Since her big break in Neighbours, Brooke Satchwell has been a familiar face on our screens, acting in shows such as Water Rats, Packed To The Rafters and The Twelve, but while Hollywood has beckoned for some of her fellow soap stars, like Margot Robbie and the Hemsworth brothers, the idea of Tinseltown has never appealed to the actress.
“I kind of paddle my own canoe – I’m that type of girl,” insists Brooke, 45.
“When I was younger and coming up, I did look at it being the mecca, which is odd. But there’s always something to be said about just staying true to your path, whatever or wherever that may be. I’ve had the most fortunate, beautiful life.”
Brooke was a 15-year-old high school student and a Just Jeans model when she first appeared as teen sweetheart Anne Wilkinson on Ramsay Street in 1996. She says it was a “generous and exciting springboard” for her career.
“For a kid coming into such a foreign environment like that, it was my beginning. It’s been one of the most fortunate things to happen to me. I turned 45 years a few months ago, so it’s been 30 years. That’s crazy. “I’m just really grateful that I came in at a time where it was such a tight family. We went bowling, had picnics and went to music festivals together. It was a proper family and they’re still family now. “I’m chuffed that I’ve managed to stay standing in this industry for 30-odd years, having had no idea what I was getting into. I feel both lucky and incredibly proud of myself that this chapter of my life has found me in a place where I’m getting to do jobs that have immense value in terms of the stories being told.”
Championing Australian storytelling
Brooke says Neighbours’ cancellation last year was a sad outcome and the reason why she successfully lobbied for the Australian government to legislate that international streaming platforms must invest a portion of their local expenditure into home-grown productions.
“Unfortunately, the market did a dirty on Neighbours,” tells Brooke.
“It deserved better. But that’s up to us both as an industry and the public that consume a lot of their news, information and entertainment through screens.”
Life in a quiet town
The actress lives in a small Aussie town where locals regularly approach her to talk about the domestic violence storyline from her award-winning turn opposite Sir Sam Neill in The Twelve.
“It’s a lovely, chill place, where a lot of retired coppers move to,” she says.
“It’s a nice place to be. I’ll be in the coffee shop and they’ll walk up to say, ‘Thank you for showing it like it is.’”
Holding onto memories
Brooke isn’t on social media, saying she’s “not a super-tech person”, and points out that all the profiles pretending to be her online are impostors. Personal connections matter a lot to Brooke. She describes herself as a “third-gen hoarder” and says she’s spent the past decades gathering things that hold memories for her.
“I’ve still got a bag full of jokey notes from the green room at Neighbours and all my birthday cards,” she says. “I even have all the letters that my school friends wrote me when I first started working on set. I have everything!”
Brooke’s latest project is tear-jerker drama Dear Life, in which she plays Lillian, a lost woman who has her life reinvigorated after learning the identities of the recipients of her recently deceased fiancé’s organs. It’s a challenging role, but one she identified with for a surprising reason.
Turning pain into purpose
“I’ve had a lot of near-death experiences and big things happen in my life,” Brooke shares, adding that this sparked her to become an organ donor herself.
“This is a subject matter I’m familiar with and that’s why I wanted to play her. “I know deep grief and I know deep trauma, and I’ve done my work personally to process that. But experiences live in the body. I’m lucky that my body is precisely what I use to do my job, so to have the opportunity to exercise the understanding of those emotions through a different story was very cathartic. “It kind of cracked me open, asking me to have a broader lens on the world than I might have had previously. Dear Life is messy, ugly, chaotic, beautiful and hopeful. I can’t wait for people to see it.”
Dear Life is now streaming on TVNZ+.
