With five children and a busy Hollywood career, Teresa Palmer rarely has a second to slow down and smell the roses.
But the Warm Bodies star’s jam-packed schedule actually helped inform her new role as Grace Lisa Vandenburg, a mathematician struggling with severe anxiety and OCD, in Addition.
“The thing I have in common with her is that my life is stacked,” she tells us. “It’s so busy, it’s chaotic.”
“I have a bunch of kids and so much going on, so there’s sort of an energy that comes from that lifestyle, a hyperactivity, so I pulled on some of my own experiences.”
The movie sees Grace’s carefully organised world thrown into chaos when she meets a charming man called Seamus, played by Joe Dempsie, which forces her to confront her mental health and her past head-on.
While Teresa doesn’t have OCD herself, she has dealt with orthorexia, a term that describes an obsession with eating healthy food, in her 20s, which helped inform her portrayal of Grace.
“Orthorexia is really interesting,” she says.
“When I was in my early 20s, and I had that, it was the control of eating clean, healthy eating and an obsession with wellness and everything healthy.
“As you can see, I’m drinking Diet Coke at the moment, so I’ve come a long way since then! But I could relate to some of those things as well, absolutely.
“But mainly, I drew on experiences from close friends of mine who have OCD tendencies and also a lot of anxiety. Just sitting and listening to stories and hearing what a panic attack actually feels like.”
Her role as a mother to her five children – sons Bodhi Rain, 11, and Forest Sage, nine, and daughters Poet Lake, six, Prairie Moon, four, and Lotus Bloom, four months – and her stepson, Isaac, 17, also helped her to channel Grace’s “silliness”.
“A lot of my playful and silliness that I have with the kids, I pulled into Grace because I love the idea that she feels childlike in some ways,” she explains.
“There’s this really beautiful, charming immaturity about her, whilst she’s also dealing with really intense things. Her anxiety bubbles up in the form of counting, and it’s really hard to be out in the world, having to juggle that. She’s just beautifully complex.”
Teresa is no stranger to managing everyday pressures in her own life, juggling her jet-setting career as an actor with her family life with her husband, Mark Webber, their children, and her mother, Paula, who lives with them, so it’s no surprise that things can sometimes get overwhelming.
“My life is ginormous! I have five children, I have my stepson and my husband, and my mum lives with us full-time,” she says.
“I have a big life with my job and my career, so I’m constantly in the circus like a juggling act.”
“I’m trying to meet the needs of different people as they arrive, and sometimes I will fall short, and sometimes I will be imperfect, and sometimes those balls will drop – often, it happens a lot! And that’s OK, I just have to give myself grace.”
While everyone can understand the difficulties of everyday pressures, Teresa felt it was important to handle Grace’s nuanced story realistically on screen because she didn’t want it to feel like a “performance” to anyone who has anxiety or OCD.
“We had a lot of experts on hand to help us deal with talking about mental health sensitively, which was imperative. It’s very important that what we’re putting out into the world is an accurate portrayal,” she explains.
“But, at the same time, you take liberties because everyone’s experience with their mental health struggles or their anxiety or OCD – or whatever you want to label it – is individual. It’s not one-size-fits-all; everyone’s looks different, and Grace’s looked very different.”
“We just leaned into her individual experience and the fact that people can draw comparisons to their own experiences, that’s excellent.”
“I think this form of anxiety is under-represented, and now we have it on film for people to go and watch and think, ‘I feel seen’.”
“I just wanted to be nuanced and subtle enough that it felt real, but it wasn’t like a performer trying to perform someone with anxiety. That would have been a mistake,” she adds.
And working with a team she trusted, no doubt helped her achieve this, as she reunited with Warm Bodies director Bruna Papandrea on Addition – though Grace’s story was miles away from the 2013 zombie romantic comedy, in which Teresa took on the leading role alongside Nicholas Hoult.
“The first thing that attracted me to Addition was Bruna Papandrea, our lovely producer and my friend,” she says.
“We were at a dinner party in New York, and she was like, I have the best script for you, you’re going to love it. She sent it through, I read it, and I was like ‘this is unbelievable’.
“It’s so nuanced and interesting, and the character is just wild. I love that she couldn’t be put in a box; she’s so many things. I laughed out loud, I cried, and it was a big fat yes from me!”
It was a return to her roots as a romantic lead, after taking on darker roles in the likes of The Clearing, Shadow Woman, The Twin, and A Discovery of Witches in more recent years.
“I’ve been orbiting everything dark and traumatic, and whilst this has trauma, the basis of who Grace is – she’s just a beautifully, brilliant, colourful human being,” she shares.
“There were moments of laughter, lightness, fun and connection, and it was just a pleasure.
“It was a bit of a departure from what I’ve been sitting in and marinating in in other roles over the past few years, to come and play this character, who still had the complexity and the darkness, but she also had these moments of playfulness and light.”
This time around, Bruna led the production with director Marcelle Luman, who Teresa said had a knack for filming her and Joe Dempsie’s candid moments on set, and including them in the movie.
“There were moments in between where Joe Dempsie and I would be mucking around and doing stuff, and [Marcelle would] be like ‘quick, quick, roll!’,” Teresa explains.
“So she’d roll the cameras, and Joe and I would be laughing, because we’re just mucking around in between, and then that ended up in the movie! So, that was funny.”
See if you can notice which of Teresa and Joe’s candid moments made the cut in the final version of Addition, in cinemas from January 29.
