It’s been 41 years since Danielle Cormack debuted on New Zealand screens, as fresh-faced, purple eye-shadowed teen Tania Veitch, in the glitter soap opera Gloss.
From there, her career took her to Shortland Street, cast as Alison Raynor in the show’s original line-up when it launched in 1992. It would go on to become a breeding ground for New Zealand’s biggest stars but Cormack, not content with staying still for too long, left the show after a year, becoming the very first core cast member to do so.
It was a risky move, but it paid off. Her star skyrocketed, and the work followed; Cormack was cast on Xena, the successful Australian series Rake, Underbelly and Secret City, and brought home a Logie for Most Outstanding Actress for her lead role as Bea Smith in the hugely successful prison drama Wentworth in 2015.
Now 54 years old and four decades into a career in acting, Cormack has found herself in an all-too-familiar position. One she has witnessed with other actors her age, and one she’s hellbent on changing.
“There are very few roles [for women of my age] and the acting jobs are now far and few between,” she tells the Herald.
Instead of waiting for someone else to lead the charge, Cormack is harnessing her own writing and producing skills and creating more exciting roles for women in their 50s.
“For me, it’s developing projects that centralise women my age – complex, brilliant, bored women.”
The issue isn’t unique to New Zealand and Australia. A 2020 study of Hollywood roles, titled The Ageless Test, revealed that women over 50 are typically sidelined to supporting roles and painted into “discriminatory, one-dimensional archetypes”.
The study also revealed women over 50 are portrayed as not having fully realised lives, and simply “serving as scenery in younger people’s stories”.
Cormack is not here to be anyone’s scenery, instead creating interesting roles with “more meat on the bones”. She has begun to write roles centred around older women.
“That’s my ballpark right now, championing those stories.”
While leading roles can be harder to come by these days, that doesn’t mean she’s slowing down. Cormack is also pitching, producing, directing and growing that vast skillset, serving as a director’s attachment, where she mirrors the director and their work during shooting.
That’s exactly what she was doing on the hit Australian courtroom drama The Twelve, working behind the scenes before eventually being cast as the smart and stubborn Gabe Nicholls – a defence laywer turned prosecutor – in the upcoming season 3.
One of the things that attracted her to the role was the depth, not only in the show’s characters, but also in the storyline.
“There are so many threads that are followed through the show, and I knew I wanted to be one of those threads and be part of [its] fabric.”
Having played a prosecutor before on Rake, Cormack says she was desperate for another shot at it to get over some lingering courtroom angst.
“I really wanted another chance at being in that prosecuting role again – because I found it very challenging, and I wanted to overcome my fear of being in the courtroom again.
“I wasn’t sure I did a great job of it the first time,” Cormack adds. But those who worked with her clearly disagreed, as it was the same production company, Easy Tiger, who cast her as a prosecutor in both Rake and again in The Twelve.
Cormack was also drawn to the familiarity of the character and how it mirrors parts of her own life.
“I liked that she’d made such a huge pivot halfway through her career – going from defence to prosecution – and I guess for me, where I am now as an actor and emerging director and producer, it’s these big pivots that we all have to make sometimes.”
Before turning to the “dark side” of prosecution, her character was a defence lawyer for the show’s lead character Brett Colby, played by New Zealand acting royalty Sam Neill.
Despite both being some of New Zealand’s biggest film and television stars, they’ve never worked together professionally before. But Cormack says the chance to work with Neill was another reason she took the role. She calls their on-screen and off-screen pairing “a perfect fit”.
“I was literally working alongside him, having to sit at a desk for days and days on end next to him – he brings such a great energy to the set.”
Cormack says she found joy in building a rapport with Neill, battling it out over crosswords, and developing a dynamic similar to their characters, Colby and Nicholls, who have a strong camaraderie yet with a competitive edge.
“That was sort of naturally taken on board by osmosis and our work relationship. And it was just marvellous to watch him work. He’s incredibly generous.”
The show’s season 3 cast and crew is stacked with a strong Kiwi contingent, including Sir Ian Mune, who Cormack says “ripped it up on set” and “was so f***ing good”, as well as Heavenly Creatures star Sarah Peirse, who plays the wife of the accused, and Kiwi musician Marlon Williams, who plays Colby’s son.
Having worked with some of the best in the business, and more than 40 years into the job,Cormack says it’s hard for her to narrow down career highlights, although she gives dark drama Channelling Baby and the Auckland Theatre Company production of Blue Room, where she played eight different characters, as two memorable moments. But she remembers some of the lowlights just as fondly.
“Some I think ‘I’d like to scrub that off the CV’, but that’s all part of the journey, isn’t it?” she says, with a laugh.
Cormack knows too well that working as an actor also means getting your fair share of rejection, and says she’s had to adapt a “Teflon skin”.
“When you’re in the flow and you’re on set and you’re in front of the camera or on stage, it’s your chance to really embody the character and tell the story.
“The other side of that is that when you’re waiting for the next audition to come through or you haven’t worked for months and months, you’re having to endure that. There’s a certain robustness that you have to adopt – well, I’ve had to anyway. I’ve always found there’s always an expansion and contraction in this industry.”
Cormack says the current breaks between projects are longer than they once were, but the lack of acting roles has given her the ability to bring other projects and interests off the back burner.
“It’s given me more space now to follow my other creative pursuits that I never had time for. I always wanted to be behind the camera, and it’s very comfortable for me to be in that space.”
And one of those projects could see Cormack, who has been based in Sydney for 15 years, headed back to our shores – for a while at least.
“I am desperate to come back and work in New Zealand again and have been developing some projects, with a view to shooting them in New Zealand. I’ve got my arrow set in that direction, for sure. The stories that I want to tell are based in New Zealand, so that’s the long game.”
But right now, Sydney is home. Cormack owns property there, where she lives with her partner. Both her sons, Ethan, 29, and Te Ahi Ka, 15, are based there, too.
She says she’s focusing on what brings her joy, new experiences – like riding her beloved motorbike and finding the meaning (or lack thereof) in downtime - proving she’s anything but a bored woman.
“What is downtime? What the f*** is downtime?” she says, laughing..
“I support the industry, I love travelling, hanging out with my family and partner. I’m always finding new things to do. I‘ve just taken up line dancing, and I did a stand-up comedy gig,” she shares.
“I’m learning just to have those moments to be able to take an hour or two where I actually don’t do anything – that’s unusual for me, but it’s happening more and more these days.”
Cormack says she’s always open to the next big thing, the next exciting phone call or script to land in her inbox. But while those killer roles are still in the pen-to-paper stage, she’s practising gratitude for 40 amazing years playing badass women.
“For everything, so far, I’m very grateful for that.”
The Twelve S3 premieres on TVNZ+ on Oct 1.
Jenni Mortimer is the New Zealand Herald’s chief lifestyle and entertainment reporter. Jenni started at the Herald in 2017 and has previously worked as lifestyle, entertainment and travel editor.