‘People either get it, or they don’t’: Brooke Satchwell is thriving in her second act

Brooke Satchwell is emptying her pockets. Out tumble rocks onto the table. “That’s a pyrite,” she says, pointing to a stone that’s more commonly known as Fools’ Gold. “That’s chrysoprase [a green gemstone], that was given to me by my neighbour on my birthday last week. That’s a merkaba star [a clear stone made from quartz], which I’ve completely busted. That’s an I-don’t-know-what-it-is-rock, can’t remember. And then the moonstone.”

Satchwell is a rock collector. She polishes them at home, and carries them with her always. “They’re beautiful and magnificent,” she says. “I’ve been drawn to rocks ever since I was a little kid and I’ve collected them. I even just collect rocks off the beach.”

It’s not just rocks – she’s a twitcher (“I saw a great southern petrel in my backyard last week”) who loves train documentaries and gardens with a whiteboard by her side so she can multitask. In other words, she loves upending people’s expectations. “People either get it or they don’t,” she says.

Satchwell, who lives on the NSW Mid North Coast, is in Sydney trying (unsuccessfully) to catch a breather after a few hectic weeks on the road. She has been to Canberra as part of a delegation fighting for 20 per cent local screen quotas, as well as emceeing and playing roadie for the Northern Territory’s Barker River Band at a couple of events for the organisations Grow the Music and Screenworks, of which she is a board member. Throw in finishing filming for the new ABC comedy Dog Park, as well as promotion for the new Stan drama Dear Life, and, yeah, it’s hectic.

“It’s an interesting moment,” she says. “I’m actually in the most exciting chapter of my life so far, which is a bit fun. It’s that beautiful thing of hitting the mid-40s [she just turned 45], and having put in the work over the time, on all the levels and dimensions, and it’s just starting to come together into a really beautiful tapestry of a life that has meaning for me.

“I mean, I’m trying to be 45 people at once right now, and I’m learning how to make that a little bit more finessed as I go, but I’m also learning how to just focus on the thing in front of me and deal with that and then switch to the next thing that needs to be addressed.”

What’s in front of her right now is Dear Life, a dramedy by Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope in which she plays Lillian, whose life is ripped apart when her fiance, Ash, is killed. Still struggling to cope with the grief seven months later, Lillian decides to track down the recipients of Ash’s donated organs. She wants to see the lives they are living, the life given to them by Ash.

“I could see, hear, feel, taste, breathe the world,” says Satchwell. “It made so much sense to me. It was so rich and holistic and beautiful and complex and messy and funny and raw, and that’s totally my jam.”

It’s a complex role that requires everything of Satchwell: love, joy and devastation, the big leave-nothing-behind emotions, with a touch of comedy thrown in (to see her vomit, while dressed in period costume at Ballarat’s Sovereign Hill museum, is something else).

“It is quite a juggle, being able to pull off the rhythms,” she says. “Wayne and Robyn have thought through every heartbeat, every breath of this. They’re so deeply invested. So the road map was there in a very beautifully galvanised way. But to drop down into all the layers that drive that [performance and the emotion], while simultaneously pulling all the strings and making it look like you’re not even trying, that is a hell of a thing.

“You just get match fit as you go, and it was more about apologising to the crew and just being like, ‘Sorry, guys. I know you’ve just had breakfast, but I’m going to do a breakdown scene from a standing start.’ I was so stoked with all the Dear Life stuff because it’s just so raw and fabulous, no make-up. It’s like, ‘Yeah, let’s show that, and let’s let people off the hook.’”

Satchwell is always delightful company. She talks a million miles an hour and holds eye contact. She’s always on the front foot, this time securing a quieter table, asking the waiter his name and checking that everyone is OK. It’s the third time we’ve spoken over the last few years, as she has pushed herself on screen and off to deliver, seemingly effortlessly, stronger and stronger performances in everything from serious drama (Mr Inbetween and The Twelve), to theatre (Oil at the Sydney Theatre Company) and comedy (Black Comedy). She is far from the girl who grew up on Neighbours.

“I had to step up and do something,” says Satchwell. “Having had the first half of my career dominated by a blue bikini from Neighbours that wallpapered the internet, I was like, I know how this game goes, so if we’re going to do it, we commit.”

It was her gasp-worthy performance as Tiffany, a white woman who was convinced she was Indigenous, on the ABC’s Black Comedy that started the ball rolling. In one episode, Satchwell, with her hair in braids, sat in the gutter outside Redfern station, drunk and crying.

“I mean, I honestly thought I was going to get deported and never work in this town again,” she says. “I really, honestly did. But there’s that beautiful thing that art and storytelling does, that is a story [on Black Comedy] that we, as whities, did not know. That’s mob truth, that’s their experience and because it is true, when it was actually delivered as a thing, as shocking as it was for those not initiated, it resonated because it was a truth.

“And the power of that was that then I had people, industry wise, turn and look at me and go, ‘You can do different things.’”

And that’s pretty much how she ended up in Nakkiah Lui’s apocalyptic comedy Preppers “pegging” game show host Grant Denyer (“that was a new threshold for me”), and then landed a role in Russell Crowe’s film Poker Face, in which she trained for three months to deliver a 30-punch boxing sequence, and then it was The Twelve and Oil, and now Dear Life. It’s a climb, but it’s a mountain Satchwell feels ready for.

“You need the terror and the doubt and the fear,” she says. “That is actually part of it because you’re either just sitting there, softening yourself or staying in a stasis of sorts, or you’re walking through those flames and getting to the clearing on the other side and going, ‘Actually, this is quite beautiful. Where are we going next?’”

For Satchwell, the answer to that question is connection. She’s passionate about grassroots advocacy, about helping organisations such as Grow the Music, which works with Indigenous and migrant communities. It’s why she was working as a roadie for the Barker River band at the Giiyong Festival (“I’m literally wrapping cables and driving cars and bumping in and out”) one week, and the next she was in Canberra talking to politicians.

She describes getting the local content quote legislation changed as a bit “like turning the Titanic”, but she feels change is in the air.

“There’s some really exciting momentum building,” she says. “I think within the industry, and within communities and people at large, where we’ve all been worn down by the obstacles we’ve all had to surmount in the last little while … we doubted our capacities to address them or step up to them, and I feel like something has changed recently. I feel like yet another boundary was crossed, and we all turned around and went, ‘Yeah, not on my watch. Hold my beer.’”

While Satchwell was in Canberra, she made another unusual connection, one that will keep her grounded while she shoots for the stars.

“When I was at Parliament House, I was in the bathrooms and, and as you do, I got chatting to the lady next to me at the sinks,” she says. “She was a geologist from Western Australia who was visiting a mate who worked at Parliament House. Her thing was space rocks, and she invited me to come visit her the next time I was in Western Australia. They’re awesome space rocks, which I’m definitely going to take her up on, so that’s pretty cool.”

Dear Life streams on Stan from January 1. Stan is owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead.

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