She lived out of a suitcase for three months in LA, eventually landing a role in a made-for-TV movie as an Aztec princess running away from a dinosaur. “At that time in Australia, we were only filming Home and Away and maybe a couple of other ABC, and” – she gestures to her face – “I didn’t see myself in that space.” When her contract was up in 2007, she packed her bags straight away. “What had come before that was very homogenous it was nice to be part of that wave of reflecting the community a bit more.” “I’m so grateful they even gave it to me to begin with. “It was important for representation in terms of Australian television,” says Lachman, who was born in Nepal, and has Tibetan and German heritage. Like so many Australian exports, Neighbours became her first break in what was still an incredibly hermetic industry. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning to conjure up emotions really fast, especially when you’re talking about a character … who’s always going through these really extreme scenarios.” I read out the incredibly chaotic list of everything Katya was subjected to: blackmailing, kidnapping, getting done for attacking someone with a defibrillator – “Stabbed! I think I got stabbed,” Lachman interjects. It’s also a far cry from the role Lachman is perhaps best known for in Australia: Neighbour’s woebegone teenage rebel Katya Kinski who, over a two-year stint in the mid-noughties, had a particularly rough run – even for soap opera standards. “They even had all the scripts finished before I started filming, which is so rare in television,” she says. The space afforded by the series felt like a luxury. Photograph: Eric Charbonneau/REX/Shutterstock “He’d … gently start the scene, ‘Just breathe, take long breaths in and out’.”īen Stiller, Dichen Lachman, Zach Cherry and Yul Vazquez at the finale screening of Severance. “He would play this beautiful music on a Bluetooth speaker – would sometimes accidentally disconnect, which was annoying,” Lachman laughs. Stiller’s directorial touch became the undercurrent beneath much of Severance’s strange stillness. Working with Stiller was daunting at first, especially with Covid mask restrictions in place, which meant “all I could see of Ben were his beautiful, bright blue eyes – but just his eyes,” she says. “They” refers to show creator Dan Erickson, as well as Stiller, who executive produced and directed most episodes of the series. “And I really want to trust that they know what’s going on.” “If I get attached to an idea about what might happen to Ms Casey, and then it goes in a different direction, I’d be disappointed,” Lachman says. Ben Stiller would gently start the scene saying, ‘Just breathe, take long breaths in and out’ Dichen Lachman Of course, she hasn’t been completely immune to the deluge of fan theories rife with hypotheses on Ms Casey’s past and future, but she’s hesitant to guess too much. There is a twist too good to spoil for the uninitiated, but suffice to say that it implies a much larger arc for Lachman’s character in the show’s newly announced second season. What does this company even … do? Who is Ms Casey outside work? And how did she end up here? As the season progresses, she evolves from something of a fembot doing the bidding of her overlords to a surprisingly pivotal character whose very existence ruptures Lumon’s safe-guarded secrets. Ms Casey, it’s revealed at one point, has only been “alive” for 107 hours in her current form. “Underneath, this naivety, this curiosity, because her life has been so short.” “She’s very special and unique stillness, but also that sort of childlike state,” Lachman says. Gone, of course, is Ms Casey’s elasticated tension it’s morning over there and she’s fully relaxed as she talks about embodying an enigma. It’s almost jarring to hear her natural Australian lilt when Lachman Zooms in from her home in London, where she’s been living since last November with her husband. Hours of preparation – watching everything from meditation guides to online sleep stories – went into the voice.
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