A fan since seeing her perform in theatre many times when he was young, Sting’s director Kiah Roache-Turner rang Nevin to ask her to be in his movie.
“I ended up adoring Roache-Turner,” she says. “He was a completely different kind of human being and director. A huge kind of extrovert, playful, loud, overexcited, the antithesis [of James]. Really knows his stuff. Very focused, but very playful and open to ideas.”
Nevin as Madame Morrible, right, with Liam Head as Fiyero and Courtney Monsma as Glinda in Wicked.Credit: Jeff Busby
Making a horror film is just like making any movie, she says. “Except that there was a giant spider on set. I was introduced to it as an object, just a piece of machinery – and I didn’t like that.” When the film wrapped, the producers – knowing full well about her arachnophobia – sent her a gift: a glass vial filled with about 100 spiders.
Nevin is currently appearing in the stage show Wicked, playing Madame Morrible, and until recently was simultaneously directing Agatha Christie’s classic The Mousetrap. It’s been a hectic schedule: the day we meet is her first day off in three weeks.
While she has always slipped between acting and directing, it happens more seamlessly these days. But they are entirely different experiences, she says.
“They require completely different parts of my personality and brain and everything because acting is so subjective. It’s all about me and how I’m feeling on the day and my energy levels and my relationship with the other actors and my relationship with the role and my relationship with the audiences. But directing, my concern is with absolutely everything: I’m uber responsible.”
She pays credit to her associate director Chris Parker, who was the associate on the first run of this production The Mousetrap last year, for all his work, and to the “lovely cast, they’re gorgeous and very enthusiastic”.
The Mousetrap will open again in Frankston in July, continuing its national tour. Another Agatha Christie may be on the cards, Nevin says.
Nevin is thrilled to see how powerfully the show resonates. A big fan of the classics in theatre, she would like to see more of them produced. “It’s beautifully written and beautifully crafted – and wordy. And so it was wonderful for me to feel big audiences listening because that’s become less and less easy for people to do because they’re required to do it less often.”
Performing in Wicked is fantastic, “just joyous”, and she will appear in the Brisbane run, which is next. “There’s something about being in musical theatre that is so vastly different [to theatre] and gives you so much,” she says.
“The inspiration comes from the scale of the music and the gifts of these extraordinary young people who are so highly technically gifted that the minute they walk in the door on day one, you think ‘You’re the real deal’.”
Wicked is at the Regent Theatre until August 25, The Mousetrap is at Frankston Arts Centre from July 31-August 3, and Sting is out in July. Relic is on Stan, owner of this masthead.