Teresa Palmer Riding High

She almost quit acting for good, but she bounced back with characteristic fierceness, and now awakens her skills in the saddle to play her best role yet: champion jockey Michelle Payne. She talks to Eugenie Kelly about hanging tough, #MeToo and doing the motherhood-and-movies thing on her terms.

- Eugenie Kelly

THE SUN is fighting through charcoal clouds on a winter’s morning near Camden, on Sydney’s outskirts, and the rolling green pastures surrounding the 19th-century property Camelot are sopping with a heavy dew. Every oil, fan and gas heater the BAZAAR crew can get its hands on has been employed in a bid to warm the three-storey stately pile and its 55 cavernous rooms, but we’re wasting our time trying. Teresa Palmer pulls her breastfeeding shawl tighter around her five-week-old daughter, Poet Lake, far too cold to feign interest in today’s fairytale surrounds. Romantic turrets, grand staircases and stables complete with chandeliers fail to impress when one is borderline hypothermic.

“She’s so easy,” Palmer says with a shiver, stroking Poet’s tiny head. “An absolute dreamboat.” Palmer’s other children, sons Bodhi, five, Forest, two, and 11-year-old stepson Isaac, are back in Adelaide with her actor and producer husband, Mark Webber, so this fleeting trip to Sydney to shoot a cover story a little over a month after giving birth could be classified as time out. Although the 33-year-old is on an informal maternity leave of sorts, she’s keen to promote her 27th film, Ride Like a Girl, a biopic about Michelle Payne, the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup, in 2015. Boasting all the hallmarks of an Aussie feelgood film, it’s the feature directorial debut of the Oscar-nominated actor Rachel Griffiths and also stars Sam Neill, Magda Szubanksi and Payne’s brother Stevie, who plays himself.