Shooting for the stars

As she takes super sleuth Phryne Fisher to the big screen, Essie Davis talks to Susan Horsburgh about childhood bullying, the magic of Tasmania, and the fraught choice between career and family.

- Susan Horsburgh

She is James Bond in T-bar heels, a saucy feminist superhero a century ahead of her time. Sporting her glamorous drop-waist getups, she can dance a tango, fly a Tiger Moth, or surf a speeding train carriage – all without upsetting a strand of her signature black bob. Not only that, the whip-smart lady detective leaves a trail of smitten lovers in her wake. Who wouldn’t want to be Phryne Fisher?

Essie Davis has won fans all over the world playing the 1920s Melbourne super-sleuth in the ABC TV series Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. Based on Kerry Greenwood’s bestselling books, the show premiered in 2012 and had more than 1 million Australians tuning in each week, before it spread to 180 countries and garnered a cult following in the US and UK.

Now, four years after the final TV episode, Essie has donned the cloche hats again for the big-screen follow-up, Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, filmed partly in Morocco.

“The last time we saw her she was getting in an airplane to fly her dad home [to England] and I think it needed an international story,” says Essie. “You can’t have a really good murder mystery without it taking longer to solve and having a few more potential culprits.”

The pistol-packing Phryne (pronounced fry-knee) is still scaling buildings and uncovering injustices, but this time it’s in jazz-age London and British Palestine. Fans were so keen to see Miss Fisher’s derring-do go global, in fact, that they raised nearly $1 million of the film’s budget in Australia’s most successful crowdfunding campaign ever.