Frankly Speaking With Magda Szubanski

JACKIE FRANK: You so totally become your characters – Sharon Strzelecki [in Kath & Kim], Pixie-Anne Wheatley and Mary McGregor [in Fast Forward], and all the others you’ve played. Do you know how you do it? Make yourself disappear?
MAGDA SZUBANSKI: I’ve got no idea. I couldn’t teach it if my life depended on it. Once you’ve got the wig and the costume on, I just sort of become that person.

JF: Do you spend a lot of time observing people? Mannerisms, speech?
MS: No, I don’t pay attention; [I] just go about my life having fun. I must be absorbing it in the background, but I don’t study people in that way at all.

JF: What role would you like to play?
MS: I’d love to do something really serious that has no comedy in it at all. I don’t know if people can make that leap with me. I could imagine doing something really dark or that stretched me in a really different way.

JF: Gina Riley has said you love to put on a wig and release the beast within.
MS: I suppose what she means is that I go for broke. I don’t hold back. I don’t worry about what I look like. I will just go for whatever is funny, no holds barred, because I think that’s what you’re there to do. You’re there to find the absolute maximum funny, before breaking point, which is when you [the performer] start laughing.

JF: Has that happened to you?
MS: All the time! I’m terrible, absolutely notorious. I think you’ve got to be on that edge to really bring your magic.

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marie claire Publisher Jackie Frank interviews Magda Szubanski in this month's issue of marie claire, on sale now. Photo: marie claire

JF: You’ve spoken about how great you felt when you lost a lot of weight, starting around 2009, but weight has also been a crucial part of who you are as a performer?
vMS:''' Yeah, in the same way that, like, John Cleese uses his long gangly body for the funny walk. I’m used to using my physicality from being overweight. When you’re a performer, your body is really your instrument, so when suddenly you go from being a big bass fiddle to a viola, it’s a really different experience.

JF: At that stage, you became an ambassador, on and off, for Jenny Craig. What kind of pressure is there with something like that?
MS: It’s a lot of pressure, but there’s also a lot of support. And that pressure can be an incentive, too. I don’t regret it in any way because it gave me the first experience in a long while of what it was like to be leaner and fitter. It was tricky, but your life as a celebrity is tricky anyway and, actually, all of life is tricky for everyone. Out of the shadows

JF: We’re always hearing about the “tears of the clown”; the sadness behind the comedy. Judging by your new book, Reckoning: A Memoir, there is quite a lot of darkness there, yes?
MS: There is. I’m two things. I’m like a shy show-off, an introverted extrovert or an intra-extrovert or whatever. But I’ve had periods of time where I’ve been quite depressed, particularly when I was younger [at school] and realising I wasn’t straight; that I was somewhere on the gay spectrum.

JF: Why was that so hard?
MS: Because it was 1972 … 1973, and it was terrifying. The world was so hostile to gay people back then. Being gay was conflated with being a pedophile. We were one of the most vilified groups. It was seen as sociopathic, classified by the psychiatric establishment as a personality disorder, an illness. And it was illegal.

JF: Did you know all of that?
MS: You pick that up. It was communicated throughout the entire culture. In every single film, the gay person was the creepy person who died in some horrible way. Or we were just completely invisible. By the time I was 17, I knew gay people existed, but I had never met one. I felt like I was the only one and it was a really terrifying, isolating experience. So it’s not surprising that I would have a reactive depression.

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Read Jackie's interview with Magda in the current issue of marie claire magazine, on sale now.

JF: What would you say to young people today who are possibly going through that? Or is it different now?
MS: I just want the world to create a space for young people where they can find their real sexuality or gender without pressure from anyone. Allowing people to be their authentic selves is going to cause much less pain and trouble in the world. People create trouble in the world when they are not happy with themselves. But I think we are becoming more sophisticated about that, where people are allowed to just be in a questioning place.

JF: At the Mardi Gras in 2012, the year you publicly came out, you wore a T-shirt with the slogan, ‘If there was a tablet that cured gayness ... I wouldn’t take it.’ Have there been times when you would have taken it, if such a thing existed?
MS: Absolutely. Totally. When I was younger I used to pray to be straight. I was beside myself. Then gradually through the years of therapy – and also the world changing – I started to realise that it’s a great experience of life that I wouldn’t have forgone at all. I wouldn’t wish to be straight now.

JF: Has your love life improved since you came out?
MS: Oh look, you know, my love life is always a sort of … Ha ha! My relationship with the Australian public is better than my love life, than my relationship with a woman! There’s been more interest, but nothing has really fired up at the moment. Single again. Now I’m coming out as single! Family ties

JF: Your 91-year-old mother is Scottish, your late father Polish. In your book you explore his story and about finding out that this guy who used to mow the lawn and do the barbie had a whole other history. Can you give us a potted version?
MS: Basically, during the Second World War in Poland my father fought for the resistance [against the Nazis]. He was recruited at the age of 19 to be a top secret counter intelligence, um, assassin, and his job, along with the rest of his unit, was to execute [Nazi collaborators]. It was very brave work, but full-on.

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JF: How old were you when you found out about that?
MS: I was probably late teens when I said to him, ‘What did you do?’ He sort of laughed it off and said, ‘I was an assassin.’ But you know how it is when you’re that age, you’re kind of listening but not listening, although I knew this was something big.

JF: How did the knowledge affect the way you viewed him?
MS: It changed over time. I had great respect for my father’s courage and his principles. But there were definitely flow-on effects because, even though my father was on the good side, fighting the Nazis, there is no way you can kill a person at close range in cold blood and not be affected by that. So, as a kid, I sort of picked it up in the ether. I could feel the guilt and shame the family carried. Little things would be said every now and then. In order to get through that war, he had to perform a sort of emotional triage [on his feelings] and jettison everything that wasn’t helpful to survival. And it’s like those [repressed] feelings skipped a generation. So things like fear of weakness just sort of poured into me because he had had no time for that. He’d grown up …

JF: Surviving...
MS: Yes, but more than just surviving. Taking action in extremely dangerous circumstances, as did his whole family, including the women. My grandmother, this fat, Polish, middle-class matron, who slept with a folded up Polish flag under her head and a pistol in her pocket, hid Jewish people throughout the war, and Poland was the only country where the Nazis imposed the death sentence for helping a Jew. So they were incredibly brave people.

JF: In your book, you said people always ask you about the inspiration for Sharon and the answer is, “She was born in my broken soul.” Can you explain?
MS: Well, it’s two things; there’s the superficial, which was inspired by that hilarious wig I found in the wig department and the fact that I was playing baseball at the time. So there were those external things. But the deeper vibration that people relate to with Sharon, I think, came about partly because I was working through that stuff – about sexuality and about my father and the legacies of the war. Some very dark stuff. I keep saying the word vibration, but it’s true, the way I emotionally vibrated while I was playing that character. People don’t love Sharon just because she’s funny; they love her because she is also sad and she struggles and she’s the eternal optimist, but she has bass notes of sadness in her.

JF: You had two love hate relationships; one with your father and the other with food. Were they connected?
MS: Totally!

JF: How?
MS: There were moments when I hated my father – who hasn’t hated their father at times? – but I wouldn’t say I had a love-hate relationship with him. I loved him very much. His mother was very overweight. His father was overweight, as well. His sister was a stealth beauty and my father was a little tubby when he was a kid. It was during the war and when he was in the POW [prisoner-of-war] camps that my father lost a lot of weight and he emerged a very handsome man. That was how he understood weight loss, from what he had learnt in the POW camps. You don’t eat. So when I started to fill out a bit, when I hit puberty, he kind of panicked and tried to impart to me what he thought was the right thing and told me to not eat, which God bless him, was one of the worst things he could have said. He was a very disciplined man and that was hard to grow up with, too. I really rebelled against that, even though I wanted to have that sort of self-discipline. So in some ways, my weight was a rebellion. But who knows whether or not it’s also genetic and has been passed down.

JF: You’ve described yourself as a spiritual dabbler and you believe everyone has a different purpose in life. What’s yours?
MS: I think in some ways it’s to bring happiness to people. This woman came up to me the other day when I was in Tasmania and said: "I was in a plane crash, a single-engine plane crash into a mountain and I survived it, and I went through some very dark times after that, and your comedy really got me through." If there is anything I can do to help heal or make someone happy, I love that. I think that’s part of why I’m here. I have an ability to create characters and stories that help shed light on how we operate as human beings and I think it’s my responsibility to share that.

Read Jackie's interview with Magda in the current issue of marie claire magazine, on sale now.