Radha Mitchell has quietly been blazing a path through Hollywood with her solid skills and sensual beauty in such varied films as High Art, Pitch Black, Phone Booth, Man on Fire, and last year's Finding Neverland. In each of these pictures, the striking Aussie has effortlessly hit the ball back to an impressive array of leading men, including Denzel Washington, Johnny Depp, and Colin Farrell.
Most recently Mitchell caught the attention of Woody Allen, who cast her in the dual title role of his latest piece of neurosis, Melinda and Melinda. The iconic director was initially set to cast Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr. to star in this romantic dramedy, but after both actors became the subject of negative tabloid headlines, Allen chose Mitchell and Will Ferrell instead. According to Mitchell, Allen cast her after seeing a tape she had sent of her work in Rodrigo Garcia's female-monologue feature, Ten Tiny Love Stories.
It's quite a milestone for this Melbourne native, whose dreams of becoming a leading lady seemed an ocean away when she was 6 years old. "I didn't really do anything about that until I was 13, when I did this TV show for kids for about six months," says Mitchell. "Then I ended up going back to high school, but I had it in my mind that [the show] was a lot of fun. No school, dress-ups every day.… So I think having that sort of exposure had stayed in the back of my mind, and when I was finishing high school I got an agent and started to do TV shows."
One such show was the infamous soap opera Neighbours, which has served as a rite of passage for many now established Aussie stars, including Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Natalie Imbruglia, and pop singer Kylie Minogue. The soap taught Mitchell good work ethics, such as learning her lines quickly and staying focused on the set. What saved her from a lifetime of daytime drama was being cast with friends in her first feature, Love and Other Catastrophes, while getting her B.A. in literature and media studies at Swinburne University. "It was a very sweet little independent film that we made with somebody's parents' money—[that] kind of thing, real low-budget. It was kind of reflective of what we were doing at the time," she says.
The little film went on to the Cannes, Venice, and Sundance film festivals, received acclaim, and was purchased by Fox. After traveling the festival circuit, Mitchell and her co-star Frances O'Connor realized that becoming international stars was not such a crazy idea. "I think as a foreign actor coming to America, if you want to be involved in film, you have to have made some sort of film," says Mitchell. "If you're from Timbuktu, they'll look at you, as long as you've been in a movie."
In 1997, Mitchell moved to Los Angeles, which remains her home. "Initially, there was a lot of coming and going between countries," she says. "It wasn't easy to get an agent [in L.A.], and I ended up with a smaller agency, but with that agency I got a film called High Art." She had played a lesbian character in her first film, which was seen by High Art's writer/director Lisa Cholodenko, whose story was about New York's drug-addled lesbian art world. Cholodenko took notice. However, things got a little sticky when Mitchell was offered a part in another film at the same time.
"Then [Cholodenko] chickened out because she hadn't met me. I had just said no to the other movie, and I thought for a day that I had no movie," Mitchell recalls. "Then [High Art's producers] flew me out to New York, and I tested with Ally [Sheedy], and that's how I ended up getting the part. That was really a lot of fun, staying in New York and making that film at the time. I don't think I made any money, because I spent all my money on living expenses. So I had to go back to Australia and do a TV movie."
High Art gave the actor an entirely new level of exposure; so, instead of sticking to small independent fare, Mitchell did a 180-degree turn for her next role alongside Vin Diesel in the action film Pitch Black. She portrayed a pilot with questionable morals guiding a pack of survivors off a dark alien planet after being marooned there. For Mitchell, it was a chance to show off the intense range she has continued to demonstrate in her work—from the wealthy mother of an abducted child in Man on Fire to Depp's chilly wife in the period picture Finding Neverland. Audiences can now see how she holds up against the hilarious Ferrell in Melinda and Melinda. Woody Allen uses an intriguing gimmick in the film: Using the same protagonist, he tells parallel stories—one a drama and the other a comedy.
According to Mitchell, there was little time to rehearse or discuss the role with Allen, and only she and Ferrell had copies of the entire script. The supporting cast members had little or no idea what was happening beyond their scenes, which made for an interesting set. "It's like how life happens to you," she explains. "It definitely keeps you on your toes and pushes any sort of your neurotic buttons that you might have as an actor. I think that working with Woody Allen sort of makes you feel like you're supposed to be really good, and I think all the actors had that kind of feeling, and that creates a sort of tense energy, which suits the story."
Was there anything that surprised her about Allen? "I don't think there was anything that didn't surprise me about him," she says, laughing. "He's very charming. For the first couple of days we didn't speak very much. I think he creates these intense characters by keeping himself separated [from] what's going on in the scenes in a way, but as we started to play more, there was much more dialogue between me and him in relation to what we were doing." As the enigmatic title character, Mitchell had to create a duality in her character to fit the comedic and dramatic versions.
"It was the same Melinda, but she had two different attitudes towards life," she says. "So I just adopted certain kind of physical mannerisms or physical habits that helped define each. Like one has messy hair and likes to drink and smoke a lot. Whereas the other girl is generally more relaxed and more playful, and I tried to show that in the way that she would wear her clothes and so on."
Generally, Mitchell says, she sometimes reads through a script with acting coach Ivana Chubbuck, and she uses everything from drinking coffee for more dramatic scenes to listening to music to keep her focused on-set. To prepare for her role as an autistic woman in the upcoming film Mozart and the Whale, Mitchell spent time with people who live with Asperger's syndrome. For her role in Man on Fire, she met people who had experiences with abduction. For Melinda and Melinda, Mitchell met with women who had graduated from the Spence School, a private girls school, in Manhattan to get a sense of her character's background. "Researching a role is really fun," she says. "It's an excuse to be very nosy." BSW