Matilda Brown ROLE OF A LIFETIME

THE ACTRESS HAS STEPPED OUT OF THE LIMELIGHT

- Cynthia Wang

Each morning, Matilda Brown heads to work at The Good Farm Shop, the online food service she co-founded with her husband Scott Gooding in September 2021. There, in a small warehouse nestled in the Northern Beaches of New South Wales, she picks and packs carefully curated orders of produce and meat sourced from seven family-owned farms, readying them for delivery straight to people’s homes. Once done, she brushes up on concepts such as greenwashing and biodynamics to create newsletters and videos that will spread the meaning of those terms to her customers and beyond.

For the youngest daughter of Australian film legends Bryan Brown and Rachel Ward, the marketing aspect of her newest venture may be the most natural. “When I put a camera up in front of me, I feel very comfortable,” says Brown, who was nominated for the 2016 Best New Talent AACTA Award as the writer, director, and star of the streaming series, Let’s Talk About It.

But about her foray in entrepreneurship, she offers a hearty laugh. “If you had told me when I was 25 doing auditions in Hollywood that, by the time I was 35, I would be the owner of a regeneratively farmed meat business, I would have said, ‘What are you talking about?’” Brown admits. “It would’ve been the furthest thing from my mind.”