When Adrienne fills the screen, she drips with contradictions. Charismatic and terrifying. Cloyingly sweet, with an undercurrent of menace. Elegant and malevolent. A cult leader capable of warmth, but with ice in her veins.
Miranda Otto, who brings her to life in new series The Clearing, knew this character had to be this way.
Otto has been fascinated by cults all her life, fuelled by a relative who was in the Rajneesh movementwhen she was a child. So when she was approached to play Adrienne in Disney’s first Australian original scripted series, she couldn’t resist.
“In some respects, (Adrienne) is utterly charming, and when she turns her light on you, she is someone who can make you feel like you’re the only person in the room,” Otto explains in an interview with STM.
“She has the knowledge and the wisdom to see the things that you’re dealing with. She’s someone who seems, in that moment, to be completely invested in you and your betterment and your pain . . . But then she’s also someone who just cuts off completely. And then you actually wonder, was she really there at all?”
If Otto’s coiffed cult leader and her band of white-blonde children in matching outfits look familiar, it is because the story is, in part, inspired by an infamous real-life Australian cult — The Family.
The eight-part series is based on J.P Pomare’s crime thriller In The Clearing, which drew loosely on the Victorian sect led by yoga teacher turned religious guru Anne Hamilton-Byrne.
The Clearing, which also stars Guy Pearce and West Australians Kate Mulvany and Mark Coles Smith, tells the fictional story of Freya, played by Teresa Palmer, who is “forced to confront the nightmares of her past to stop a secret cult intent on gathering children to fulfil its master plan”.
In the real world, The Family began when Hamilton-Byrne teamed up with English physicist Raynor Johnson in 1963 and set up a commune at a secluded property in the Dandenong Ranges. From there, the charming self-appointed leader convinced her middle-class followers to donate money and sign over land — and children.
After more than two decades, the property was raided on a winter morning in 1987, and police found nine children being held. All told, up to 28 children are believed to have been either handed over to Hamilton-Byrne and her husband Bill by brainwashed members, or stolen from hospitals with forged adoption papers.
The children of The Family were raised in isolation as part of a so-called master race, and told Hamilton-Byrne was their mother. Many were physically and psychologically abused — beaten and starved as punishment, and given doses of LSD.
Hamilton-Byrne was never charged, but she was fined $5000 for falsifying the documents of three of the children, according to the ABC. She died from dementia, aged 98, in 2019.
Despite Hamilton-Byrne’s history looming large, Otto says her portrayal of Adrienne came only from the script and her own imagination. She didn’t base her on any real person, and even had to stop reading Pomare’s book because it clouded her vision.
“Our scripts were so intricate, in the way that the story is layered and in the way that parts of the story come back later on in other episodes . . . that when I started to read the book, I found that it was just going to confuse me. I had to stay very much in the world of the script,” she says.
Her research focused instead on cults more generally. She’s devoured books and documentaries on many of them over the years, from David Koresh’s Waco sect in the 1980s and 90s to the more recent NXIVM and Sarah Lawrence scandals.
“It intrigues me because, on some level, there’s always something really fulfilling about the cult in the beginning,” Otto says. “There’s something about the cult that offers so much of what human beings seek — community, understanding, a moral compass, some way to live this crazy life that we’re living, some kind of structure.
“But they invariably go wrong, sometimes not because the person who sets out to make it is necessarily setting out to do something evil. Sometimes it just goes wrong because the power of the situation corrupts them, I think.”
Her plan for Adrienne, and in particular how she related to her young charges, changed as Otto began filming, thanks to a dose of COVID-19 the week rehearsals started.
“I arrived, desperately tried on a lot of costumes — there are so many, about 60 — and then really had to jump into it,” she says.
“It was like rehearsing on film, trying to find where where it sat best in (Adrienne’s) relationship with (one of the children) Amy. When I first came to it, I thought it would be quite cold. But then we decided it was more interesting if it changed, and that at times she could be quite seemingly kind and interested and that you never quite knew where you were with her.
“It was a big question in my mind from the moment they sent (the script) to me . . . It’s a great role to get to play. But what is the quintessential way to do it?”
Otto was intrigued by the notion of a female cult leader, and pondered how she would exert power in a different way from a man. Rather than physical force, Adrienne’s control comes partly from “maternal” aspects — her affection and attention, and the cruel power in withholding both.
“She’s the sort of person that can reach out and touch you, and in that moment, you feel like you’re the fullest that you’ve ever been,” Otto says.
“And then the next minute, she walks away, and it’s gone . . . When someone seems so invested in you, in that moment, that you’re constantly trying to get that level of investment back, you know? But she’s moved on to the next person.”
Otto says she was deliberately kept separate from the young actors who played Adrienne’s “children” at first, “so that I didn’t seem too familiar”.
“We wanted to keep them thinking that I was someone special and to be looked up to and to be slightly nervous around,” she says.
And despite some intense, disturbing scenes, Otto says the children were typically resilient.
“Kids are great, because they understand make believe better than anybody,” she says.
“I think, over our lives, we lose that sense of play and make believe and we have to work hard, as actors, to find it.
“But kids are so good at being totally involved in something, it’s completely real for them, and then just dropping it and going and eating ice-cream or something, not bothered by it at all.”
There are also powerful performances from those playing adult members of the cult. Mulvany’s Tamsin, in particular, simmers with a palpable desperation for Adrienne’s approval so powerful conveyed that it’s often hard to watch.
But Otto gets it — how someone could be drawn in, by charisma or understanding or desire for a different life, and then find themselves caught in a web from which they find it impossible to escape.
“I’ve always felt like people judge from the outside and say ‘I would never do something like that, how do those people get involved?’ And I think it’s really not that simple,” she says. “If you are in a moment of change and open to things, it is easy to be taken into something that it seems at first to be about being a better person.
“In the beginning, it all just seems so wonderful, to have all these caring people around you and this amazing community and the ability to give up responsibility of your life, in some ways — for someone else to tell you how you should behave and what you should do.”
The Clearing also gave Otto the chance to be directed by two people close to her — previous collaborator Jeffrey Walker, whom she worked with on the recent fantasy film The Portable Door, and her sister, Gracie Otto (Seriously Red, Heartbreak High).
“With Jeffrey, who set up the show, this is the fourth time I’ve worked with him,” she says. “It was really nice to . . . have someone where I know his style. I know what he wants to do, so you have a sort of shorthand.
“Then having my sister directing was fantastic. She was super-collaborative. Over the weekend, she’d be telling me, this is what she wants to do, she has been to see this location, she’s thinking of doing a shot from above, she wants to get this, that and the other. It was nice that we had that time outside of work, where she’d prepare me.”
Being able to tackle new projects and characters has been a welcome change for Otto, after devoting 2½ years to Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, in which she played Zelda Spellman, the aunt and guardian of Kiernan Shipka’s titular witch, Sabrina.
The aforementioned The Portable Door, also starring Sam Neill, Christoph Waltz and Perth actor Jessica De Gouw, premiered in March. Last year, with another co-star from that project, Sophie Wilde, she shot Talk to Me, a horror film shot in Adelaide, which was picked up at the Sundance Film Festival and comes out in July.
She’s also had a part in Celeste Barber’s new series, Wellmania (“I really admire her, she’s great”).
In 2021, Otto managed to travel to WA with her daughter, spending two weeks in hotel quarantine before travelling to the South West for Cinefest Oz.
“I want to go back to that again . . . we watched so much, so many films,” she says. “It was wonderful.”
Otto has even found time to reprise arguably her most famous role, as Eowyn in the second and third of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films — or at least her voice — by narrating the 2024 anime film, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.
“It’s been a great couple of years in that way for me,” Otto says. “I loved (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina); it was a fantastic family and I love the part but it was a long time to be playing one role. It’s been really nice to skip around and just do a whole lot of different things, where each is completely different to the next.”
The Clearing starts on Disney Plus on May 24