The bright, hot bulbs of the photographer’s lighting rig play on Liz Stiles’ face and figure like high-noon sunshine. Instead of shrinking from the glare, she opens up to it, as if it will give her a tan. She offers poses, takes direction and does it all with an uncommon grace.
In this, the most naked of environments, with a guy behind the lens telling you to be natural, and a journalist watching on keenly, taking notes, you get to see a subject truly exposed.
Often, even the most confident crumble. They become docile or totally lobotomised. Or they get cranky. But not Stiles, who is bantering with The Weekly Review’s photographer Jules Tahan and changing in and out of a vast battery of costumes with supermodel speed.
For a young actress whose big break came as understudy for lead character Glinda (Lucy Durack) in the Melbourne version of the hit Broadway musical Wicked, Stiles is doing a pretty good job of being the extroverted star. Tahan has put on some Sting to relax the room. He needn’t have bothered.
“Is this Sting?” Stiles asks, as Fields of Gold eases out of Tahan’s MacBook Pro, which is flashing up shots of her as she talks.
“Oh, I love him; his voice is so relaxing. You know, I have a funny story about Sting. My mum was working in a bar in London in the ’80s and he tried to pick her up. He told her he was in a band and she said: ‘The Police? Sorry, who is that?’ She didn’t go.” “So Sting could have been your dad?” Tahan offers helpfully. Stiles considers this Sliding Doors proposition for a second and then laughs. We all do. Click click click.
It’s fair to say everybody wins. I have a quote, Tahan has the cover shot in the can – “Got it!” he shouts, raising his right hand, with a mite less pomp than Austin Powers – and Liz is having the time of her life.
After the shoot, which has run over an hour-and-a-half, we walk out of the studio into the bright spring sunshine.
Stiles is now dressed down, trading the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis-era summer dress for tight designer jeans and a breezy blouse.
Her choice of early-1960s glamour wardrobe was no mistake. Stiles is to embody one of the era’s “It girls” when she plays the character of Little Edie, the eccentric cousin of Jackie Onassis, in the upcoming musical theatre production of Grey Gardens. Known around society circles as “Body Beautiful Beale”, Little Edie was a knockout. So is Stiles. The 25-year-old is in heels today, and commandingly so. “My whole family’s tall. I’m actually the shortest of us!” she says, pretty much meeting my 188 centimetres eye to eye.
Choosing a Greville Street café with outdoor tables to take in the weather, we install ourselves, order a latté each – hers soy – and Stiles begins by admitting that yes, it was no fluke, she likes photo shoots: “My friend’s a photographer and she practises on me. It’s helped me see all the little things I do and to get comfortable.”
As for the pressure of being in the spotlight, Stiles makes the salient point that being an understudy is in many ways more challenging than being the star.
“The first time I played Glinda I hadn’t worn some of the costumes; I hadn’t ever run the show from beginning to end in a technical context,” she says.
And how did it feel? “Imagine being on a treadmill that goes for three hours. You have to keep running, keep singing, keep changing clothes and do it all without losing your breath. I was terrified, because I couldn’t stop even for a second; that treadmill is flying!”
Stiles learnt of her promotion in enough time to have her mother fly down from Sydney to watch the show. Her only Glinda glitch came when she actually paused to take stock of what was happening.
“I walked on stage to start a new section and it occurred to me that I was doing it, that I was not in the ensemble any more, I was Glinda. Rob Mills was just looking at me and, after an awkward pause, which luckily suited the moment in the script, I blurted out my lines and thought, ‘Get back on the treadmill’.”
The role of Little Edie is Stiles’ biggest in her own right since graduating from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). Her resumé consists of “little bit parts” in TV programs such as Offspring and Winners and Losers and theatre productions such as Hello Again, which analysed the difference between sex and intimacy. As the chat continues and we discuss her Grey Gardens co-stars, particularly Stiles’ on-stage mother in this production to be played by the legendary Pamela Rabe, you can see her getting steadily more energised, perhaps a little nervous, about the prospect.
“I’m very aware of Pamela’s calibre,” Stiles says, nodding. “I remember seeing her in a production of Mother Courage. She was playing a man’s role and I thought she was incredible. I was a bit nervous when I knew I had to read with her in the callbacks for Grey Gardens. I thought, I can either stand here like an idiot with my mouth open, or I can just do the work; she’s an actress, I’m an actress. I’d call the thought of working with her exciting more than daunting.”
Stiles first saw Grey Gardens on Broadway in early December, 2006. She had travelled to New York to celebrate her 21st birthday with her mother and a friend and wanted to catch as much theatre as possible. At the time she was two years through a musical theatre degree at WAAPA, which Stiles describes as “different to the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) because it’s this remote little melting pot, where everybody has to rely on each other”.
Stiles believes all WAAPA graduates have a bond, “even me and Hugh” she says laughing, naming the academy’s most famous graduate, Hugh Jackman.
In a coincidence that mirrors the path of Little Edie, Stiles returned to New York in 2010 to do a three-month acting course at the New York Film Academy.
After eight Wicked shows of a week for two years, Stiles thought that she might have cured herself of musical theatre, the discipline she had trained for. She wanted to skill up in “pure acting” and move away from “singing big dance numbers”.
“I felt like I was giving up on it. I looked at the other girls going overseas with Wicked and you have to take your hat off to them – it’s a massive effort. It’s like being a professional athlete. I didn’t feel cut out for it and I knew deep down that it wasn’t what I wanted.”
Grey Gardens is still a musical, but it feels “more like a play that happens to have songs. They allow the characters to basically soliloquise to the audience and share their innermost feelings”.
The riches-to-rags plot, based on real events, again proves that truth can be stranger, and sadder, than fiction. It examines the lives of Jackie Onassis’ cousin Little Edie and aunt, Little Edie’s mother Edith Bouvier Beale, in two truly dichotomous acts, set 32 years apart.
The first half of the play is an imagined telling of the pair’s heyday in 1941. It is set over a mere six hours, as the women prepare for Little Edie’s engagement party. She has the world at her feet and society in the palm of her hand. Edith senior does, however, put the mother back into smother as she “schemes to keep her pretty little bird from flying the nest”, Stiles says.
Regardless, Little Edie has a marriage to Joseph Kennedy jnr in her sights as well as a move to the Big Apple, New York, where she dreams of being an actress. Together they live in a grand mansion in East Hampton. Life is peachy and full of possibility. Press pause.
The second act picks up the story in 1973 and is based on an actual documentary (of the same name) filmed in 1975. The two Ediths still live in the mansion, but it has degenerated into a ramshackle haunted house, overflowing with human detritus, cats and even raccoons. The pieces of the puzzle explaining how two shining socialites have become, in Stiles’ words, “pretty much crazy cat ladies” are slowly assembled.
“As a musical it was unlike anything I’d seen before and Christine Ebersole was amazing,” Stiles says of the American actress who, with extraordinary range, played ‘Big’ Edith in the first act and Little Edie in the second.
Rabe is well equipped to take on the same challenge in this version. “I was captivated by the songs and the two parts of the show, which span such different times in the characters’ lives,” Stiles says.
“I couldn’t believe these two women had spent their entire lives in the same house. The emotional effect that it has on young Edie is fascinating, because she continues to wear the clothes she did in the first act. She literally lives in the past.”
Indeed, if the overarching theme of Grey Gardens could be distilled to one quote, it would be William Faulkner’s: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
“The two women just hide in their mansion and shut things out,” Stiles says. “It’s an incredible mechanism as human beings that we have to pretend that things aren’t happening; that time isn’t passing.
“The first act really explores why the second act happens; why these women ended up this way. What kinds of events have taken place? And what kind of emotional storm have they been through to end up as recluses living in this house?
“When you see all that’s occurred you stop seeing them as crazy people. I feel such empathy for them. It’s the first big role that’s been all me. I’m going into it knowing that it’s totally my responsibility to do the best I can with this.”
If humility, sensitivity and a degree of self-deprecation are all part of a successful actor’s foundation, then Stiles is on solid ground. The understudy is advancing and she takes a little time to consider before answering the final question: What does it take to be great?
“For me, being great means having the opportunity to explore lots of different characters and to do them really well,” Stiles says.
“If you get swept up with what other people think of you and take that perception on as proof of your greatness, then you’re going to spend your entire life clambering for compliments. I think I’m still at the very beginning of what I hope will be a longer journey for me. I’ve always had the passion and the focus, but now with Grey Gardens, I have the challenge in front of me. And I’m ready.”
Liz Stiles on …
Asher Keddie
To me, her work is completely unique, particularly in her role in Offspring. She has this style that is all her own; she’s not conforming to what others think she should be doing as this character.
Claudia Karvan
I think she’s phenomenal. I watched Love My Way a few years ago and have watched it countless times since.
Cate Blanchett
Every Australian actress looks up to her. I watched Elizabeth again the other day; it blew my mind yet again. I also admire so much that she’s come home to give back to the industry as the (co) artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company. The notion of celebrity just doesn’t seem to register with her.
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