Claudia Karvan: ‘I’m a hashtag lazy girl … It’s a priority I set for myself’

Claudia Karvan OAM has started twerking.

“Dancehall is like this,” hoots the 52-year-old actor, TV producer, gen X golden girl and former Dancing With the Stars contestant, dropping her knees and shaking her behind on a concrete platform.

We’re on a busy section of the suburban Sydney foreshore, with dog walkers and afternoon runners darting past, but Karvan is giving me an unselfconscious demonstration of the many styles of dance she does in her spare time.

Karvan, whose acting career began aged 10 in the film Molly, came to dance in her 40s as rehabilitation for a back injury. Nowadays, as well as Jamaican dancehall, the actor is a student of Afrofusion, Zumba and salsa. She’s also learning classical ballet for a new TV role and is a keen student of Spanish (“I’ve been in the [Duolingo] Diamond League for a long time now,” she boasts). It’s a lot of extracurricular activity for someone who places a high value on downtime. “I’m a hashtag lazy girl,” she says. “It’s a priority I set for myself.”

The actor lives a couple of suburbs away but this strip of the Glebe foreshore, across the bay from the Anzac Bridge, has been her second home for the past five years. As co-creator, producer and co-star of the comedy-drama series Bump, she spent hours here scouting for locations and filming with the multilingual, multigenerational cast. Karvan plays Angie, the mother of studious high school student Oly, whose surprise pregnancy brings an Anglo Australian and South American family together.

“It’s so pretty down here, isn’t it?” she remarks as rowers glide past in Rozelle Bay. “Look at the cox up the front there – my god, that’d be a fun job, wouldn’t it?”

The final season of Bump airs on Boxing Day 2024, marking the end of a period Karvan says saw “big changes” in her personal life – “Different relationships, kids growing up, leaving home,” she says.

Some of these experiences – even verbatim family dialogue – have found their way into the script for Bump but Karvan is circumspect about sharing details.

Karvan has been a familiar face on Australian screens for more than four decades – from idealistic young Greek Australian teacher Christina Papadopoulos in The Heartbreak Kid, to Dr Alex Christensen in flatmates drama The Secret Life of Us, to grieving mother Frankie Paige in the award-sweeping thirtysomething series Love My Way.

But for an actor of her renown, Karvan’s private life has remained relatively free from scrutiny. It’s allowed her a degree of anonymity that she says is “essential” to her wellbeing.

“[I’m] generally not bothered [in public] because a lot of people can’t work out where they know me from, so they think I’m just a very close friend, and that’s pretty nice,” she grins.

“I don’t think I could have coped with any more [fame] than this.”

But at some point, more fame was on the cards. In her early 20s, Karvan spent three months in Los Angeles auditioning for roles and meeting Hollywood casting agents. Cutting your teeth in Hollywood, she says, was “what you were expected to do”.

“All I remember is listening to [Everybody Hurts by REM] about 20 times a day and just crying all the time – just not feeling comfortable. It just wasn’t my city.”

Also, her early work with the likes of Judy Davis and Gillian Armstrong had turned her into a “film snob”.

“I remember reading an action movie [script] and going ‘I’d never go for that’. I don’t think that was an attitude that a 20-year-old was encouraged to have,” she says.

Fortunately for her, Karvan had no shortage of offers in Australia, but when a fresh cohort of talented local female actors began emerging – Rose Byrne, Toni Collette, Cate Blanchett, Jacqueline McKenzie – suddenly those big roles were no longer being handed to her on a platter.

She recalls watching Blanchett in 1995 TV drama Bordertown and thinking: “I wonder if I’ve even got a career left.

“I think it was a bit of a shock because I started [acting] young and I was probably coasting along a bit, so it made me work harder and pull my socks up.”

And she did. Now, as a producer as well as a lead actor, she can set her own ground rules. For one, her Bump character is now in a same-sex relationship. Karvan is done with intimate scenes with men.

“I’ve done them all!” she laughs, reminiscing about her romantic male leads. “I’ve run out!”

They were “all lovely”, however, she says.

“Hugh Jackman probably has to be one of the loveliest men alive,” she says as we walk towards the old railway arches in Federal Park. “Guy Pearce is gorgeous … Samuel Johnson; Vince Colosimo; Ethan Hawke – he’s hilarious company, he’s just got no filter.

“I’ve been very lucky. So yeah, now it’s time to go, ‘OK: now it’s just women. Start picking them off!’”

As Karvan laughs, and divulges details of her on-screen love life, including “the most awkward kiss I’ve ever had to do on television” (with her real-life best friend Catherine McClements), it feels as though you’re being drawn into the confidence of a friend.

We walk on and Karvan points out landmarks – a house refurbished with old railway sleepers; a spot in the park where she filmed a sex scene in a tent – like they are objects in her own home. When we reach Bicentennial Park, she guides me with the reverence of someone about to enter a cathedral, over the damp foliage and beneath the mighty branches of a 130-year-old Moreton Bay fig. “It’s got an incredible energy,” she says, gazing up at the late-afternoon sun glowing through the canopy. “[These trees are] really magical. They fill you with a sense of awe.”

Here is Earth Mother Claudia: serene, connected, mystical.

***

Another reason Karvan didn’t follow her contemporaries to Hollywood was love. By 22 she was in a relationship with Sydney-based film set constructor turned event engineer Jeremy Sparks and stepmother to his four-year-old daughter. Even at that age, Karvan understood the importance of being a dependable presence. The couple went on to have two children – Audrey, 23, a fledgling producer who is about to go travelling, and Albee, 18, who lives with his mum half the time and works with his father. (The pair split in 2017 but remain close.)

Karvan was determined her kids’ childhood be as conventional and stable as hers was not. The actor grew up down the road from Kings Cross, where her mother, Gabrielle Goddard, and her stepfather, Arthur Karvan, ran a nightclub. When she was eight, her mother relocated the three children to Bali for a year. Meanwhile, her biological father, Peter Robins, struggled with schizoaffective disorder, and Karvan’s older brother, Rupert, was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Related: Three things with Claudia Karvan: ‘He painted a spontaneous nude of me on a baker’s tray’

“The thing I’m most proud of is that I didn’t have to leave home,” she says of her career as we amble back over the bridge crossing Johnstons Creek. “I got to work in my own city in quite a small industry on global terms – I didn’t have to travel that much for work, and it meant my kids got to have their lives on their own terms and we were able to have a very consistent, reliable family life when in this sort of career it’s not always possible.”

One memory from her own childhood has stuck with Karvan and fostered in her an enduring fascination with death. As an eight-year-old in Bali, Karvan recalls seeing bodies burning in funeral pyres on the beach – a graphic introduction to the cycle of life. And at 21 she began the practice of visualising her own death every day after reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. As Angie’s breast cancer returns in season five of Bump, Karvan’s character must reckon with her mortality even as her daughter prepares to welcome her second child.

“I’d never ever had a role where I have to go through all of the motions [of facing death], and to be honest I probably wouldn’t do it again. I found it surprisingly disturbing,” she says.

“It just sort of crept up on me and I felt bereft – just very empty and very vulnerable.”

This vulnerability led Karvan to the work of Zenith Virago, a “mind-blowing” death doula who was an adviser and guide on the set of Bump. The actor wants to face her discomfort head-on and has signed up for one of Virago’s “deathwalker workshops” in the new year.

She hopes the new Bump storyline, and the “nuanced and very empowering way” they have managed it, will “encourage people to have conversations that they’ve been putting off”. So that others can face the discomfort, too.

She smiles: “It’s a community service.”

• Bump season five is on Stan in Australia from 26 December 2024. Claudia Karvan also co-hosts Great Australian Road Trips on SBS in 2025