Melinda Houston                                                                            

The Age (Melbourne) Magazine

June 2009 edition

Lisa McCune on juggling two careers, three kids...and staying sane.

There's more to Lisa McCune than meets the eyes, writes Melinda Houston.

LISA MCCUNE FLOATS into the St Kilda cafe still in the creamy satin ballgown she wore for today's photo shoot.  “Darling, I'm exhausted!” she exclaims, sinking into a booth.  She adjusts her skirts, glancing around.  “And I am gasping for some champers!   Do you think this place serves decent bubbles?”  The other diners turn to stare...

No.  Not really.  She's in jeans and a cardi, eating toast and jam.  But “Make me sound interesting!” were her parting words.  And one of Lisa McCune's defining characteristics is the way her low-key eagerness to please prompts a similar response in the people around her.  Likeability has been McCune's stock in trade for 15 years now, garnering her steady work, 10 (count 'em!) Logies and a legion of loyal fans within the industry and without.  And it'll be a useful quality as the actor moves into the next phase of her career, as a producer.

At 38, with two long-running hit television series and a number of successful stage productions under her (size-XXS) belt, McCune is ready for a new challenge.  “I've been talking about doing some producing, and I've actually just optioned (bought the rights to) my first book,” she says.  “Christine Harris's Outback: The Diary of Jimmy Porter.  I've attached myself to one of the producers from Blue Heelers (Gus Howard) and he's kind of allowing me to be his work experience kid.”

McCune has always had an interest in what goes on behind the camera, and has an on-set reputation as a great asker of questions.  “There's such an art in filming drama.  The way you can manipulate the story, the way you can tell a story, there are a million ways of doing it.  I find the possibilities exciting.  And there are so many stories to tell.”

She also loves the idea of parlaying her own successes into opportunities for others.  “As a performer, I've never blown my own trumpet, but I feel if I can provide a platform for other performers and do good work then I will be blowing my own trumpet,” she says.  “I think that would be something to be incredibly proud of.”

Acting, although she loves it, is essentially being someone else's puppet, as she puts it.  “But to be creatively involved in putting something on the screen that will be enjoyed by an audience?  That's a very exciting idea.”

“I can imagine few people who will succeed as well as her, because what she does have is resilience and perseverance,” says veteran producer Hal McElroy, who originally cast McCune in Blue Heelers and now works with her on Nine's Sea Patrol.  “A lot of energy.  Discipline.  Focus.  And she's very empathetic.  Very easy to talk to, a good listener.  All those qualities that are essential to creative collaboration.  And she is creative.”  McElroy also admits, though, that producing is a rocky road.  McCune will inevitably make her own mistakes.

“It is rarely truly enjoyable,” he says.  “The emotion you look for is relief.  You rarely have a moment of triumph.  And if you do it's almost always overshadowed by something.  If you win a prize, everyone else in the room hates you.  That's where her inner strength is going to be terrific.”  The other quality he thinks will stand her in good stead is being just the tiniest bit of a control freak.

“Oh, I am!” McCune laughs.  “Maybe I picked that up from Hal.  But I have had to be.”  In the past six months, she's spent 16 weeks filming the third series of Sea Patrol, then three months performing eight times a week in Guys and Dolls, as well as being mother to three children under nine (Archer, 8; Oliver 5; and Remy, 3) and finding time for husband Tim Disney.  “For things to run smoothly you have to keep control or someone gets let down,” she says.  And in McCune-world, letting people down is not an option.  “I have to be organised.  Because the little things add up to big things.”

McCune is a bit one for attention to detail, for taking care of the little things.  And it's the little things that make her interesting. She has the reputation of being a bit of a Miss Perfect, and it's certainly difficult to find anyone to say a bad word about her.  But that fragile frame contains the restless energy, enthusiasm, intelligence, ambition, and impatience of a much larger person.  And, like the rest of us, she has the usual quota of human foibles.

Like 90 per cent of new mums, she freely admits that the first two years of motherhood were “joyous, of course, but also horrific”.  She's a great people person, but not keen on being alone:  when she is, she'll have the telly on in the background, “for company”.  She hates hearing the sound of her own voice on tape, and has mixed feelings about seeing her own work in the editing suite.  “Although, I must say, on television you don't have a lot of time to look back at it.”  She loves girly accoutrements (“That's why I love hanging out with Marina Prior. She has all that sort of stuff, the frocks, the perfume”) and had her Logies dress (by Tea Rose, very girly) sorted a month in advance.  When she's sad, she eats to cheer herself up (she loves to cook and Gourmet Traveller is a favourite read).  She can't resist reading her own reviews, but when they're bad (like when one Age critic described her performance in Cabaret as “eerily unerotic”) she feels it.  She likes to be liked.  Most of all she likes to be doing, to be involved.  During the photo shoot, she's no mannequin.  She moves both according to direction and her own ideas of what might look good, and when she's done she leaps up and peers eagerly at the images.  “That's a nice one!” she exclaims, pleased she's done her job well, not let anyone down.

McElroy says McCune would be the one to step into a bar brawl and tell everyone to just take a breath.  She can't see a problem without wanting to solve it.  (Over coffee, McCune asks if I take sugar and when I say yes, actually spoons it into my cup for me.)

Long-time friend Lara Mulcahy was on the phone to McCune recently, in a flap because her car battery was flat and she needed to get to a show in which she was performing.  “She says, 'Oh darling, you're never going to get a cab on a Friday night.  Hold on, and I'll call you right back',” Mulcahy says.  “Ten minutes later, she calls back and says she's found a limousine service that can be at my house in 15 minutes.  I was like, 'Aren't you supposed to be warming up for your own show?'  But that's typical Lisa.  She hasn't changed in 20 years.”

Mulcahy and McCune both grew up in Perth and were students together, first as kids at the local dance school (“Lots of Village People routines, with a bit of My Fair Lady,” Mulcahy says) and then at WAAPA, the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, where the only thing that distinguished McCune from her peers, according to Mulcahy, was her diligence.  And typically, the only time Mulcahy can remember them getting into trouble was for laughing too loudly.  Indeed, it probably says more about the industry she works in than the person, that McCune should be remarkable simply for being pleasant, professional and pragmatic.

In McCune-world, it's normal to say please and thank you, to smile at strangers, to let the elderly person or the heavily pregnant woman in front of you in the queue.  To turn up on time for work, prepared.  And to not complain or make a fuss unless something's really worth making a fuss about.  And then to make a full calmly and rationally.

As McCune says, these are pretty basic things.  We're not talking Mother Teresa.  “How hard is it to just be nice to people? I don't get that.  It's all just the simple stuff you're taught as a kid,” she says.  Her impulses are not necessarily even about being a good person.  It's just about keeping life simple.  “Maybe it's denial but by keeping busy, you don't have the time to sit and ponder the negative.  I think you need quiet and rest but I sometimes think you can manifest problems when you don't have enough to occupy yourself.  So I just keep myself busy.  I try to have respect for others.  The idea of being embroiled in arguments, I hate that.  When you do something good for someone else, it makes you feel great.  My life's easy because of that.”

Of course, McCune's idea of an easy life isn't everybody's.  She maintains a punishing schedule.  On Sea Patrol, she'd be up at 4.30am, at work by 5am, home by 6pm in time to feed the kids (the family moves to Queensland's Mission Beach for the duration), bath, bed and story time.  Then it's learning lines before her own bedtime, and up again pre-dawn again the next day, six days a week.

She is helped, greatly, by her husband of 10 years, Tim Disney, a film technician she met on the set of Heelers and whom she clearly adores.  “I just – love everything about him!” she says.  “He's really good-looking.  He's incredibly capable.  The first thing he ever gave me as a gift was a drill and I just went, 'You are the man for me!'  He really digs me.”  Her colour rises.  She's blushing.  “He really digs me.  I just think he's really cool.”

During long days on set or when McCune is out of town (as she has been recently, in Sydney with Guys and Dolls).  Disney is the house-husband, taking care of the day-to-day child wrangling.  But between jobs (as even successful actors inevitably are) McCune is relishing motherhood.

“I don't remember that much about life before kids, to be honest.  From the age of 30 onwards, that's my life, that's the now for me,” she says.  “I did wish away the first couple of years because it's just so hard, it's such an onslaught when it first happens.  But I'm better for having children. You just can't think about yourself.”  Because, clearly, vanity, ego and self-absorption would otherwise have become major problems for her.  

Her birthday this year was spent at home with Tim and the kids, having dinner and playing Monopoly.  And despite, the success of both Guys and Dolls and Sea Patrol, she counts having the youngest out of nappies as the real highlight of recent years.  Winning 10 Logies is all very well.  But for serious triumph?  “Oh, the nappies.  The nappies!  It's a pretty big thing.  And it's saving us a fortune.” (In another homely touch, as the family grew they couldn't afford to buy in their old haunt, St Kilda, and have now settled further out along the bay.)



BUT BEING NICE and ordinary does have its downside.  Many who have worked with McCune suggest being pleasant and reliable has led to her being underrated.  McCune tends to agree.  “I think that's true.  Absolutely.  And people like to pigeonhole me.”  But being difficult is just not an option.  “I can't be bothered holding everybody up just to make me look more important, to make everybody look at me.  If someone pushed me the wrong way I would let them know it's not appropriate.  But I don't think being an actor gives you an excuse to be an arsehole.”  (Although, she admits, without naming names, that watching an actor being an arsehole can be quite titillating.)

Des Monaghan, now head of production company Screentime but previously Seven's head of production and program development, first saw McCune in her WAAPA graduation production, and was instantly struck.  Not just because she was pretty and talented, but because she had that elusive X-factor.  “It's a strange chemical process.  Some people just register on camera.  Most don't,” he says.

He worked with her closely during the production of The Potato Factory and remembers most her professionalism.  “She's very calm, a very positive influence on everybody else,” he says.  “And that's a big thing when you're trying to cope with the schedule and demands of a television show.  That's why people keep coming back to Lisa.  They are much-valued qualities.”

And he thinks we've only just begun to see what McCune can do.  “I would love to see Lisa do a role where she really gets down and dirty,” Monaghan says.  “A really tough, demanding role.  I'm sure she'd deliver in spades.”

There is certainly a kind of toughness to her in person, not so much hard edges as a kind of confidence and capability.  It's something that led McElroy to cast her first as Constable Maggie  Doyle, and then as the second-in-charge on a naval patrol boat.  While Heelers co-star John Wood might have fondly described her as “the apologetic constable” (“I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to arrest you”), others see a quiet authority in her both as an actor and as a person.

Reviews were mixed when she did attempt getting down and dirty, as Sally Bowles in Sam Mendes' production of Cabaret: along with The Age, The Australian's critics were underwhelmed (“blank-voiced”, said one) but she won a Green Room Award for the role, and audiences liked her.

She's admitted to weeping over those reviews, but that didn't stop her getting back on stage the next night, or the night after, or the one after that.

And the experience must have toughened her further, because she took the next salvo, from critic Graeme Blundell, who described McCune's style as epitomised by a “habitual blankness”, squarely on the chin.  “I read his comments with great interest.  And look forward to the day when I can catch up with him and  find out what exactly it is that he hates,” she says cheerfully.  She thought about sending him tickets to the opening night of Guys and Dolls, but decided not to push it.

“But I respect his opinion, I'd be really interested in finding out why he thinks what he thinks.  He hasn't seen me even come close to what I can do yet.  I think if we met we'd really get along.  And anyway,” she concludes, ever the pragmatist, “I can't give up my career because Graeme Blundell doesn't like me.”



DESPITE HER FORAY into producing, she has no intention of giving up acting for any reason.  “People rely on entertainment.  When times are tough, especially, entertainment is the thing that can make you feel glorious.  That's why we're here,” she says.

And while on the one hand, if she were starting again, she might do things a little differently, on the other, well, she wouldn't change a thing.  “If the timing was different, if I was graduating now, if I was 15 years younger, chances are that I would do what they're all doing now and go to the States.  And my story would be very different,” she says.  “But I've worked consistently here and have loved it, loved the people I've worked with.  I wouldn't change anything.  You can't in life, and I'm glad about that.  Because everything that's happened to me along the way has brought me to a very good place.”

Melinda Houston, who writes about television for The Age, has done a few celebrity profiles in her time.  This month she interviewed Lisa McCune for our cover story.  “The thing that most struck me about her was her energy and good humour.  She'd been working like a navvy for the last six months, and had just spent five hours in a photo shoot – anyone would have been a bit tired and cranky, but not Lisa.  At the same time, she's not a saint.  She just behaves like a civilised human being.  She's normal – and in her world, that makes her a bit special.”