The actor opens up about the challenges – and unexpected advantages – of playing a character based on a real-life person no one really knew.
It’s a story practically made for television. Set against the backdrop of Sydney’s glitzy eastern suburbs, a glamorous fraudster with a penchant for designer clothes and luxury holidays allegedly swindles some of her family and closest friends out of millions of dollars before she mysteriously vanishes.
Kate Atkinson: “She is everything that I’m not. I certainly don’t subscribe to the notion that being someone ‘important’ or ‘valuable’ equates with the trappings of wealth.”“I won’t assume to know because she’s not here and she doesn’t have a right of reply, and it’s not for me to say I know what she was like,” says Kate. “But I can say I was responding to the script, and it’s about a woman who, for whatever reason, wanted to be someone other than she was.
It’s the mystery surrounding Caddick that in some ways helped rather than hindered Kate when taking on the role. She found many of the challenges that can come with playing a real-life person, including idiosyncratic figures such as Bob Hawke or Ita Buttrose, just didn’t exist. “There’s really no footage of Melissa – there are still images of her but there’s no moving footage,” she explains. “I don’t have to replicate a voice.
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