Rose Riley (L) and Emma Harvie in ‘Diary of an Uber Driver.’
Rose Riley is getting ready to have her first crack at Hollywood amid the most successful year of her career since graduating from WAAPA in 2013.
This week the actor is heading to the US for the first time for meetings with producers, casting directors and other players set up by her US agent, Authentic Talent & Literary Management’s Jessica Morgulis.
Rose met Morgulis when the agent visited Sydney, arranged by her Oz rep United Management, before she started work in Stateless, the six-part ABC drama about four strangers in an immigration detention centre in the Australian desert, co-created by Cate Blanchett, Tony Ayres and Elise McCredie.
“I will always be very passionate about Australian stories and Australian cinema, TV and theatre but working overseas would be a total dream; ideally I will find a balance,” she tells IF.
Directed by Emma Freeman and Jocelyn Moorhouse and produced by Sheila Jayadev and Paul Ranford for Matchbox Pictures, Stateless stars Yvonne Strahovski, Jai Courtney, Fayssal Bazzi and Asher Keddie.
Strahovski is cast as an airline hostess who is escaping a cult-like self-improvement group, with Bazzi as an Afghan refugee fleeing persecution. Courtney is a young Australian father escaping a dead-end job and Keddie is a bureaucrat who is caught up in a national scandal.
Blanchett portrays one of the leaders of the self-improvement group along with her husband (Dominic West). A lot of the extras were refugees, some of whom had been in detention for years.
Riley plays Sharee, one of the new guards at the centre, a vulnerable, lost young woman. She watched Strahovski in awe, observing: “She is an incredible actor; I was very inspired to be in her presence.”
After working solidly in the theatre Rose’s screen career took off in 2016 with roles as a 1980s British pop star in the late Cris Jones’ The Death and Life of Otto Bloom and as an assistant to Jacki Weaver’s character in Matchbox Pictures/Foxtel’s Secret City, directed by Emma Freeman.
Judy Davis and Rose Riley in ‘Mystery Road.’
Last year she appeared as a precocious senior student and budding author in Heath Davis’ movie Book Week and as a young girl who searches for her missing boyfriend in Bunya Productions’ Mystery Road directed by Rachel Perkins.
This Wednesday’s episode of RevLover Films’ ABC drama Diary of an Uber Driver directed by Matthew Moore and scripted by Tom Ward features her as Sarah, best friend of Emma Harvie’s Nina (one of her best friends in real life), who both behave obnoxiously.
In the second series of Foxtel’s Mr Inbetween, which premieres on Fox Showcase on September 13, she plays Michele, the girlfriend of Damon Herriman’s nightclub boss Freddy.
“I had a wonderful time shooting that. Damon is extremely talented, very friendly and inspiring,” she says. “Scott Ryan and Nash Edgerton make it such an exciting show.”
She has a supporting role in Blackfella Films’ ABC political drama Black Bitch directed by Rachel Perkins, which stars Rachel Griffiths as Australia’s embattled Prime Minister Rachel Anderson and Deborah Mailman as her rival Alex Irving. She plays the chief of staff to the Minister for Indigenous Affairs (David Roberts).