How actor Emily Browning learnt to embrace the funny side of failure

Sydney Morning Herald

5 days ago

For Emily Browning, few things are more terrifying than the prospect of embarrassment. And until recently, few things were more embarrassing than trying to be funny, and potentially failing.
'I guess people have different levels of things they find embarrassing,' says the 36-year-old actor, who burst onto the global stage as a 15-year-old in the Lemony Snickett film A Series of Unfortunate Events opposite Jim Carrey. 'I've gotten naked in a million films before, and that didn't embarrass me. [For me the threshold is] not wanting to look stupid or something.'
That all changed with her first foray into comedy, in the Paramount+ series Class of '07, about a high school reunion that goes from bad to worse when the Apocalypse causes massive flooding that traps the former students of a Sydney girls' school in the building where the best and worst years of their lives played out.
'Before I started doing comedy I'd kind of reached the limit of what I could do without being willing to embarrass myself, if that makes sense,' she says. 'And now I want to look stupid, I want to fail – failure is so interesting to me. I want to just be kind of dumb and not worry about it.'
In One More Shot, a time-travelling romcom screening at MIFF, Browning gets every opportunity.
She plays Minnie, a self-absorbed anaesthetist who attends a party on New Year's Eve 1999 hoping to win back her ex-boyfriend (Sean Keenan), only to find everything going wrong. Luckily, the bottle of tequila she's brought along gives her the chance to set things right, as each swig transports her back to the beginning of the night.
Though it's very funny, One More Shot is grounded in truth: young parents (Ashley Zukerman and Pallavi Sharda) struggling with the impact a baby is having on their lives and marriage; drug and alcohol dependency; a solipsism that stands in the way of ever really connecting with others.
And, of course, the whole panic about Y2K.
Browning was just 11 years old when all that played out. Her father worked (and still does) in computing, 'and he was like, 'meh'', she says of the predictions that the banking system would crash and planes would fall from the sky simply because of the way dates had been coded into operating systems.
For her, 1999 was all about her bedroom. 'I had this blue vinyl blow-up chair and a blue Sony boom box,' she says. 'I just remember it aesthetically. It was gorgeous.'
For Nicholas Clifford, whose debut feature this is, there's a strange echo of a more recent societal panic (as well as a chance to unearth some classic tracks from the era by the likes of Spiderbait, Deadstar and the Cranberries).
'What's been really rewarding is the line between COVID and Y2K, and the way some younger audience members can grasp the concept of a great big bad unknown on the horizon,' he says. 'Our cross-section of characters are all at different ends of it – some don't care, some really care. I like that. It sort of represents the world in a way.'
Though there are plenty of smarts in the script from husband-and-wife team Greg Erdstein and Alice Foulcher (who made the terrific low-budget comedy That's Not Me in 2017), there's also some terrific physical comedy, including a dance scene in which first Aisha Dee (from Apple Cider Vinegar) and then Browning do the splits – the first elegantly, the latter less so.
Thankfully for Minnie, every misstep is only a swig away from being erased from everyone's memory but hers. And that's something Browning can definitely see the appeal in.
'I really relate to that feeling of grief that comes from knowing that when you make a choice, you're letting 100 other choices die,' she says. 'I can't make a decision to save my life, I really just want all the options open to me at all times.
'As I've gotten into my mid-30s, I've had that realisation of, like, 'Oh, wow. I have one life, and that means saying goodbye to 1000 other lives that I thought maybe I would have had.' So that just really resonated with me.'
Not that she's moping about the road less travelled.
'I feel like all the things that are interesting to me right now and that I'm enjoying have at least an element of humour,' she says. 'I can't think of anything worse right now than doing a dead-serious drama.'