Back in the early 2000s, Madeleine West was sitting in the audience of Arj Barker’s stand-up show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival when he pointed at her. Back then, she was starring in Neighbours as Dee Bliss.
“Part of his schtick was talking about fame,” Madeleine, 43, tells TV WEEK. “Arj pointed to me out in the crowd and said, ‘You – you look like you could be famous. You know, right?’ Everyone in the audience cracked up and he was like, ‘What?’ and someone yelled out, ‘She is famous, you dag!’
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“Arj came out afterwards to apologise and I said, ‘What are you apologising for? You probably got the biggest laugh of the night.’”
Twenty years later, when Madeleine was offered the chance to play the romantic lead opposite Arj in Aussie comedy movie The Nut Farm, she jumped at it. Arj stars as Brendan Brandon, a failed cryptocurrency trader from San Francisco, who inherits a macadamia farm in Australia when his uncle Mitch (Roy Billing) goes missing. Madeleine plays Kim, a single mum who runs a dairy farm nearby.
“Arj has this lovely, endearing energy about him, kind of like a deer in the headlights,” she explains. “I found it really sweet and really cute.”
JJ Pantano, whose stand-up comedy routine on Australia’s Got Talent in 2019 when he was just seven propelled him to fame, plays Kim’s son Carl. Carl is determined to set up Kim, who he describes as “my still-attractive-for-her-age mother”, with Brendan.
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“He’s not unlike one of my daughters, who’s very precocious in the same way and often says the most awkward things at the most inopportune moments,” Madeleine, who has six children – Phoenix, Hendrix, Xascha, Xanthe, Xalia and Margaux – with former partner Shannon Bennett, says. “So for me, it was it was just an extension of what happens at home, really.”
One of the movie’s funniest scenes has Kim and Brendan on a date at a Chinese restaurant, accompanied by Carl. There’s not a lot of opportunity for romance, especially when Kim gets into a discussion with Carl about his recent bowel movements.
“Been there, done that, so many times!” Madeleine says with a laugh.
The Nut Farm was filmed near where Madeleine lives in northern New South Wales, and she says its environmental message is “really close to my heart”. As for lugging around bales of hay in her role as a farmer, that came naturally.
“I come from farming country in Victoria, so I’ve grown up around animals, I now work as a reforester in my spare time, and I’m reasonably strong, surprisingly,” she says. “You have to be as you hit your forties.”
Madeleine, who recently helped jail her childhood sexual abuser, has said shooting The Nut Farm was a “bright spot” in the darkness.
“That’s the joy of my craft, that once I’m on set, I’m stepping into someone else’s shoes, and just for that moment I’m JJ’s mum, I’m Arj’s girlfriend, I’m the cattle farmer worrying about whether her cows have an udder infection – all those kinds of things that were such a relief in a time that was particularly dark for me.”
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Up next, Madeleine will be seen alongside Aaron Eckhart and Rob Kipa-Williams in the US thriller Deep Water. As for Neighbours, she’d be happy to return “if there was an opportunity”. But she has a lot more going on in her life than acting. Among other things, she’s training to be a trauma counsellor, she visits schools and educates kids about online safety, and is working in podcasting.
“But number one, being a good mum,” she adds, “and just continuing to find ways to meaningfully heal from what I’ve gone through in the last couple of years in bringing that particular person to justice.
“I’m really investing in being the happiest version of myself. That’s not necessarily the most successful or most relevant or most popular, it’s just the happiest.”
