“I’m someone who likes to do all the hard yards myself and it’s been quite tough at times this week, with the heatwave.
“There are moments on the train when my [10-year-old] son, Solal, looks at me and says, ‘Mum, you need a husband and a nanny.’”
Melissa George plays Mia, a suburban mum who unintentionally crosses a “501” career criminal, played by Jonno Roberts.
George turned 50 on Thursday, celebrating her birthday at Le Grand Colbert, the famous Belle Epoque brasserie where Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton filmed the restaurant scene in Something’s Gotta Give.
Right from the start, she’s had a reputation for doing things her own way. At 16, she left her family home in Perth for Sydney, joining the cast of Aussie soap Home and Away as Angel Parrish, a young runaway.
Since then, she’s worked with some of Hollywood’s leading directors (Mulholland Drive with David Lynch) and appeared on a string of top-rating TV shows (Grey’s Anatomy, Friends, The Slap).
A former teen model and national roller-skating champion, she did a cover shoot with Australian Playboy and was the face of L’Oreal for the Melbourne Fashion Festival.
Over the past three decades, she’s had a string of film and TV roles, walking the red carpet at Cannes with legendary French actress Catherine Deneuve, her co-star in the 2021 film De Son Vivant.
Hannah Marshall and David de Lautour, husband-and-wife co-creators of Three’s new six-part dramedy series Ms. X.
When her agent sent the script for Ms. X last year, George had just given birth to her third son, Lyor. She read the first episode at a train station in Paris.
“I loved it so much I missed my train, and there’s only one train a day,” she says. “I’m thinking, oh boy, this is so good. I guess I’ll be going to New Zealand.”
Created by husband-and-wife team Hannah Marshall and David de Lautour (who played Ted West in Westside), the six-part series began screening on Three this week.
A darkly comic collision between suburbia and the criminal underworld, it’s an absolute gem that’s already been picked up in the US, Germany, Netherlands and Australia. Funding for a second season was announced by NZ on Air this week.
The stellar supporting cast includes Robbie Magasiva as a criminal kingpin, Oscar Kightley as a melancholy detective whose daughter died of a drug overdose, Simone Kessell as a bad-ass rich girl, and Antonia Prebble as the PTA’s Queen Bee who serves up lines of cocaine on a silver platter as adult “party favours”.
Dean O’Gorman and Melissa George play oddball partners-in-crime in Ms. X, but with no hanky panky.
But it’s George and her hapless on-screen sidekick, a hilarious Dean O’Gorman in shaggy-dog mode, that makes the show sing. And there’s a great girl fight at the end.
Mia is an earnest stay-at-home mother with a bob cut and a couple of troublesome teens. Suspecting her husband is having an affair, she hires Oscar, an old school friend, to snoop around.
In the killings and chaos that ensue, the pair find themselves caught between the cops and a drug cartel – and Mia slowly discovers she’s better at this gangland gig than it might seem (even if she does forget she has 600kg of cocaine in the back of her van).
The relationship between Mia and Oscar was originally written as a romance, but stepping that back was a masterstroke that allows the story to breathe.
George, who was also brought on as producer, met O’Gorman for the first time on camera for a chemistry read. Their rapport was instant.
“It’s magical when that happens because you can’t ask for it, you can only hope for it,” she says, dissolving in laughter as she recounts some of her favourite scenes from the show.
“Here’s this guy who makes everything go so wrong, but they can’t get through the day without each other. It’s beautiful.
“After we finished filming, I came back home and thought, why don’t they have a French version of Dean? He’d be the catch of the century.”
Tavita (Robbie Magasiva) and Saskia (Simone Kessell) form an unstable alliance.
George hired a Kiwi nanny to help look after baby Lyor during the four-month shoot in Auckland and commuted long-haul back to Paris, where her two older boys, Solal and Raphael, were in school.
Their father is French entrepreneur Jean David Blanc (son of the famous violinist Serge Blanc), who has shared custody since his bitter split with George in 2016. The two boys cannot be taken out of the country without his written consent.
Unable to return to Australia permanently with her children, George has carved out a career that’s required a level of compromise and sacrifice.
In 2019, she was offered the lead role of Margot Fox, opposite Justin Theroux, in US drama series The Mosquito Coast. Its two seasons were filmed on location in Mexico.
“That was a big, life-changing role,” says George, who talked it through with her boys first. “I’m very happy to be a mum; it gives me a lot of joy. But it’s good to show the kids that you have to work, you know?
“They love the fact that I’m happy when I’m working. I’m somebody that likes to be needed. And the more I feel personally and professionally successful at the same time, that’s when I thrive.”
Bridget (Antonia Prebble) serves up cocaine at her house party to Ricky, a local real estate agent (Niwa Whatuira).
George had filmed in New Zealand once before, opposite Josh Hartnett in the 2007 US horror 30 Days of Night, with Central Otago standing in for a town in Alaska attacked by zombies.
So, returning for Ms. X was a kind of homecoming. She felt on safe and weirdly familiar territory here.
She took Lyor for walks on the beach and to Māori cultural classes where they sang waiata. Her best friend visited from Paris and her mother flew from Australia to meet her new grandson.
After spending so many years living in big cities – New York, Buenos Aires, Paris – she was happy to immerse herself in suburbia for a while. “It actually gave me a sense of peace.”
She will return to Auckland early next year for the second season of Ms. X. In the meantime, she’s mulling over the offer of a film in Australia and another project in the south of France.
Not that George is one for relaxing in her downtime, always having a side gig on the go.
In 2008, she invented Style Snaps, a clever device that temporarily alters the hem of your trousers – inspired by a pair of Balenciaga dress pants she wanted to wear long with heels and short with flats when she was out walking the dog. Around 12 million units have been sold.
In France, she’s teamed up with a good friend who’s an architect to do high-end makeovers of apartments, houses and chateaux.
Her own holiday home, a 15th-century property surrounded by lavender in the south of France, was recently featured in a 12-page spread in the New York Times.
You get the sense she likes to push back against the formality of life in France, with her spiky Australian sense of humour and dislike for conformity.
When De Son Vivant premiered in 2021, George bundled her two kids and two cats into the car and drove to Cannes in an old Landrover that didn’t fit down the narrow, cobbled streets. No wonder they looked at her sideways when she arrived at the hotel.
That night, she walked the red carpet with Deneuve, wearing an outfit made for her by Giorgio Armani’s luxury Armani Prive line.
“That was a moment come true,” she says.
The cats, a rare Persian breed from Mexico, stayed in her room.
Ms. X screens on Mondays at 8.30pm and can be streamed on ThreeNow.
Joanna Wane is a senior lifestyle writer with an interest in social issues and the arts.