Christie Whelan Browne: ‘Words are so dangerous … I’ll be sure to tell my son that’
As we walk past the Ornamental Lake in Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Christie Whelan Browne confesses she has become obsessed with ducks. It’s the fact their legs may be paddling furiously below but they’re keeping their cool up top. “I’m trying to be more like that,” she says.
Whelan Browne is gamely speed-walking in the rain that has besieged us, occasionally sheltering under a generous canopy. It’s jacaranda season, so the open spaces explode with purple. We take a moment under the giant Montezuma cypress, whose bark seems to contain universes. Whelan Browne posts a photo to her Instagram stories.
Pre-baby (son Duke is three), she used to grab a coffee with a friend and walk The Tan track that circles the gardens. These days it tends to be a quick blast around her inner-north neighbourhood. “I listen to a lot of female chat podcasts where women are just talking to each other,” she says. “I get to feel like I’m having a social life with these women in my ears.”
Life, for Whelan Browne, is a balancing act. While managing their preschooler, her husband Rohan Browne is playing Lumière in the stage adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. Meanwhile, her own one-woman cabaret show, Life in Plastic, appears at Sydney festival in January, after stints in Melbourne and Adelaide. Written by Sheridan Harbridge, it draws on Whelan Browne’s complex relationship with her body throughout her life, with the help of a talking Barbie doll.
But hang on. As backhanded Barbie says, “You’re pretty enough to be in a Qantas safety video!” So why is an actress who has enjoyed a career in top musicals, plays and TV shows having an existential crisis about her looks?
“Oh absolutely,” Whelan Browne says. “‘Oh waah, you felt ugly!’” In the grand scheme of things, it is not a great tragedy. “Who cares? But it’s something I felt that was worth talking about, because there’s also a line in there, ‘Like all normal women, I hate myself.’
“Thinking that I had to be perfect was always such a big problem for me.”
Life in Plastic holds up a mirror to such self-loathing. Barbie, while perky, acts as Whelan Browne’s critic (“Isn’t cabaret what actors do when they stop getting jobs?”). It’s hard to gauge whether this critic is internal or external, since over the past six years the lines have blurred.
Until September this year, Whelan Browne was tied up in legal clashes, first with Craig McLachlan, who she appeared alongside in The Rocky Horror Show and who she and other actors accused of sexual harassment, and then with the theatre company, Oldfield Entertainment. McLachlan was acquitted of assaulting his co-stars in 2020, and this year Whelan Browne settled her sexual harassment lawsuit against the theatre company. McLachlan denies the allegations.
At the moment, my main struggle in life is perimenopause. That is an absolute monster
That’s finally over, but the claims made about her character, both in court and in the media, have ganged up in her head along with the “ugly” taunts from boys at school. Then there was the boyfriend who told her she was “$10,000 away from being perfect”. Even now, she scans the pictures of other actors, wondering who has had surgery.
“I just think words are so, so dangerous.” she says “And I’ll be sure to tell my son that.”
Being in the business of comparison doesn’t help. After she had Duke, if she didn’t get a role she’d think, I bet it was because I’d put on weight. Or, maybe I wasn’t beautiful enough.
“In your 40s, it becomes less attractive, hunting, begging for a job. It’s like, this isn’t funny any more, but by then, it’s the only thing you know how to do. I’ve never been an academic person, but somehow, I just always understood stagecraft.”
Whelan Browne grew up in Eltham in Melbourne’s north-east.
At school, she was front and centre in every musical. “I was always competitive. I played basketball for Victoria, and I see my son now at his sports class on a Sunday and he’s running with his elbows out, he wants to win,” she says. “I was like that.”
We pause in Fern Gully for some drizzly photographs; no mean feat when you’re trying to maintain perfection. Strands of her hair came out when she was styling it that morning, a symptom of perimenopause that she turns to TikTok women to learn more about.
“At the moment, my main struggle in life is perimenopause. That is an absolute monster. But I love that so many people are talking about it now.”
Actually, perimenopause is just the latest dragon to fight, because as Whelan Browne says, “It feels like I’ve gone from one battle to another.” For most of her career she’s worked while enduring chronic, invisible pain.
First, there was the endometriosis which she struggled with for 10 years. Then it morphed into adenomyosis after she had Duke. “That’s where the endometriosis, after you have a baby, crawls into the uterus. It feels like I’ve gone from one battle to another, but I really love talking about it on stage. It’s a very lonely, horrible experience, and so talking about it feels like a community service.”
In 2003, aged 21, she was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, the catalyst of which she thinks was a UTI. She’d thrown herself into amateur theatre work and now her blood tests were revealing there was nothing left in the tank. “I didn’t get out of bed for about 18 months,” she says. But if there’s one trait that defines Whelan Browne, it’s stubbornness.
A year or so later she was performing in a shopping centre when she got the call that she’d been accepted for the role of cheerleader Patty in Grease: The Arena Spectacular. It would launch her professional career.
In 2008, she won Sydney theatre awards’ best newcomer for her role in Company. In 2009, she gave a one-woman performance in Britney Spears: The Cabaret, which she reprises from time to time. The way the audience receives the show has changed dramatically over the years, she says, as we have come to better understand the damage wrought by celebrity culture.
“When we first did it, people just laughed their heads off, even when I talked about all the terrible things. Now when we perform it in 2024, no one’s laughing any more.”
One person who understands the pressures of the industry is her husband. The pair first started talking on Facebook, where they had about 150 mutual friends.
“Same friends, same birthday, same industry,” she says. “I wrote him a message and said, ‘It seems like we should have met.’ He was in China at the time, so we just were pen pals for two months and I would wake up every day waiting for his message. Sometimes he’d really leave me hanging, you know, I’d see the bubbles.”
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When the couple tried for a baby, they had to turn to IVF. It was a bittersweet experience. “At the very first meeting it’s a discussion around money. ‘Can you afford this?’” she says. “And the worst part is that when it doesn’t work and you get your period, you have to then call to book in a new cycle. So not only is it heartbreaking, but then you’ve got to pay $10,000. It’s just brutal.”
Throughout the process, she kept a journal, which she drew on for the show.
“When I read it again for the first time, I was like, fuck, I didn’t even remember any of this. And when Rohan first saw the show, he cried, because he was remembering as well,” she says. “Like a lot of traumas, time heals and you move on. But I do consider it a trauma.”
We stop for a moment at a cluster of bamboo into which hundreds of young lovers have etched their initials, prompting the erection of a sign pleading clemency. By now it’s bucketing, so we take refuge in The Terrace cafe.
Whelan Browne is still writing everything down. Not quite a memoir, but stories about her life. When she was sued by McLachlan for defamation (he later dropped the case), she relied on her husband, family and friends to remind her that she wasn’t “who they were saying I was”.
“I’d go to therapy every week and I’d do the work,” she says, “because I just refused for this to define my future, or to mess me up or break me. I have a three-year-old to look after; I can’t be crying in my bed and wondering ‘who am I’?”
At the end of Life in Plastic, Whelan Browne brings a large inflatable penis on stage and drop-kicks it into the audience. “That was Sheridan’s idea, to reclaim a time of my life where a photo of me with a hen party penis was used to say that I was a person of bad character,” she says. “I invite the audience to take pictures. It’s ridiculous, but it’s fun. It feels like reclaiming a part of myself.”
Life in Plastic features as part of the Sydney festival on 14 January 2025.
