Radha Mitchell: Interview

Interview by Clint Morris

Interview with actor Radha Mitchell
Co-starring in the movie Man on Fire.

A weary, somnolent, timeworn and famished journalist walks into a hotel suite to chew fat with his latest interviewee. She’s not on the chesterfield though, not even sitting at the dinner table. Nope, ravishing Radha Mitchell is plonked up in bed, and beckons said interviewer to the bedroom.

She’s decided she wants a [exceedingly] laid-back, chill-out interview, and wonders whether she could do it in bed. She seemed even more excited to see that “it’s a man!” standing at the foot of her sleeping quarters.

Inelegantly, I climb onto the bed with Radha Mitchell (pinch me, I must be dreaming, I recall thinking). She smiles and offers me the balmy blankets to get under.

I benevolently repudiate, and animatedly get on with the job at hand – which is talking to one of Australia’s most talented, chirpy, young actresses about her latest movie.

In Man on Fire, Academy Award Winner Denzel Washington plays a besmirched burnt-out bodyguard to a young girl whose parents (Radha and Marc Anthony) have been endangered by a multitude of kidnapping threats.

The film, a slick, well-performed, thriller set in the sun-beaming opportunistic Mexico, is directed by veteran action director Tony Scott.

As trade for a space on her queen size-bed though, all run-of-the-mill questions have been excised from the interview. “What was it like working with Denzel? What interested you about the movie?” laughs the small-statured beauty, head still firmly rested on throw cushion. “That’s what I’ve been getting…so good, something different.”

Radha Mitchell kicked off her illustrious career in her native Australia, largely in television. She appeared in such series as “Halifax F.P”, “Blue Heelers”, “Phoenix” and predominantly, “Neighbours” in which she starred as Catherine O’Brien from 1996 to 1997.

“It was an excellent training ground. We actually rehearsed on Neighbours, can you believe that?” says Mitchell “I don’t think I’d still be rehearsing now if I was still on it, it’d probably be a bit blasé to me actually, even when I was on the show I pretended I wasn’t on there. I never did any publicity, nothing. But it was a good time all the same.”

Mitchell says she flicks on the series any chance she gets when she’s back in Melbourne. “I flick it on sometimes. It’s so easy to watch television here. A lot easier than watching TV in the states. For one, there are so many channels over there; it’s too hard to navigate.

“I know they have cable here now too, but we’ve essentially just got the main four channels and you can almost guarantee that there’s going to be something at least half-worthwhile on. Over there, it’s a lot of crap.”

Television, it goes without saying, isn’t something Mitchell was very keen on doing when she moved to Los Angeles in 1997. “I did a telemovie…what was that called? Ah… Uprising. That’s it.

“If I did television, even now, it’d be something like that, a good telemovie or mini-series, I don’t see myself doing something episodic, some series or anything…but that’s this week, ask me again next week and I might have a different answer,” she laughs.

This week, Mitchell’s on the promotional trail for the film in which she co-stars alongside charismatic A-lister Denzel. “You promised you weren’t going to ask me about Denzel!” she giggles. As a consolation, we talk about her younger co-star Dakota Fanning, who plays her daughter in the film, instead.

“She is the consummate professional. She’s just great. She is a phenomenon; she even has like this huge fan base. She’s like a seasoned old actress making script notes’, making sure everything is precise and ready to go. She’s amazing. She even did this huge concert thing with Kermit the Frog recently… so she’s versatile too, and just such a great performer.”

Mitchell has equal praise for director Tony Scott too. “He’s visually stunning. His influence for this film was City of God, which I just loved, so I knew he was going to do something interesting with it. From the moment I stepped on the set, I could smell Tony, as in, this was definitely a Tony Scott film.

“It was such a precise, good-looking flick from the get-go”, she says. “The location worked well for the film too. Mexico was awesome. And everywhere I looked there were all these famous heads – I mean, even Mickey Rourke is in our film. It was just an all-around great experience. So Cool!”

Scott really put Mitchell through her paces too, to play the disconsolate mother who has to cope when her daughter is abducted. “I drank coffee,” she says, when asked how she works herself up for such heavy scenes. “Lots of it. I actually just sat by myself, just sat. It seemed to do the trick. Oh, and listen to CD's.”

Mitchell volunteers to draw a contrast chart between co-star Denzel Washington, and her Pitch Black co-star Vin Diesel, if only to further verify just what a great time she had on this movie. “Vin wasn’t famous then, but he had that movie star quality. I think he knew he had something. He was smart.

“There wasn’t anyone around at the time – besides The Rock, I’ve actually got a thing for him, I think maybe it’s the name, The Rock! – so there was a need for someone like him to do movies like that.

“So yeah, Denzel and Vin shared a similar focus, they’re both very professional and everything’s ‘spot on’, but obviously Vin’s a different type of acting talent all together,” says Mitchell, adding that she’s yet to see the Pitch Black sequel, Chronicles of Riddick. “It’s not real good? Yeah I think Pitch Black was edgy, I think that’s what worked for our film.”

Next up Mitchell’s working with another mega-star Johnny Depp in the long-awaited Finding Neverland. “That comes out in October in the U.S, and I think maybe December or something here in Australia. It was such a brilliant experience. I mean, I was in London with Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet, Dustin Hoffman and Julie Christie – does it get any better?”

I don’t know, does it? “Well there is one type of film I’d like to do and that’s just something very naturalistic. Oh, and I’d love to play like a gun-toting action hero in a movie, but Charlies Angels has been done. Unless they wanna do another one?”

And Radha Mitchell could definitely look at home in a third Charlies Angels movie too: she’s beautiful, and not to mention quite fit. “I do Yoga. I’d like to say I do it every morning, but I don’t, I just don’t have the time. I mean do it one or two times a week, that’s about all I can fit in. But I’m also a vegetarian so there’s another factor I guess.”

And beauty secrets? “I don’t smoke and I don’t drink alcohol,” she says, before suggesting to me to take it easy on my Buck’s Night next week, if only so I can remember it. “It’s a big thing. You’re better off not drinking, especially smoking. I think it helps a lot in regaining looks and being otherwise healthy.”

And though she’s stuck doing publicity for Man on Fire for the next couple of days, Mitchell says just even being back in Melbourne is a welcome relief from the hustle bustle lifestyle of Los Angeles. “I just got back two hours ago and it’s great. Nothing here changes, which is so reassuring – except perhaps for that big Silver monument [Federation Square] thing they put up in the middle of the city. But yeah, it’s nicer here.”

And with the last question being crossed off this journo’s note-pad it’s time to leave the comfort of Radha Mitchell’s bed...

Man on Fire commences August 5th.
You can click here for a full review of the movie.

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