getting ahead

Emma Booth has had a speedy ascent into the limelight. She was awarded the 2007 Australian Film Industry (AFI) statue for Best Supporting Actress in the indie Aussie flick Clubland, and with a Hollywood blockbuster and a Brit ‘dramedy’ due out this year, she’s quickly earning a reputation as the “next big thing”

WORDS MILLIE ROSS

Photo: Getty Images

Emma Booth arrives for our interview a bit flustered. The cabbie has just dropped her unzipped suitcase, the contents of which have fallen out onto the wet street. Make-up free, hair still wet and on just three hours’ sleep, she’s a little worse for wear. As rough as a stunning ex-model turned starlet could look at 8am on a Sunday morning. “Nothing a bit of Visine and some panel beating won’t fix,” Booth chuckles as she tucks into a McDonald’s big breakfast.

Ruffles soon smoothed, it doesn’t take long for Booth to show she’s every bit the professional, answering questions about Joel Schumacher’s supernatural thriller, Town Creek (opening in Australia this month), with aplomb. Although she’s accustomed to stunt action, filming Town Creek left Booth “bruised, bumped and scratched.” Had she been rolling around in fields then? “Well yeah, but not for the film! Kidding.”

With her fiancé having spent the last two weeks of filming with her, this could be true. Booth’s British Saatchi & Saatchi man was a welcome sight: “It was a very lonely life living for two months in Romania looking at hotel walls without family or friends around.”

No stranger to living far from home for work, Booth’s acting career began at 13 when she took a year off from school to work on the kids’ TV series Bush Patrol. Two years later she was picked up by Viviens modelling agency in Sydney and she left her hometown of Fremantle, Western Australia, and school for good.

Khan Chittenden and Emma
Booth in Clubland

After making the cover of a local teen magazine, she later won the title of Western Australia’s Model of the Year and Face of Fashion Week. By the age of 20, Booth was living in New York modelling when she plunged back into acting with The Shark Net, a miniseries shot in Perth.

Soon after, RGM (the agency representing Cate Blanchett) summoned her and within a month she was auditioning for Clubland.

“I’m sure a lot of people were thinking, ‘Can this girl act?’ I just had to go along to auditions and prove myself. That’s all I could do, and it worked.”

This was confirmed at the Sundance Film Festival as Booth, now 25, shed tears of pride when Clubland received a five-minute standing ovation, with Booth in particular receiving major applause for her performance as feisty teenager Jill. Acting alongside acclaimed British actress Brenda Blethyn and 21-year-old Khan Chittenden, Booth plays the experienced girlfriend who competes with his mother (Blethyn) for his love, while schooling him in the bedroom.

With such intimate scenes, Booth formed lasting friendships with much of the cast and crew. The close-knit atmosphere couldn’t be more different to her experience filming Town Creek in Bucharest, Romania, last year under veteran Hollywood director Joel Schumacher. She emphasises that while Schumacher was incredibly supportive, the production was simply a clock-in-clock-out, big-budget affair.

Set in West Virginia in the 1930s and the current day, Town Creek tells the story of a German family who have immigrated to America and are held captive by a Nazi vampire who feeds off men, whom Booth’s character, Lisa, cuts up for his meals. As well as resident butcher, Lisa is the “brains of the family, she figures out his game. She’s very headstrong.” Schumacher cast her in the role without an audition after catching her performance in Clubland.

It’s no coincidence that the roles Booth has scored so far have a smart, sassy, headstrong sensibility, from the sexually confident Jill, to her upcoming part in Hippie Hippie Shake playing Germaine Greer, the outspoken academic. Shot in London late last year, it’s already mired in controversy, thanks to Greer openly sneering at the film and Booth in her Guardian column in which she called on Booth to “get an honest job”.

Booth receiving her
AFI award for Clubland“I knew I was gonna get some flack from her!” Booth smiles cheekily.

Penned by Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall, the film portrays the infamous Oz magazine obscenity trial of the 1960s. Booth shares the screen with English ‘It Girl’ Sienna Miller, who plays Louise Ferrier, the role Booth was originally auditioning for. “Then at the last minute they said ‘oh, can you try for Germaine?’ and I thought I’m not Germaine! I didn’t really think I would get it, so I didn’t care so much in the audition and it showed – I was quite relaxed. I got an email the next day.”

While Hippie Hippie Shake has sparked more controversy since images of Booth and Miller appeared in the British tabloids, running in and out of a river for a skinny dipping scene, Schumacher took Booth further into unfamiliar territory during Town Creek.

“My main speech got completely rewritten at 4am, I had two hours to rehearse it. The toilet was out in the middle of the field, I went to go and thought, I could just run and keep on running!” admits Booth. “He’s an incredible director, and if you’re not up to the task or not strong enough… it’s sink or swim.”

With a warm yet brazen charisma, an AFI award on the mantle and a smitten Australian audience, Booth’s future is bright. Despite her rapid success, she remains reassuringly down-to-earth, her future aspirations resting on one day living in the bush near Margaret River where most of her family lives.

“I just want to do well and see where it takes me. I might after two years say I’ve made my money, I want a house near my family in the bush, see ya later. I’m not putting any pressure on myself.”