Emma
Booth: "Am I a hippie? I probably am." Photo: Stephen Taylor
Craig
Mathieson, The Age, reports
In
the wake of a thrilling swansong, busy Emma Booth is finally heading to the US.
These days it does not take much to get a young Australian actor
on the first flight to Los Angeles: a single season on Home & Away or a
supporting role in a well-received local feature will generally do the trick.
But amid the clamour to be the next Chris Hemsworth or Naomi Watts, Perth-based
actor Emma Booth has stayed put.
''Until now, I've been too busy working here to relocate to LA to
look for work,'' says the 29-year-old, who is doing a final tour of Western
Australia, including a week in Broome and spending some time with her mother in
Busselton, before finally making the move. ''For a long time Hollywood was
something that had to come later.''
The former teenage model, who first came to attention in 2007's Clubland, has gone from
role to role in recent years, doing a diverse pair of television mini-series in
the form of the adaptation of Tim Winton's Cloudstreet
and Underbelly: The Golden
Mile, where she played sex worker turned police recruit Kim
Hollingsworth, as well as appearing opposite Clive Owen in Scott Hicks' The Boys are Back.
Booth recently finished her first major American picture, starring
opposite Jason Statham, Jennifer Lopez and Nick Nolte in the crime thriller Parker, which is directed
by Taylor Hackford and due out early next year. Playing the girlfriend of an
action hero is usually a thankless task, and Booth was surprised she fit the
bill.
''I thought I'd never get the role. When I went to the chemistry
audition with Statham there were these three blonde American Barbie dolls
sitting outside waiting and I thought that I was wasting my time with my nose
ring and tattoos,'' Booth says.
''But Jason and I got on and Taylor was very happy to do something
different, too. I had a lot of fun doing the film.''
Her going-away present is the independent Australian thriller Swerve. Released
yesterday, it's a taut piece of neo-noir set in the Australian outback. Booth
plays the calculating Jina, the wife of hot-head police officer Frank (Jason
Clarke), who decides an Iraq war veteran passing through town, Colin (David
Lyons), is her best means of extracting her freedom and a bag of illicit money
from a dead-end situation.
Veteran filmmaker Craig Lahiff, who covered some of the same dusty
ground with Russell Crowe in 1997's Heaven's
Burning, offered the part of Jina to Booth without an audition.
She found herself playing the femme fatale, a role where she's
acting as a woman who is always acting, which placed her in an esteemed lineage
that includes Barbara Stanwyck in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity and Linda Fiorentino in John
Dahl's The Last Seduction.
''To me it was about showing just a little to say a lot. She's
also so good at doing this that she doesn't even know when she's lying any
more,'' Booth says.
''For me the challenge was staying at this heightened level of
emotion for the whole film.''
Because she was a model working in Europe when her friends were
finishing high school, it has taken Booth time to establish her dramatic
reputation. But in recent years she has segued from one demanding character to
the next, switching from baring herself emotionally, and often physically on
screen, to chilling out on yoga retreats.
''Am I a hippie? I probably am,'' Booth says. ''I'm certainly
self-aware. I love acting, but I also need a very calm part of my life to
balance these highly emotional roles. I love being on a set, telling a story,
but I have to have something completely different as well to break the spell.''
Swerve is now screening.
