Offspring’s Asher Keddie is mesmerising in Fake, an eight-part series about a romance that isn’t what it seems. She tells Rebecca Barry Hill why we’re all prone to being deceived.
How do smart, capable people fall for liars, catfishers and narcissists? You might think you’re immune but TV star
“I’ve been in situations where I’ve been lied to, and I’ve known someone is misrepresenting themselves or just wants to control me,” says the Australian actor and producer over Zoom from her home in Melbourne. “As a younger woman, I certainly did that. Most of us want to see the best in people. We want to be able to trust.”
Fake is an unsettling psychological thriller that takes us deep into the confusion of a whirlwind romance that somehow feels ‘off’. Thanks to Keddie’s realistic performance as the victim of deception, it gives viewers the sense they’re experiencing the highs and lows, too.
Keddie plays food writer Birdie Bell, a single woman in her late 40s. When she meets a charming ranch owner online she resists him at first. But a long-held desire to meet “the one” and misguided encouragement from her passive-aggressive mother prompt her to let her guard down.
From the outset, Birdie has her suspicions. Joe, played by an electrifying David Wenham, is full of excuses and contradictions – but he always seems to find something plausible to explain away any doubt. Of course as viewers know from the title, Joe is not who he says he is. Typically of someone who has experienced deceit, once Birdie becomes entangled in his life she starts to question her hold on reality.
“The show speaks to the power of the illusions that deceive us,” Keddie explains. “It connects with anyone that’s ever been lied to, but also who has lied to themselves.”
Fake is also evidence that, at 50, Keddie is on top of her game. Nicknamed “the golden girl of Australian television”, she has never been far from a leading role, Offspring her most beloved.
Keddie shone as obstetrician Dr Nina Proudman in the popular Aussie dramedy from 2010 to 2017, and has continued to create characters you can’t help but root for: bruised souls like Heather, a mother dealing with unthinkable grief in Nine Perfect Strangers. Or Evelyn, the no-nonsense magazine boss in Strife, loosely based on Mia Freedman’s memoir about the grassroots beginnings of her website Mamamia. (The second season is now in post-production, affording Keddie the luxury of being able to work from home and take her two sons to soccer practice.)
Journalist characters have seemed to loom large on Keddie’s CV, not just with Strife and Fake but a lead role in Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo, (2011) in which she played magazine founder Ida Buttrose. She reckons that’s purely coincidence, as she’s perceived each character as distinct from the next.
“I’m drawn to characters that are not perfect,” she says. “That are endearing, because I have the challenge of making them endearing to an audience. I’m attracted to faults and the difficult layered challenges that we all have as humans. If I see a character that’s too glorified or has the perfect life, I spend the entire shoot trying to mess that up.”
Naturally of all her roles, Offspring has made the biggest impact, with Keddie winning the Logie Award for Most Popular Actress five times between 2011 and 2015, along with the 2013 Gold Logie award for Most Popular Personality on Aussie TV. Audiences often couldn’t separate fact from fiction, and she’d sometimes find herself consoling members of the public who’d approach her to discuss the show’s more emotional storylines.
“It endures. It’s still the gift that keeps on giving,” she laughs. “At least weekly, I’ll have a conversation with someone publicly about Offspring. Or I’ll receive a message. They loved it, and I just feel so happy about that. I mean, I loved it. I loved playing her, I loved that show so much. It was an enormous amount of fun to make. And it really gave me the opportunity to become the performer that I wanted to be.”
Keddie grew up idolising performers such as Lucille Ball, leading ladies who could inhabit that tricky middle ground between drama and comedy.
“I find it really exhilarating to perform in that way. But I also really like a drama like Fake as well, because I like the deeper feelings also.”
Keddie says she identifies mostly as a “mind person” but would love to tackle something more physical next, perhaps something similar to her (albeit small) role as Dr Carol Frost in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009). She’s always been the type who finds it difficult to sit still.
“At the ripe old age of 50, I feel more robust and more energetic than I ever have. And I would love to do something that involved action…
“I’ve ridden horses all my life and, and I like the adrenaline of that kind of physical activity. I just think it would be fun to put on film. I’ve just thought about it recently. Why haven’t I done that?”
One thing she has done in typical Keddie style: electing to travel rather than party to celebrate her milestone birthday in July. A trip to Italy with her family, including stepson Luca, and younger son Valentino, was “the time of their lives” – her husband, artist Vincent Fantauzzo is Italian so she’s always been drawn to the culture. The family eat Italian food almost every day, she says, although that’s about where it ends, “with my eldest son singing ‘That’s amore!’”
“I rejected the idea of a big party as all my friends and family knew, and colleagues knew that I would,” she says. “So there wasn’t that much pressure. Everyone gave up after the first push. I don’t like parties. They’re too noisy for me. I just don’t want to talk to a million people.”
Keddie is far too animated and confident to compare herself to her introverted Fake alter ego Birdie Bell but perhaps her aversion to socialising is the one thing they do have in common.
Keddie was first made aware of the story of Fake when her co-producer Imogen Banks came to her with the book of the same name. Journalist and author Stephanie Wood tells the harrowing tale of being romantically conned by a man named Joe, unpacking the exhilaration and eventually trauma of discovering his lies. Banks warned Keddie she could read it and run – or dive straight in.
“She knows me very well, Imogen, so I think she actually knew that I’d want to dive in. I did from the moment where I read the book and from that moment we started discussing how we could possibly tell this story as a TV drama and a cinematic experience.”
Working with head writer Anya Beyersdorf, their first challenge was figuring out how to tell a compelling story on screen when viewers already knew the relationship was doomed from the outset.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” says Keddie. “This is the question we all argued about until we were blue in the face.”
They settled on the idea that the show would forensically examine the relationship through Birdie’s eyes, making it “experiential” for the viewer, a sense that’s heightened by Keddie’s realistic performance, and an equally unsettling turn from David Wenham.
Joe narrates his own suspicions that Birdie is on to him from the start, and the result serves to illustrate Birdie tipping towards a breakdown. The point of view then flips in episode six, so we see the story through Joe’s eyes.
As Keddie discusses the many challenges the creative team encountered before they’d even started shooting, it’s clear she relished her role as co-producer, as much as the chance to act in virtually every scene. She has always enjoyed problem-solving, adoring the hyperfocus, the juggling, the “chaos” that comes with the producing role.
“It’s just how my brain works,” she says. “At this point in life, I was just ready for it.”
Even with all the chatter behind the scenes, Keddie developed Birdie as someone completely separate from Fake author Stephanie Wood – a character who is comparatively quiet for TV.
“One of the earliest decisions we made all together was for Birdie to only speak when she had to,” says Keddie. “I wanted to explore loneliness – often we see characters on screen overcompensate. And I didn’t want to do that.”
Birdie is a successful professional but also lacks confidence and has grown up with the “princess myth”, the idea that Prince Charming is out there to solve all her problems. As she slowly dawns upon the idea that her fantasy is imploding, she goes into survival mode.
Perhaps the most powerful aspect of Fake is that it’s so relatable – in this day and age of romance scammers and online con artists, it could also serve as a powerful reminder of the red flags to watch out for. But it doesn’t have to be a sexual relationship for the deceit to really hurt, says Keddie.
When Wood first published her book, thousands of women contacted her to say they’d been through similar experiences. Likewise, when Fake screened in Australia earlier this year, it proved triggering for viewers who had experienced the trauma of being lied to, that sense of losing faith not just in another person, but yourself.
“It’s such a complex story,” she says. “It’s brutal, it’s quite a ride. And I’m really proud of it.”
Fake is on Three from December 8.
NY Times: Universal believes audiences will take flight with Hiccup and Toothless again.