\u201cI\u2019m someone who likes to do all the hard yards myself and it\u2019s been quite tough at times this week, with the heatwave.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are moments on the train when my [10-year-old] son, Solal, looks at me and says, \u2018Mum, you need a husband and a nanny.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Melissa George plays Mia, a suburban mum who unintentionally crosses a “501” career criminal, played by Jonno Roberts. <\/p>\n
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\u2019s Gotta Give.<\/p>\n
Right from the start, she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Since then, she\u2019s worked with some of Hollywood\u2019s leading directors (Mulholland Drive with David Lynch) and appeared on a string of top-rating TV shows (Grey\u2019s Anatomy, Friends, The Slap).<\/p>\n
A former teen model and national roller-skating champion, she did a cover shoot with Australian Playboy and was the face of L\u2019Oreal for the Melbourne Fashion Festival. <\/p>\n
Over the past three decades, she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Hannah Marshall and David de Lautour, husband-and-wife co-creators of Three’s new six-part dramedy series Ms. X.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
\u201cI loved it so much I missed my train, and there\u2019s only one train a day,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m thinking, oh boy, this is so good. I guess I\u2019ll be going to New Zealand.\u201d <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
A darkly comic collision between suburbia and the criminal underworld, it\u2019s an absolute gem that\u2019s already been picked up in the US, Germany, Netherlands and Australia. Funding for a second season was announced by NZ on Air this week.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Queen Bee who serves up lines of cocaine on a silver platter as adult \u201cparty favours\u201d.<\/p>\n
Dean O’Gorman and Melissa George play oddball partners-in-crime in Ms. X, but with no hanky panky.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s George and her hapless on-screen sidekick, a hilarious Dean O\u2019Gorman in shaggy-dog mode, that makes the show sing. And there\u2019s a great girl fight at the end.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In the killings and chaos that ensue, the pair find themselves caught between the cops and a drug cartel \u2013 and Mia slowly discovers she\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
George, who was also brought on as producer, met O\u2019Gorman for the first time on camera for a chemistry read. Their rapport was instant.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s magical when that happens because you can\u2019t ask for it, you can only hope for it,\u201d she says, dissolving in laughter as she recounts some of her favourite scenes from the show.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere\u2019s this guy who makes everything go so wrong, but they can\u2019t get through the day without each other. It\u2019s beautiful.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter we finished filming, I came back home and thought, why don\u2019t they have a French version of Dean? He\u2019d be the catch of the century.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tavita (Robbie Magasiva) and Saskia (Simone Kessell) form an unstable alliance.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Unable to return to Australia permanently with her children, George has carved out a career that\u2019s required a level of compromise and sacrifice.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat was a big, life-changing role,\u201d says George, who talked it through with her boys first. \u201cI\u2019m very happy to be a mum; it gives me a lot of joy. But it\u2019s good to show the kids that you have to work, you know?<\/p>\n
\u201cThey love the fact that I\u2019m happy when I\u2019m working. I\u2019m somebody that likes to be needed. And the more I feel personally and professionally successful at the same time, that\u2019s when I thrive.\u201d <\/p>\n
Bridget (Antonia Prebble) serves up cocaine at her house party to Ricky, a local real estate agent (Niwa Whatuira).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So, returning for Ms. X was a kind of homecoming. She felt on safe and weirdly familiar territory here. <\/p>\n
She took Lyor for walks on the beach and to M\u0101ori cultural classes where they sang waiata. Her best friend visited from Paris and her mother flew from Australia to meet her new grandson.<\/p>\n
After spending so many years living in big cities \u2013 New York, Buenos Aires, Paris \u2013 she was happy to immerse herself in suburbia for a while. \u201cIt actually gave me a sense of peace.\u201d<\/p>\n
She will return to Auckland early next year for the second season of Ms. X. In the meantime, she\u2019s mulling over the offer of a film in Australia and another project in the south of France.<\/p>\n
Not that George is one for relaxing in her downtime, always having a side gig on the go. <\/p>\n
In 2008, she invented Style Snaps, a clever device that temporarily alters the hem of your trousers \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
In France, she\u2019s teamed up with a good friend who\u2019s an architect to do high-end makeovers of apartments, houses and chateaux. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t fit down the narrow, cobbled streets. No wonder they looked at her sideways when she arrived at the hotel.<\/p>\n
That night, she walked the red carpet with Deneuve, wearing an outfit made for her by Giorgio Armani\u2019s luxury Armani Prive line. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat was a moment come true,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n
The cats, a rare Persian breed from Mexico, stayed in her room.<\/p>\n
Ms. X screens on Mondays at 8.30pm and can be streamed on ThreeNow.<\/p>\n
Joanna Wane is a senior lifestyle writer with an interest in social issues and the arts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI\u2019m someone who likes to do all the hard yards myself and it\u2019s been quite tough at times…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":563205,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[28179,3376,51,1863,15435,276980,6147,5136,156,2082,12856,51584,78,51670,74216,12779,19033,117,111,139,69,6943,276981,14232,1305,4743,40749,8475,11790,10376,80],"class_list":["post-563204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-genre","tag-actor","tag-auckland","tag-back","tag-bad","tag-comedycrime","tag-crime","tag-drama","tag-entertainment","tag-for","tag-george","tag-hot","tag-in","tag-lured","tag-melissa","tag-mom","tag-ms","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-paris","tag-parisbased","tag-redefines","tag-show","tag-spree","tag-swaps","tag-thats","tag-threes","tag-x","tag-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/563205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}