I am woman, hear me roar.
Twenty-six-year-old Australian breakout Tilda Cobham-Hervey portrays Reddy, oppositeEvan Petersas the mercurial Wald.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: When auditioning, how familiar were you with Helen Reddy and her music?
Credit: Everett Collection
TILDA COBHAM-HERVEY:I’m very ashamed to say I didn’t know much about her.
I knew the song “I Am Woman,” of course, I knew Helen Reddy’s name.
But I did not know much about her life.
Why do you think that is?
It’s quite interesting because I felt the same.
Not a lot of people know much about Helen.
She was quite a private woman.
She was very focused on her family and very driven and very about the work.
Perhaps that’s why, there wasn’t as much drama around her.
You and Reddy both grew up in families of performing artists.
Did that help you find a way into her?
My mum’s a dancer, my dad’s a lighting designer.
I definitely felt like there was similarities there in the way we grew up.
We both moved to America for more opportunities.
When I moved here, it was a lot easier than when she moved over.
And it was because of women like her that paved the way for the next generation.
Was there any story or information about her that really unlocked who she was for you?
There was so many.
or “What about when she did this?”
That competitive streak made a lot of sense.
The playfulness in there, it really helped.
Because we’d all heard the hard story of their breakup and the dramatic story of their life.
But of course, there was a lot of love there at one point.
The prep for this must have been crazy singing Helen’s songs, learning to embody her physicality.
Can you tell us more about all that?
Helen is so loved.
I constantly had that fear of “How am I ever going to pull this off?”
At the beginning, it was incredibly daunting.
It’s a huge responsibility, and I took it very seriously.
I did everything I could.
I started trying to take some of those things on.
We really wanted to make it feel an authentic story and be as true to her spirit as possible.
Did you get to meet her or any of her family before shooting?
If so, how did that help inform your take on her?
I didn’t meet Helen while we were making the film, but I met her after the film.
But I met her daughter and her son while we were filming.
They visited the set.
Her voice is amazing, and the song’s so beautiful.
What was meeting her after the fact like?
It was such a joy.
She lived up to every expectation.
She was really kind and generous and funny and charming.
The ending, just seeing Helen tear up at what her song means to people, is pretty extraordinary.
Was it incredibly emotional filming that for you too?
We really wanted to capture that.
On the day, we were in a park in Sydney.
There was about 20 people standing in front of me and there was a big storm coming in.
We were really worried it was going to start raining.
So it all happened very quickly.
It didn’t feel the grand [way] I remember when I first watched the film.
Why do you think we see this over and over?
Do you think Helen’s story can be inspiring or instructive?
What I find quite inspiring about Helen was she was quite ready [to do what she did].
I found that incredibly interesting about Helen.
We’re all so complex as people, and she was too.
But then she was living a life and in a marriage that was complicated.
He controlled all of her money.
She was still a woman of her time.
That made a lot of these things very tricky.
The film uses a lot of real footage from the women’s movement and second-wave feminism.
Did it have the same impact on you bringing it to life?
We’re still fighting for a lot of same things.
For example, the Equal Rights Amendment has still not been passed in the Constitution in America.
That’s something I would love to see change in the next few years.
Yeah, it is exhausting.
But I also think it’s really important to acknowledge how far we’ve come.
