Photography: Amanda Billing.
When Morgana O’Reilly was sharing a dressing room with fellow actress Kura Forrester, the fiendishly funny friends had a rather risqué habit.
“We were in Amadeus with Auckland Theatre Company and we’d do this gag where we’d run topless around our dressing room,” the White Lotus star laughs.
“We’d run in, tits akimbo, while apologising madly for being late. Boobs are just so funny!”
From that germ of a joke, Morgana, 40, saw potential for something more.
“I said that one day I was going to make a solo show that would start with me running on stage completely topless,” she tells Woman’s Day.
“I also wanted to make a play that included bits from my form-two diary, where I call myself a fat cow, because LOL. There’d be stories from when I worked at foot-fetish parties in New York – also LOL – then the play would end with the video of me giving birth. LOL again! That was the story I wanted to tell because that was the show I needed to see.”
A personal story turned creative project
From that collection of quirky ideas, Morgana created her hilarious and heartfelt play Stories About My Body, which she has now turned into a delightful, life-affirming film, directed by Morgana’s husband Peter Salmon, who also helmed After The Party.
“I’ve spent a lot of my life calling myself fat and really hating my body, from my belly to my under-chin,” says Morgana, who has recently starred in Aussie series Playing Gracie Darling and Tom Sainsbury’s comedy Small Town Scandal.
“Whenever I’ve missed out on some job I’ve auditioned for, my body has usually been the scapegoat. But when I was hapū and preparing to give birth for the first time, I unstitched a bunch of those fears, which really helped me get through my body stuff.”
Which is how Morgana went from being incredibly critical of her appearance to falling in love with it, which in turn led to the star running topless across Auckland’s busy Mayoral Drive, a daring act she says felt liberating.
Going rogue to bring the vision to life
“Because our little film didn’t have the kind of budget where we could shut the road down, we went rogue and filmed that scene at two in the afternoon,” Morgana explains of the movie’s jaw-dropping opening sequence.
“There was no closed set. We just waited till the lights at either end stopped the traffic, as we didn’t want cars crashing at the sight of me, and I’d run so fast, really trying to make my titties fly. It was actually exhilarating. I even ran past a double-decker bus – goodness knows what they made of it!”
The resulting low-budget flick is an absolute labour of love and possibly one of the world’s only stand-up comedy specials to include real-life birth footage.
“Every single frame of our film is fuelled by kindness, yet I still felt completely nauseous when I sent it to some of my White Lotus co-stars, who were so generous to take the time to watch it,” tells Morgana.
Praise from the White Lotus cast
“Parker Posey called it ‘brilliant and beautiful’, while Carrie Coon messaged that it was ‘gorgeous, gross and hilarious’. Then she messaged again to say she’d send something more highbrow, but I thought ‘gorgeous and gross’ was great!”
Morgana – whose new local crime series Bust Up premieres on Sky Open and Neon later this month – admits to having nerves before shooting The White Lotus in Thailand, but the star-studded cult series helped her “unpick” some of her issues.
“I loved seeing so much physical diversity on screen and I felt a sense of duty to bring some of that diversity to the table,” she explains.
“Maybe I was cast as Pam because I’m uniquely me and, by crikey, if everybody looked the same, how boring would that be?”
Learning to live in her own skin
Morgana insists she’s not completely free of hang-ups and can still feel a sense of “self-loathing”, but she adds, “I also know the more I authentically inhabit my own skin, the more beautiful I am – because confidence is gorgeous. Sure, if you want to, get a little filler or Botox. Do whatever you need to do, but how sad if people did those things as an apology for looking like themselves or being their age.”
It’s this attitude that makes Stories About My Body so deeply profound and fearless, reminding viewers to give thanks to their remarkable flesh-and-blood bodies.
Morgana concludes, “Another thing I’m really proud of is that all the people who’ve seen the film have said that they love how I am funny when I talk about my body, but I’m not self-deprecating or mean. Because, yes, boobs and farts are funny, but this is still my body and it has done so much, and for that, I’ll always honour and respect it.”
Stories About My Body screens as part of the NZ International Comedy Festival in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. To purchase tickets, visit comedyfestival.co.nz.
