so I think I wake up every snake in the neighbourhood,” she laughs. “Tiger snakes are very dangerous, but I find them fascinating and can’t feel fear for them. They’re such cool little animals, you know, the way they move.”
Cradling her morning coffee, Robyn is makeup-free and in her PJs. Banter comes easily, and she’s so refreshingly straightforward that we go deep quickly.
“Authenticity, above all else, is the most important thing to me. It’s about being deeply honest about who you are, not just yourself but your world and community. People who dare to show up absolutely in their own skin,” she says.
“If something or someone is inauthentic, I find that the biggest turnoff because, to me, it’s about trust. Being able to be authentic means that you trust the world with you. To me, it’s the deepest kind of honesty.”
It’s also extremely important to her craft and why she believes After the Party has resonated with audiences globally. It won her Best Actress at the Series Mania Film Festival in Lille, France, and Best Performance at the Barcelona Series Festival (Serielizados Fest) in Spain, where the judges were impressed with her boldness, maturity and honesty.
The show has also enjoyed success locally at this year’s NZ Television Awards, winning a record-breaking
nine awards.
The French and Spanish accolades brought home to Robyn the show’s universal appeal. “We weren’t trying to make something that was necessarily going to travel. We wanted to make something authentic, and that was what I was so proud of, the fact that that character, who was as far away from a French woman as you could get, travelled anyway. People connected with her.”
Carbon footprint
Robyn flew from Tasmania to France for her Series Mania Film Festival appearance and could only be on the ground for 48 hours to do press calls, which meant missing the prize giving. She was boarding the plane when she got a call from screenwriter Diane Taylor and producer Helen Bowden, who screamed down the phone that she’d won Best Actress. While it meant missing her glamour moment, she quips she’d rather stay in her tracksuit. Her reason for gapping it so quickly was that she was needed back on set in Tasmania.
She is also aware that that trip’s carbon footprint was “just awful”. The amount of travel she does doesn’t sit well with her, which is why, in January, to help offset her environmental impact, she decided to give up meat.
As we chat, she munches on toast loaded with Fix & Fogg Everything Butter – it’s packed with hemp, chia, sesame, sunflower, flaxseeds and pumpkin seeds with peanuts and almonds. “Women over 50 need lots of protein, so I eat barrels of this stuff,” she says. “My son is trying to get me to take creatine, which is what weightlifters use. Apparently, it’s very good for menopausal women, but for now, I’m sticking to my Fix & Fogg.” As Good magazine went to press, Robyn was announced as the brand ambassador for Myregyna, a cream and dietary supplement to relieve symptoms of perimenopause and menopause.
For Robyn, the pointy end of menopause was pure hell. She went into a complete hormonal breakdown and developed anxiety and depression. “It was like the lenses I looked at the world through got very dark, and I just felt horrendous.” She’s still on HRT, which was a game-changer, but she also sees an upside to menopause. She reflects that it forces you to reevaluate how you live and think about the next stage of your life.
“I feel like getting older is like you’re on a bit of a tightrope. You start to have a relationship with your own mortality, but also, I’ve never felt better. I’m on a tightrope, but I’m quite happy, and I’m keeping my balance.”
Going plant-based
Robyn was vegetarian through her teens until “that went tits up” after attending a barbecue and eating a sausage. When she decided in January 2024 to stop eating meat again, she felt she’d returned to who she “really authentically had been”. “I didn’t even blink. Some of my friends were horrified. They were like, ‘No one roasts a lamb the way you do,’ which is true. But I feel that the dots that should have been joined decades ago have suddenly joined. I feel very comfortable not eating meat.”
From a climate change perspective, eating less meat would do the world a hell lot of good “because industrialised farming is one of worst things for the planet”. Owning two dogs – Tara, a border collie retriever cross, and Scooby an Aussie shepherd – and scrolling videos of animals on Instagram contributed to her decision and one she calls a positive of social media. Seeing people with pet cows, chickens and pigs and “how extraordinary every animal on the planet is and how sentient they are”. “We’ve made a judgement that we’re not going to eat dogs and cats because they’re our pets, but pigs are just as intelligent as dogs, so what are we doing eating bacon?”
Robyn is also slowly coming off dairy “because how we mass produce dairy is unspeakably cruel”. And she’s given up booze. It started as a challenge from a friend and while she has never been a big drinker, she had got into the habit of having a glass of wine every night of the week. “I would quite often proudly say, ‘I’ll make a bottle last all week,’ but I was not sure it was doing me any good any more, so I decided to stop to see what would happen, and I didn’t look back. If I’m out for dinner at a posh restaurant and there’s an extremely good red wine on the menu, I might have a glass but it’s neither here nor there whether I do or not. And I just feel like I’ve dropped pounds, I’m sleeping better, I feel fitter. I feel like there’s no downside to it, and I’ve got more energy to exercise.”
Environmental champion
While she wrestles with the amount of flying she does, the nature of her work demands it – plus her partner and After the Party co-star Peter Mullan lives in Scotland, so she clocks up a few personal air miles too. “Some people say flying on planes is the worst thing you can do for the environment, so I go, ‘Okay, so I can’t fly on a plane, but Elon Musk can send a whacking great rocket into space?’”
Aside from giving up meat and barely touching dairy, Robyn is constantly working on other ways to dial back her carbon footprint. She lives in a small house, has an electric car and gives money to Trees That Count. She still eats free-range eggs, and one day, when she moves from Auckland to Abel Tasman, she will have her
own chickens.
And she votes: Green. “Chlöe [Swarbrick, Green Party co-leader] has to be the next prime minister, in my view. I think she’s a superstar. She’s the fiercest, articulate, committed, incredible young woman. I’m just in awe of her. There are no other politicians around at the moment that I think match her fearlessness, and the Greens seem to be the only party at the moment that is very clearly driven by an authentic set of values.”
Robyn took part in the March for Nature on June 8 to protest The Fast-Track Approvals Bill, which could allow companies (that choose to use it) to dodge laws designed to protect people and nature.
“It’s funny. In my job, you’ve got to empathically get into the head of whoever it is you’re playing, and it doesn’t matter what sort of awful human they are. So, I sometimes try and get in the head of this government and try and find a way to understand the behaviour and I find it almost impossible. I can’t see what’s driving them other than money.
“Across the world, governments are too terrified to push through the kind of legislation that is needed to really combat climate change because they think it’s going to cost them votes, and I don’t believe it will.”
Body image
Fifteen years ago, Robyn, then 45, appeared on the cover of the inaugural issue of Good. The provocative image showed her bare-shouldered, not even a shoestring strap in sight, and holding an apple like she’d just stepped from the Garden of Eden and was about to take a bite.
It was near the end of a glorious run playing the lead role of Cheryl West in Outrageous Fortune, the character who she credits with learning how to feel good in her own skin. Two years earlier, she’d been voted New Zealand’s Sexiest Woman at the 2007 TV Guide Best on the Box Awards.
“I had an appalling sense of body image when I was growing up. I had an eating disorder and, like a lot of girls, had quite a hateful relationship with my own body and this weird thing where I was obsessed with really skinny girls. For a long time, I found it really difficult to even accept myself physically… The real healing of all that had a lot to do with Cheryl West,” she explains.
“I was spending 10 to 12 hours, five days a week, playing a character who was not only perfectly comfortable in her own physicalness, in her own body, she actually celebrated it, and she was sexually confident. So, I had to step into that state of mind to be her, and I actually think that had an incredible impact for me on how I felt about myself because I had to believe it. It goes back to authenticity in that I couldn’t pretend to be that with Cheryl. I had to believe it, and the minute you start doing that, your brain chemistry shifts.”
She remembers being on the show after she’d given birth to her first son, Charlie. He was 13 months old when she began playing Cheryl and she still had a bit of a baby belly. Then, over the course of that first season, she was pregnant again, though she lost weight quite quickly because she was working so hard.
She remembers the show’s producer, Caterina De Nave, calling her one day and saying, ‘Don’t make me come over there and eat cream with you.’
“I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘You’re losing weight. Don’t. The whole point of this character is that she’s real and that she comes from where she comes from, and you have a muffin top that sits over your jeans, and I want that to stay. Don’t you dare go Hollywood.’ Hilariously, my mother was staying with us at the time, and she said, ‘Invite her over. I’ll make some scones and put some jam and cream on them.’
“So, she came over, and I’ll never forget that because I remember thinking at the time, I suspect that she’s the only network executive on the planet who rang up a lead actress and said that to them. Most of the time, actresses are told that they must lose weight.”
Robyn had so much positive feedback from just being who she was, and she found it incredibly healing, though she’d be lying if she said that getting an audience award for the Sexiest Woman didn’t make her smile. “Because I never believed that I had the face or the body for television and film. I always thought the other girls are more beautiful, thinner, more like Hollywood – the Cate Blanchetts in New Zealand. I was like, ‘I’m never going to be that’ so it was an incredibly validating time, and by the time I ended up hitting menopause 10 years later, I’d grown to accept myself physically a lot more. So, when we got to After the Party, we talked about how we wanted to treat the middle-aged female body as something to be seen and appreciated without judgement.”
At drama school in her 20s, Robyn earned money being a life drawing model. She was terrified but remembers thinking it would help her with her body image. “It was amazing because you could hear them talking about your body as an aesthetic shape without judgement. They’d talk about where the curves were and where the shade was and where the light was hitting it, but they weren’t judging you and actually it was an amazing thing to do.”
Robyn describes Penny’s scenes as a life model in After the Party as a political act. “We didn’t want her body to be sexualised; we wanted it to be filmed in the way that an art class might look at a naked body, which is just from an aesthetic perspective, like a piece of landscape. We don’t judge landscape in that way.”
