“You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.”
Australian actor Rachel Griffiths is contemplating the role artists can play during turbulent times. “We are actually screwed either way. And not every artist is political.”
This month the Academy Award-nominated actor stars in When We Rise, a highly anticipated TV drama exploring the struggles of the American LGBT rights movement.
Based on the memoir by gay rights activist Cleve Jones, the seven-part docudrama follows a group of activists as they fight for equality in the United States, from 1970s San Francisco through to present day. Written by Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for Milk in 2009, and produced by Gus van Sant, the show features an all-star cast that includes Griffiths, Mary-Louise Parker, Guy Pearce, Rosie O’Donnell, Whoopi Goldberg and David Hyde Pierce.
Griffiths herself is as well known for her activism as for her roles in Muriel’s Wedding, Six Feet Under and Brothers & Sisters. She has been a vocal patron of human rights organisation Hagar Australia since 2012, and in 1997 she famously stripped down to a loincloth and a crown of thorns at the opening of Melbourne’s Crown Casino to protest the city’s loss of community.
But she stops me when I describe her as a “proud” activist. “I’d say my activism is probably poor – and in light of the recent [US] election, I think I have been a very poor and bad feminist. I don’t think I have been proud enough [to advocate] for women’s equality and rights ... I have had fear of being portrayed as a nasty woman.”
Yet she is inspired by younger feminists, and “how they invert and own and co-opt and usurp the attempts to gag and reduce and delegitimise [them]”.
“I find them really brave, and often their paths of resistance are very exciting,” Griffiths says.
Personal politics aside, Griffiths believes drama can help bring about change. She likens When We Rise to Roots, the seminal 1970s TV miniseries which chronicles the life of an abducted African man sold into slavery in the Unites States. The show, which was recently rebooted, made a big impression on her growing up.
“I remember being a little white Catholic girl in Gardenvale [in Melbourne] watching Roots, and having that absolutely change my life in the way that I felt engaged with the struggle for dignity that was inherent in that journey of [lead character] Kunta Kinte.”
It also made her think about the effect drama could have where debate and discussion could not. “[That] just by playing a human person and telling their story, one can inevitably change [people’s] views,” Griffiths explains.
She hopes the portrayal of the experiences of the real-life activists in When We Rise will have the same effect on those debating marriage equality in her home country. “Ultimately change seems to come when people know gay people, they love gay people and they want for these people they love ... what they have for themselves,” she says.
Griffiths herself has experienced the mind-changing capacity of a good TV series. Laughing, she admits when she watches HBO series The Crown, she starts to question her own strongly held views on republicanism in Australia. “This is someone who was handing out republican cards, and now I’m going, ‘Oh my God, this is really challenging’. I did not expect to be feeling what I’m feeling about [Queen] Elizabeth, about the royal family, about the role – and it’s just something where debate doesn’t work.”
In When We Rise, Griffiths plays Diane Jones, a nurse and the partner of LGBT rights activist Roma Guy (Mary-Louise Parker). Of the many remarkable people portrayed in the series, Griffiths found Jones the most inspiring: she was one of the very few nurses who looked after those who had contracted Aids in the early 80s, at a time when little was known about the disease and how it was transmitted. “Getting up at five in the morning and doing a double shift on the Aids wards, to me that kind of courage is just unbelievably impressive and inspiring,” she says. “I think [it’s] so much harder than picking up a microphone and making some clever statements.”
Aside from the series, Griffiths continues to develop her directorial debut Ride Like a Girl, the biopic of Melbourne Cup winner Michelle Payne. It has a “wonderful” script, written by Andrew Knight and Elise McCredie, but they are still working on the finance, she says. “As a sports movie, it needs to have a fairly generous budget [to] have all the action and danger and sweeping pieces that we would expect.” Here, Griffiths slips into a faux Los Angeles accent: “So, it’s a prah-cess.”
For now, she’s focused on promoting When We Rise. In the first episode of the series, a young Roma Guy quotes Martin Luther King to Diane Jones: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Griffiths says she still believes this, even in our complex times. “I have faith in the young. My daughters will insist on the world moving forward. They may put up with momentary gaps and pauses, but they are not going to put up with a ministry full of white men and think that’s OK, they are just not.”
She tells her daughters, 11-year-old Adelaide and seven-year-old Clementine, that they’ve been born into a fortunate age in a fortunate country: “[I say to them] ‘You have more opportunity, you’ve got more confidence, more courage, more rights and freedoms in [Australia] than most western liberal democracies than any time in the last 2,000 years.’ I have to take faith in that.”
• Episode one of When We Rise is available to watch online now in Australia on SBS On Demand. It will be broadcast on SBS TV from 11 March. US audiences can watch parts two and three from 1–3March on the ABC
