Powerful women are Essie Davis' stock-in-trade (2024)

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This was published 7 years ago

By Jake Wilson

"She's a survivor, and she's an incredibly powerful woman," Essie Davis says of Elizabeth Woodville, her character in the new historical miniseries, The White Princess, a British-American co-production based on the novel by Philippa Gregory.

The widow of Edward IV and mother-in-law to the new king (Jacob Collins-Levy), Elizabeth continues to plot behind the scenes, using every means available, including witchcraft, to put her family back on the throne.

Powerful women are Essie Davis' stock-in-trade (1)

Powerful women are the stock-in-trade of Tasmanian-born Davis, who recently has been working mainly overseas – she guest-starred in the last season of Game of Thrones – but visited Melbourne recently for the Series Mania television festival at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

Locally, Davis is well known as flapper detective Phryne Fisher in three seasons of the ABC's, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (a Phryne movie, she confirms, is still in the pipeline).

Powerful women are Essie Davis' stock-in-trade (2)

Internationally, she won many new fans through her role in the 2014 Australian horror film, The Babadook, where her fragile, grief-stricken character Amelia becomes a monster in her own right.

In their different ways, Elizabeth, Phryne and Amelia are all forces to be reckoned with, but does Davis carry this feeling of power with her when not at work?

"No," she says flatly, before bursting into full-throated laughter, a sound you get used to quickly when talking to her.

That said, she concedes that she's no pushover. "I've learnt more and more in life to stand up for myself and become more and more outspoken about things."

Where her career is concerned, Davis says she doubts she'll ever be "satiated" by any single role, and that the pleasure is in making it different every time.

"The Babadook was very raw, because it's about opening up and being completely vulnerable," she says.

In contrast, Phryne Fisher is defined by her unquenchable joie de vivre. "Even when she is crushed she picks herself up and dusts herself off and gets in an aeroplane, or straddles a man."

Unusually, the half-dozen writers of The White Princess are all women (as are the creators of Miss Fisher and The Babadook). When I ask what difference this makes in practice, Davis makes an amused, drawn-out "Ooh" noise, as if to say, "I'm impressed you went there."

"I think that essentially the world came from Philippa Gregory, and that definitely the stories are a female point of view," she says. Still, she's reluctant to generalise in this area. "I think that some male writers really get a female perspective and some female writers don't."

White Princess co-writer, Sarah Dollard, also works on Doctor Who, and I'm curious what Davis makes of the announcement that Jodie Whittaker will play the first female incarnation of the time-travelling doctor. After all, Phryne and the doctor have a few things in common, particularly their way of strolling into a situation and seizing control.

Davis laughs again. "I love that analogy, thank you very much! Look, I haven't watched Doctor Who since it turned into a sort of CGI version of itself ...Tom Baker was my man. And I don't know what I think about it, honestly. I was quite shocked."

Again, she's keen to consider both sides of the question, spelling out that she supports the push for more "great leading roles for women" and more diversity in casting in general.

"I think that there are lots of really amazing stories about women and for women to tell, and we don't necessarily need to use male ones." She pauses. "What do you think about it?"

I say that for me it's a plus – that the show needed a revamp, and that the science-fiction premise has always allowed the doctor to change from one form to another. Davis mulls it over. "Yeah, I can totally get that."

Recently the sinister, top-hatted Babadook has also emerged in a new guise, the internet jokingly claiming him as a gay icon. Asked what she makes of this, Davis bursts into laughter once more. "It's hilarious. It's quite wonderful. I do understand. He does come out of the closet, and nothing can stop him from coming out."

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