When the curtains closed on Nina Proudman and her Offspring clan in 2014, Asher Keddie’s life rapidly changed pace. In the space of a year the actress was out of a job, yes, but she was also newly married and expecting her first child.
While her 30s were spent breathing life and soul into one of television’s most beloved characters, her 40s have been an entirely different experience. Or, as she puts it succinctly during her chat with NEXT, “I turned 40, I was pregnant and everything turned upside down and moved forward at the time.”
Content at home with her baby boy, Valentino, Keddie was taking a break from the spotlight and enjoying family life – one she hadn’t entirely anticipated. But the changes kept on coming, and more professional success was following hot on the heels of personal happiness.
Thanks to a budgeting Hail Mary from the powers-that-be in Australian television, Keddie got a second chance to play everyone’s fantasy best friend, Nina Proudman.
When it was announced last September that there would be another season of Offspring, after it had been axed, it was as if the combined wish power of the show’s fan base had pulled off a miracle. And no one was happier to see the return of everyone’s favourite obstetrician than Keddie herself.
“I felt great about it,” Keddie says of stepping back into her most famous role. “It was really well thought out by everyone involved and we all felt there was more story to tell. Certainly, for Nina as a character, I felt I’d like to continue the story. And the show is such fun to make. It’s the stuff dreams are made of for actors.”
For journalists, Keddie is the stuff dreams are made of. Like many of her fans, I assume she IS Nina and when our interview is postponed, not once but twice at the last minute, I’m not the teeniest bit annoyed. I just think, ‘Classic Nina!’ Our chat starts with her asking about the weather in Auckland, before she launches into a diatribe about the “yukko” weather her home city of Melbourne is currently experiencing.
Where some actors make it very clear their personal life is off limits, a conversation with Keddie is a free-fall of intimate details – what it was like giving birth to Valentino last year – “I was totally present, totally in the moment. It was pretty amazing” – and revealing that the children in her life – her stepson, Luca, now six, and Valentino – have made her less self-involved.
“All the existential angst – that we all experience when we’re single – sort of dissipated. Particularly when you’re a narcissistic actor, your head is in the
clouds a lot of the time: you’re self-involved, you’re ambitious, you’re trying to prove yourself.
“When Luca came into my life, and then Valentino… you have to take the attention away from yourself. There’s a little human who can’t do anything without you, you don’t have a choice. I see it as a gift.”
The story of how Keddie fell for her husband, Melbourne-based artist Vincent Fantauzzo, is, frankly, ludicrously romantic. They were introduced by a mutual friend in 2012, after Keddie had split from her husband of five years, actor Jay Bowen. Fantauzzo asked to paint Keddie’s portrait and by the end of the process, the pair were in love.
The painting, titled ‘Love Face’, is almost too intimate – a glowing Keddie with eyes only for her artist. In 2014, they married at a secret ceremony in Fiji, with Fantauzzo’s young son Luca the only guest. No photos were released from the wedding.
At a red-carpet event later that year, Keddie was visibly pregnant – the first public indication of her impending motherhood. When Valentino was born, the actress did one magazine story before retreating to the privacy of her farm in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges with her new family.
However, late last year, the family relocated to central Melbourne so Luca could attend a local kindergarten. As for Valentino, now 16 months old, Keddie describes him as “expressive, confident, curious… an interesting little fella”.
And she’s surprised at his self-awareness: “He laughs a lot… he thinks he’s very funny already.” Despite the demands of motherhood, Keddie says her alter-ego lingered in the back of her mind.
Offspring producer Imogen Banks, Keddie and a few other key creatives had been chatting about what would happen if they were to get another shot at the show; if there was enough left to say. For Keddie, returning to Offspring meant returning to a physically and mentally demanding schedule – the actress is in almost every scene.
But, she says, after a “wonderful” year of being at home with the children, she was ready to return.
“There comes a point where if you like to work – as I do – that you’ve got to take the plunge. I realised how much I did want to work and I thought, ‘I’m just going to take the leap, try to juggle it and make it work’. I’m not the first to do that! It was time to jump back in. I wanted to be creative again,” she says.
“I had to be brave about it and fulfil my own creative desires, as well as my desires to be a mum and nurture my home life.”
Keddie says the Offspring set is very baby-friendly. She and her co-star Kat Stewart (who plays sister Billie) brought their children on set. Stewart has compared returning to Offspring as “like getting Christmas again”. With Banks’ attitude to family on set as “the more the merrier”, the return to work was made easier, says Keddie.
There’s a parallel to Keddie’s love for her work and Nina’s success as an obstetrician that makes it a welcome break from the female protagonists we’re usually expected to relate to: Bridget Jones was a terrible TV reporter, as a lawyer Ally McBeal was haphazard at best, and in Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith Grey’s hospital presence is heavy on the melodrama, light on the medical.
When I mention to Keddie that it’s refreshing to have a female character who is a mess in her personal life but knows her shit pro-fessionally, Keddie goes ‘full Nina’ and cements my love for her for ever.
“Did you just say ‘knows her shit’?” Keddie exclaims. “That’s my favourite description of her so far. I’m going to steal that from you. Yes she does know her shit and I love that about her too. There is a real dichotomy to her – she’s good at her job and she celebrates that about herself. She has just really struggled outside of her work to emotionally ground herself.”
The Offspring world is one of beautiful chaos: the batshit family, the rocky love life, the stressful job. There’s the annoying detritus of daily life, the drama and the heart-stopping, ugly-cry moments – go on, say the name ‘Patrick’ to an Offspring fan – that have kept us thinking about Nina, even when it seemed like she would be gone for good.
Keddie says the Nina we’ll meet in the new show is now the mother of a three-year-old and a more centred character than she was before. Well, within reason…
“There is an enormous effort on her behalf – with many mistakes along the way, of course, otherwise it wouldn’t be Nina – to try and anchor herself outside of work, and enjoy a little more balance and equilibrium,” says Keddie.
“She may not get it right – and she really doesn’t! – but we see her really trying, and questioning herself and her behaviour a lot more than we have in the past.”
Since becoming a mother, Keddie says she not only cares less about the small stuff, but that she has relaxed into her work and her energy is more focused. Already an emotional person before parenthood, she says that her natural empathy has increased tenfold. Shooting delivery scenes, in particular, are an instant cue for the waterworks – an issue when your character is an obstetrician, laughs Keddie.
“It’s bubbling away under the surface, I’m having to push down quite a bit of emotion so that Nina can stay steady and professional while she’s delivering babies,” she says. “I’d like to think I appeared to know what I was doing but, in all honesty, it does change you when you have kids.”
Before giving birth, Keddie says she had hoped she would be a “grounded, open and honest” mum and she casts back to that aim every day, hoping to follow through on her plan. Fantauzzo has joked that he wants Keddie to have more and more children each year so that he can paint them.
The couple has also relaxed a little about sharing their lives with the public. Between shots of his art, Fantauzzo’s Instagram is interspersed with sweet photos of his family and numerous references to ‘my beautiful wife’. To experience personal happiness after years of professional success must be very sweet for Keddie, I suggest.
But the actress typically plays it low-key, stating that she struggles with the same self-doubts as everyone else.
“We’re not wrapped up in a pretty bow, our family – we adore each other and we’re lucky – but we’re just the same as anybody else. We have the same challenges and feelings and thoughts and worries.
I feel like I’m on the journey – some things fall into place and some things don’t and you’ve got to deal with that and get your shit together.”
Therein lies Keddie’s charm. Despite being one of the most recognisable faces in Australasia, in her mind she’s just another working mother. So while you may never get to have a wine and a chat with Nina Proudman, you probably could have one with Keddie. Is it any wonder that we’re so excited to have her back?
Dressing the part
Nina’s trademark boho-luxe style has become a big drawcard of Offspring, with websites and stories dedicated to ‘how to dress like Nina’. Turns out, dressing her character is one of Keddie’s favourite parts of the role.
“It’s important to me and a big part of the job. I have a lot of input. Michael Chisholm [the stylist] and I work very closely together. This season, we’ve tried to go with a bit of an Annie Hall look and I’m loving wide-leg pants, boots and a really soft feminine blouse, but toughened up with a leather jacket and a scarf,” she says.
Ah yes, the accessories. Nina is a woman of many emotions and even more scarves, but while there’s crossover between Keddie’s own style and her onscreen looks, there is one crucial difference. “I’m not a scarf person,” Keddie says, with a warm cackle. “That’s very much her, not me.
And I don’t wear jewellery at all, apart from my wedding ring. My style is probably more of a uniform compared to hers, but like Nina, I do really love mixing luxe, feminine fabrics with leather or jeans.”
