Kate Elliott has been acting since she was 14 years old and it’s safe to say the industry has changed wildly in that time. In this Capsule chat, The Gulf actress talks about becoming an intimacy coordinator, why she wants to be Waiheke’s unofficial mayor and what it’s like to be expecting her second child 12 years after she had her first one.
“I thought I would wait and leave 12 years in between them – I thought that would be a good gap,” Kate Elliott deadpans when describing what it’s like to be pregnant with her second child at 39, 12 years after having her first child Dee Dee. “It feels a lot healthier to be having a baby at this age than it was when I was having Dee Dee – I look back at myself and think, ‘You were a baby!’”
But the biggest difference now for The Gulf actress isn’t an age-related one, it’s a job-related one. When Kate got pregnant at age 26, it had a profound effect on her career path. “There were a lot of things I realised I had residual anxiety about; when I was pregnant with Dee Dee, I lost my Australian agent and my American agent, because I was pregnant,” she says. “Well, ‘because I wasn’t going to work for two years’ was the official line. And I accepted that at the time, rather than thinking, ‘Hmm… I’m pretty sure this is illegal.’”
It was pretty shocking wake-up call to learn how her industry handled pregnancy, she says. “I still remember my reaction to losing my American agent, it was almost like a death. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is. You work so hard to get good representation overseas and then to lose it for something that you thought everyone would celebrate… I was quite anxious telling The Gulf producers or my new agent. They were all like ‘Congratulations, that’s great!’ And I thought… ‘You mean I’m not in trouble?’”
Getting older in the television industry does present its challenges, Kate, 39, says. “It’s all to do with your physical appearance, really. You get far more interesting roles, often. But I’ve noticed that they’ve become less sexual, in a way. You go into the ‘mother’ category. It’s still about being desirable, sexually.”
While that makes for fairly grim reading, Kate says it’s definitely getting better. The environment making The Gulf, for instance, where Kate plays detective Jess Savage was a world away from some of the sets she was used to working on. “You can feel the difference on The Gulf, with two powerful and impressive women at the helm,” she says of the show’s writing team, Paula Boock and Donna Malane. “They work really hard to create a safe, non-gender bias workplace.”
In fact, Kate is so interested in being part of that change that she’s learning how to be an intimacy co-ordinator through a company in LA that is behind the progressive and sexy scenes in shows like Euphoria. “It’s shown me how different things were back then,” she says of the early years in her career. “I don’t think I’ve ever done a love scene that hasn’t been at least mildly traumatic; I haven’t done one where I haven’t cried either afterwards or before, just from stress.” Nothing extremely horrible happened to her, she says, but the lack of boundaries around shooting scenes of a sensible nature was less than ideal. “I have those experiences of having the sex scenes being watched by the dog wrangler and thinking ‘why is the dog wrangler here?’ or being told that I wasn’t masturbating correctly by a 50-year-old man, when I was like 18.” Being able to advocate for young actors doing those scenes, ensure a safe, communicative space and even choreographing the scenes themselves is some of the work an intimacy coordinator can do. They’re becoming increasingly popular, both by actors and producers. The realistic-but-super-hot sex scenes on Normal People, for instance, Kate says. “All those shows have the most amazing intimate scenes and you can tell that the actor is in a place where they’re safe enough to really be vulnerable. Because during sex scenes, you’re mostly worried about everything else. It’s a bit dissociative to be honest. I want to help directors and production teams create work that gets it right.”
When she looks back those early years, I ask, was there an attitude that you should just put up with everything because it’s part of the job? “Oh yes – as an actor, you’re taught to never say no, which is a big thing,” Kate nods. “You don’t say no because you’ll lose the job or somebody else is waiting in the wings ready to get it. That’s been a really big learning curve for me and when you work from the age of 14, like I have, it bleeds into your actual life as well. Setting boundaries doesn’t come naturally to me – it’s taken me a long time to figure out how to say no and that it’s okay to say no.”
When it comes to Dee Dee, her first child, Kate says she is blown away by how much more self-possessed she is at the age of 12. “They’re just so much their own person and has no interest in being like other 12 year olds. They’re truly much more of an individual than I’ve ever been.” Dee Dee is a big ally of the LGBTIA community and is in the process of trying to start up an LGBTIA club at their Catholic’s girls school. “I’m super proud of them.” Kate identifies as cisgender but has dated both women and men in her life. “That’s always how it’s been for me – I do think it’s becoming more accepted. Watching Dee Dee becoming the person they are, I’m like ‘Man, it’s such a good time’ when it comes to how it is for these kids, compared to what it was like for my generation.”
So much of an actor’s life is going where the work is – moving between NZ and the US, or over the Australia. But with Covid-19 restricting filming overseas, there are numerous teams bringing work down to New Zealand – plus the local acting scene is also busy. “For the first time in my life I haven’t felt like I should be somewhere else,” Kate says. The bonus of The Gulf being filmed on the unbelievably picturesque Waiheke Island makes for a pretty phenomenal day job, as well. “I’m such a huge fan of Waiheke now – I feel like I’m the unofficial, self-appointed mayor of Waiheke… which is completely unfounded and not true at all,” she laughs. “But I do have an affinity for it. We are so lucky here.”
Tune in to The Gulf on Monday, 1st March at 9:00pm available on Three and ThreeNow.
