Lisa McCune MODERN FAMILY

With three teenage kids, Lisa McCune knows a thing or two about family comedy. Happily single, she talks to Susan Horsburgh about life in the time of COVID-19, the complexity of parenting, and learning to ignore the critics.

- Susan Horsburgh

When Lisa McCune’s family – and most of the world – went into isolation in March, her 14-year-old daughter Remy announced an ambitious plan to watch every episode of Blue Heelers, the 1990s cop drama that made her mum Australia’s sweetheart and a four-time TV Week Gold Logie winner. Remy’s proposed TV marathon sounds like a sweet act of daughterly devotion, but Lisa has no delusions.

“She’ll just bag me,” says the 49-year-old actor, laughing. “She’ll just go, ‘Oh Mum, you’re so bad!’ She adores me, I know she does, but they like giving me a hard time as well.”

Such is life in a family full of teenagers. As Lisa chats to The Weekly on the phone (our shoot was done previously), Remy and 16-year-old Oliver are remote learning, their schools shut down by the coronavirus pandemic, while 18-year-old uni student Archer is holed up at home too, enlisted to help his mum in the garden. Like most parents around the country, Lisa is trying to keep her kids busy, calculating the household toilet paper requirements and contemplating an uncertain future.

She had arrived home in Melbourne only a few days earlier from Sydney, where the acclaimed Bell Shakespeare production of Hamlet (in which she plays Gertrude) has shut down. It was the last show to leave the Sydney Opera House. “There was something very eerie,” she says, “about this almighty icon going dark.”