Every great actor has a means of telling us something more, a touch that takes the implicit to the explicit without resorting to easy explanation. With Asher Keddie, it’s the moment of surprise. Looking back through the Australian actor’s body of work, which has steadily been accumulating calling cards, there’s often an instant where Keddie’s character is caught off guard. She has a mellifluous “oh”, one that ends in a note of uncertainty, but in her eyes is a sense of realisation. Something has changed.

When Keddie is caught out she catches on. It makes sense in the syntax of the comic-drama, which is where Keddie’s breakthrough role in Network Ten’s Offspring resided. Embarrassment can be funny and illuminating. But Keddie has instinctively taken it further. As her comic roles have found a harder edge and the dramatic pieces have started to provide a sterner accompaniment, Keddie has made that moment where awkwardness can become painfully telling a trademark. It’s there in Fake, the recent Paramount+ drama where she gives a masterful performance.

Keddie, who recently turned 50, went from working actor to star when Offspring debuted in 2010. In the years afterwards, as audiences delighted in the travails of Melbourne obstetrician Nina Proudman, she won so many Logies, including the Gold in 2013, that her mantelpiece probably needed buttressing. That’s the short game of success, but Keddie has played the long one as well. The breadth of her roles, and the depths she’s found in them, has been exemplary. Keddie is red-carpet famous, but at this point her craft is actually underrated.

To a degree, that stems from Keddie staying put. Any Australian actor who can attach Hollywood to their career automatically gets a glow-up in the public’s eye – our national pride produces overt praise. But as with Claudia Karvan, with whom Keddie co-starred in the influential Australian drama Love My Way between 2004 and 2007, building a body of work in Australia allows you to have a surreptitious conversation with a national audience, to hit the high and low notes in a collective psyche.

Keddie has a comedian’s instincts, and the romantic comedy comes easily to her. The odd early headline part may have leant too heavily into this, but in turn some of Keddie’s nominally lighter roles now have a sharp edge. I thought she was a revelation in Binge’s Strife, the anxious career woman comedy-drama from last year. As media commentator Evelyn Jones, Keddie is playing someone who can’t pull off the work-family balance. She finds fulfilment in her women’s website and frustration in her husband raising their family.

Evelyn’s missteps as a school sports mum are amusing, but both Keddie and Sarah Scheller’s show are serious about depicting a woman who isn’t defined by motherhood. Evelyn wrestles with this in fundamental ways, and while she also has to grovel to Dannii Minogue in a genuinely funny piece of celebrity casting, the show has painful parameters. One of the criticisms Strife received was the old bugbear that Evelyn wasn’t likable, but to me that was the point being made. Evelyn had accepted that; so should the audience.

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Keddie isn’t afraid to engage with unease. The 2020 ABC series Stateless (now streaming on Netflix) remains a telling indictment of this country’s obsession with border protection, but the performance I think about, alongside the first-rate work by Yvonne Strahovski, Fayssal Bazzi, and Cate Blanchett, is Keddie’s supporting part as Clare Kowitz. A diligent Immigration Department bureaucrat assigned to an outback detention centre, she’s an executive forced to acknowledge that she’s become the commander of a prison camp. It is, like the facility itself, uncompromisingly absurd, and Keddie captures a life buckling.