Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.May, 2024: I watch a preview of episode one of Fake with my mother while eating a home-made TV dinner of Cantonese shrimp and egg stir-fry. On my laptop, Joe and Birdie are on their first date. “What would you do if money were no issue?” my ex, Joe*, aka David Wenham, asks me, aka Asher Keddie. She would, she says, “write a book”. I sob. This wasn’t a book I ever wanted to write.
Briefly, Leacey joins Banks, Beyersdorf and me at “the split” – a monitor allowing crew to see what the camera is shooting. Leacey wants to know how I’m feeling about an idea that’s been floated – for me to have a cameo role in a scene to be shot tomorrow at the offices of the magazine where Birdie works. “How close do you want to be on screen, do you want to be recognised, do you want to be next to Joe?” she says.
After my book was released in mid-2019, I signed over the “option” to Imogen Banks, then head of drama at Endemol Shine Banks, her own division of the production company Endemol Shine. My literary agent counselled I should not get my hopes up – any number of books are optioned, few become film or television.In 2020, I got a pandemic puppy. In the dog park near my home in Sydney’s inner-south, Lola romped with Daisy and Frankie and Sandy. With their humans, I talked about puppies, life, work.
I ask her if she’s tired after the 12-week shoot; she’s in almost every scene and, as a co-producer, also watches rushes and is involved in any number of other decisions. “I’m spinning at the moment a little bit ... I’ve got kids and all sorts of other stuff as well, so it’s been a rigorous shoot.
Between takes of Birdie’s pub scene today, I tell Leacey I found it challenging to read the scripts – and not just because it was my story, but not-my-story. As I know now, a script is a one-dimensional view of a multi-dimensional, as-yet-unrealised work of art. Leacey shares with me an aphorism: “So a writer puts, ‘The army assembles at dawn,’ ” she says. “The logistics people go, ‘It’s just that bit of the page, we’ll be done in an hour.