‘We're roadkill': How this Kiwi actor turned middle-age rage into her best work yet

Sydney Morning Herald

06-06-2025

Robyn Malcolm is a hoot. The Kiwi actor is leaning on one arm, recounting her recent evening at the BAFTAs in London, where her critically acclaimed series After the Party had been nominated for Best International Series.
'Honestly, they go on and on and on and on,' she says. 'Of course, our award was right at the end. By the time it got to the end, I was like, 'I hope we don't win', because my feet are so sore in these massive shoes I bought, and I was desperate to go to the loo. And I thought if we did win, I'd either fall down the stairs because my feet were numb or I'd piss myself on the stage. So when it went to Shogun, I was like, 'Oh, thank god for that.''
Surely it was a bit glamorous? 'Oh, it's a nightmare!' she says. 'There's the going to the ball aspect of it, which is fun … but then you stand in the heat and there's all this jostling and pushing and photographs and chaos, and it was really hot. And then you get inside and you sit and watch these damn awards for 3½ hours. And honestly, it's not entertainment.'
Malcolm, who turned 60 in March, is in Glasgow, where it's early evening, but the temperature is a balmy 25 degrees. 'All the Glaswegians are, like, freaking out that they're so unprepared for it,' she says, laughing, over Zoom.
She is exactly as I had hoped – funny and forthright, stripped of any artifice – and instantly familiar. She's been on New Zealand and Australian screens for years, starring in everything from the big stuff (Jane Campion's TV series Top of the Lake) to the cult local stuff (Outrageous Fortune) and the delightfully funny stuff (Upper Middle Bogan).
It was on Top of the Lake where she met her partner Peter Mullan, the Scottish actor who specialises in being both terrifying and charming on screen, who pops in mid-chat, so Robyn can pop out to farewell his grandson.
'He's just a really f--k-off actor,' says Malcolm. 'He's an enormously fun actor to work with. I've worked with actors before who are arseholes, and people make excuses for that because they're playing a dark character. And I'm like, 'I know a fellow who's played some of the meanest motherf---ers on the planet, and he'll get the third AD [assistant director] a cup of tea because he's such a sweetheart.''
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She has been in the UK for the last three months or so, after being summoned by an agent when After the Party aired last year. 'They just said, 'Could you not talk to any other agents, and can you come with me?' – which was great.'
The series, which was co-created by Malcolm and screenwriter Dianne Taylor, was about a high school teacher (Malcolm) who accuses her ex-husband, Phil (played by Mullan) of sexually abusing a drunk friend of their teenage daughter. Malcolm was hailed for giving the best performance of her career and five-star reviews followed.
'I feel like I'm at the beginning of something, not the end of it,' says Malcolm. 'Because I've never lacked ambition, so this has just got my pilot light going faster again, which is fantastic. Weirdly, it's sort of new-lease-of-life stuff.
'I'm more confident than I used to be. I know a lot more. I know what I don't know. I know where I need to get better. I feel like I'm in an excellent place right now for the age I am, you know. I'm not about to buy a La-Z-Boy [reclining chair] any time soon.'
My mother-in-law has one of those. 'No, no, no. Although they are f---ing great chairs, I have to say.'
Back to the serious stuff – Malcolm is part of a growing group of older female actors using their power on screen and refusing to be invisible. Women can now – shock! – play their age instead of being quietly shuffled out of shot, having reached their screen use-by date of 40 (or, really, a 40-year-old who can pass for 30). It's their stories that Malcolm is most interested in telling.
'One of the things that I love about women in midlife is that it's the three-act structure,' she says. 'You set everything up with the first act, and then everything has to go to shit in the second act so that third act can happen.
'And I feel a lot of us are at the end of our second act. So women of our age straddle so much stuff … we're the generation where a lot of people were divorced. Mistakes have been made, new lives are being started. Careers have been dropped. Careers have been picked up. There's been tragedy. We're in the middle of a big story and that, in itself, I find a really fascinating place to start from.
In drama, she says, women's conversation often sits around romance.
'I always remember being so furious – I mean, I was never a major fan – but being so furious that Sex and the City ended with them all shacking up with blokes. I was like, 'This is not what this show was meant to be about. How dare you.'
'You don't see women living independently of the romance story, women being – I hate this word – but having an agency that is completely separate from that. Women having powerful lives in other areas.
'One of my most favourite things is the word 'crone'. The etymology of the word crone comes from either Greek or Latin, and it basically was a word that meant roadkill. So the middle-aged or older woman, the crone word essentially means that we're roadkill. I love that because it's like we've just been chucked out the window, knocked over by a car, and we're splat on the road, and who gives a f--k about us. There's something incredibly powerful in that.'
Her latest role is in Netflix's Tasmanian murder mystery The Survivors, adapted from Jane Harper's bestselling 2020 novel. Malcolm plays Verity, the mother of Kieran, who has returned home 15 years after two young men were killed in an accident. The relationship between Verity and her son is strained, and it's another cracker of a performance from Malcolm, who is brittle and forthright on screen.
'To use all the cliches in the book, she's multi-layered,' says Malcolm of Verity. 'What she says she doesn't mean, and what she doesn't mean, she says. There's always something else driving her. She's bottled up so much grief and so much pain. She's blaming the wrong people. She's angry at the wrong people. She's just all over, all over the place. And I really love that.'
Malcolm has been onscreen so much in Australia that we would have a fair chance of claiming her as one of our own.
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'I just think we should build a bridge [between Australia and New Zealand] and just be done with it,' she says, laughing. 'I don't think I would ever call myself an Australian. I've been in Aotearoa for too long. But I love Australia and I love working there.
'I love the directness of Aussies; Kiwis can be very apologetic, very self-deprecating. A friend of mine said once that to determine the difference in personality between an Australian and New Zealander, you just have to listen to the bird calls,' she says. 'So in New Zealand, in the mornings, the bird calls are sort of like [Malcolm does a lovely sweet bird call] and in the morning in Australia, it [sounds] like this mass vomit.'