‘My first thought was my career is over’: The moment that changed Pia Miranda

Suddenly, Pia Miranda is everywhere. The actor who seared herself into the nation’s consciousness as the star of Looking For Alibrandi 26 years ago has over the past year or two cropped up on multiple networks, as an actor, guest and presenter. And always looking as if she can’t quite believe her luck in being there.

She was in Stan’s Invisible Boys, as the mother of one of the young men struggling to come to terms with his sexuality in a remote town in WA. She’s popped up on Luxury Escapes for 10 and Foxtel. She travelled back to her ancestral Sicily with Shaun Micallef for SBS’s Origin Odyssey. She was in Darby and Joan for the ABC, and now she’s co-presenting Recipe of the Year with Adam Liaw for the national broadcaster.

Not bad for someone who as a girl felt there was no place for someone like her on our screens.

“I always wanted to be in movies. I just never thought it was possible because I didn’t see any Italian-Australians in film and TV,” she says.

It was, of course, Alibrandi that changed all that.

She was 25 when she made the film, playing 17-year-old Josie, who starts the film feeling deeply embarrassed of her heritage, trapped by it even, but ends up embracing it. She’d been on Neighbours, but when Melina Marchetti’s script, adapted from her own novel, landed on her desk “I could not believe what I was reading, and I honestly was thinking I have to get this. It was the first time I’d ever imagined I could be in something that meant so much to me.”

As she writes in her rather engaging memoir Finding My Bella Vita (2023), she paid her way to Sydney to audition for the part, and when she landed it, she had to crash with her sister for the three months it took to make it.

The film may have made her famous, but it certainly didn’t make her rich.

“Full disclosure, I wish I’d been paid more and I wish residuals [ongoing royalties] were a thing in Australia because as Australian actors, generally we don’t see a cent after we leave set,” she says. “That’s been something I’ve had to negotiate with my brain, but apart from that, the whole experience has been wonderful.”

She watched the film last year for the first time since its release, with Kick Gurry, the actor who plays her boyfriend in the movie, at her side. “He was crying through the whole thing,” she says, laughing. “I had to look after him. He was crying, holding my hand, going, ‘Look at us!’”

Though it didn’t set her up financially, the movie did yield other fruits; indirectly. It’s how she met her husband, musician Luke Hanigan, whose band Lo-Tel contributed the song Teenager of the Year to the soundtrack.

“I think he has a thing for Italian women,” she says. “I was so scared to take him to Italy the first time because I thought he was going to be like, ‘I didn’t even get a good one’. He saw me on the side of a popcorn box [promoting the film], and he asked me to be in his film clip, and I was just really excited because they were going to pay me $1500.”

Was that more than you got for the film?

“Probably. So we met on that, and we struck up a friendship. We had to do a bit of press together, and one thing led to another. Eventually. He moved slowly. He was a bit shy. I mean, I like shy guys.”

Miranda has worked consistently in the years since, though it’s fair to say nothing made as much of a mark on the public mind as Looking for Alibrandi (it’s amazing what being on the high school curriculum can do for the popularity of a book, and its screen adaptation; plus, it’s a seriously good movie). At least until she won Australian Survivor in 2019.

She came to the show as a hardcore fan, and took the competition seriously, despite having a few blind spots. “I can’t catch a ball. I don’t like heights. I’d never been camping before I went on Survivor, so what was I doing,” she says, laughing. “But I love the game, and I still love the game.”

She approached it, as all winners do, strategically, making alliances (she and Boost Juice founder Janine Allis became, and remain, great friends) and breaking them when needed. It worked, and she walked away with $500,000 in prize money – “financially it absolutely helped me because we went straight into COVID and we were freelancers, so we didn’t get any COVID payments” – but the reactions online were a rude awakening. For perhaps the first time in her professional life, Miranda was not universally adored.

“Some of the online bullying was really embarrassing and hard to deal with,” she says. It was also distinctly gendered.

“I know a lot of female Survivor winners say that the story of when a woman wins is always about how the man loses, and the story of when a man wins is how incredible they are.”

She undertook the move that brought her the most grief, a blindside (elimination), with two male accomplices. As the hate poured in, she checked in with them to ask if they were OK. “And they went, ‘What are you talking about?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I’m getting 1000 death threats a minute.’”

Awful though it was, Miranda insists there was a positive side to that experience, too, as she became involved in Dolly’s Dream, an organisation dedicated to fighting online bullying. “What was most shocking was a lot of the people who were coming for me were parents of young children, and I thought they’re probably doing this to me and a MAFS contestant and someone else tomorrow. And if we continue to accept it as part of society, how are we going to teach our kids to be better? So that’s something that I take really seriously, and I am hoping that at some point we can make [a] change.”

The Survivor experience gave her another unexpected insight, too. As the competition wore on, something strange began happening to her skin pigmentation. It turned out she had vitiligo, an autoimmune condition that causes the skin to lose pigment related to alopecia (which runs in her family), but of which she had been totally unaware.

“My first thought was, ‘My career is over’,” she says. “They call it a disfigurement; I don’t see it as that because I think people with vitiligo look beautiful, but I started to question the world I was in.

“I’ve spent my whole career trying to fit into this mould and being told things like, ‘You’re not sexy enough, you need to change your body, you need to do this’, where I’ve never questioned being told that, I’ve always just tried to fit in. And I realised that I’m actually part of a really broken system.”

If Miranda has a secret weapon in confronting that, it’s the air of relentless, and the seemingly genuine warmth and positivity she exudes. You can see it in spades on Recipe of the Year, in which she and Liaw shepherd contestants through a CWA-run cooking competition (with nothing more at stake than a ribbon for the winner).

The show is a clear effort on the part of the ABC to fulfil its remit to reach regional Australia. But it’s also illustrative of how much the notion of Australianness has expanded since she got her big break.

“I was brought up in the ’80s as an Italian kid. No one wanted to date me,” she says. “I know that feeling of being called the greasy wog and all those sorts of things. So it’s informed my life, and I really try to make sure that everyone feels included and to speak about that stuff.”

Recipe of the Year airs at 7.30pm on Sundays on the ABC and ABC iview.

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