Tammy Macintosh: 'I Broke Down'

The Physical And Emotional Challenges Of Playing A Character In Wentworth.

- Stephen Downie

On screen, we’re used to seeing Tammy MacIntosh as fierce Top Dog Kaz in popular prison drama, Wentworth. It’s the role of a lifetime for Tammy, but it’s taken a toll on the actress.

She says the often physically and emotionally demanding scenes can affect her long after the director calls “cut”.

“I’ll go … home after filming, make dinner, sit down and just completely break down,” Tammy, 49, tells New Idea, ahead of Season 7 of the Foxtel drama. “That’s my body’s way of coping; of just saying, ‘Release it.’”

Introduced in Wentworth’s Season 3, in 2015, Tammy’s character, Karen ‘Kaz’ Proctor, is the leader of the vigilante group Red Right Hand and has been in the middle of the mayhem from the get-go.

The intensity of the series, which is filmed in Melbourne, took some getting used to for the actress. But her husband, Mark Yeats, has been there for her. The couple married in 2005 and have a son, Benjamin, together.

“In my first season, I was very lost, completely consumed with emotion and overwhelmed with the character I was given,”

Tammy recalls. “One morning, I was walking along the promenade at St Kilda, and my husband called and I broke down in tears saying, ‘I can’t do this’.