The Big Picture
- A24’s Talk to Me is a creepy Australian supernatural horror film that has achieved critical and commercial success like The Babadook.
- Zoe Terakes delivers an outstanding performance as the antagonistic Hayley, who hosts parties and pressures teenagers into communicating with the dead in Talk to Me.
- Terakes’ role in Wentworth Prison was crucial in representing gender identity issues, and they have become a prominent LGBTQ+ rights advocate.
A24 offering Talk to Me is an original and fantastically creepy entry in the canon of supernatural horror and a movie that follows in the footsteps of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook. Both Australian horror films share similar success stories. Like Kent’s revisionist horror film, the movie, from directors Michael and Danny Philippou is the sleeper hit of 2023 and has made quite an impact, critically and commercially. One stand-out performance in the movie is Zoe Terakes, who portrays the antagonistic Hayley, Their purpose in the story is to obnoxiously host parties and peer-pressure naive teenagers into communicating with the dead: via a severed ceramic hand.
The story revolves around Mia (Sophie Wilde), haunted by the death of her mother who along with siblings Jade (Alexandra Jensen) and Riley (Joe Bird) attend a party, intrigued by a possession-themed video making the rounds on the web. Contacting the other side is all fun and games until someone tries to gouge out their eye. Mia’s deceased mother makes an otherworldly appearance at one of the soirées and a doorway is opened and horrors start to spill through. Terakes’ role in the movie is unapologetic and mean-spirited and the character shows little to no remorse even though they are responsible for the horror invading Mia’s life. It’s an edgier role than the actor’s previous part in Nine Perfect Strangers, with Terakes ultimately underutilized. They will next appear in Disney+’s Ironheart, but fans should check out an earlier role in a cult Australian drama that ran for nearly a decade: Wentworth Prison.
What Was ‘Wentworth Prison’ About?
Running from 2013 to 2021, Foxtel’s Wentworth Prison was the gritty reboot of Reg Watson’s cult favorite Prisoner: Cell Block H. The show received high praise and like its predecessor, it was groundbreaking in its depictions of marginalized characters and exemplary in how it tackled queer and Trans themes with its storylines. The show was as grim and disturbing as HBO’s Oz and initially followed Bea Smith (Xena: Warrior Princess’s Danielle Cormack), who finds herself behind bars after attempting to murder her husband. Doctor Who’s Peter McTighe was the chief writer for the show.
Now concluded, the contemporary reimagining took place in a maximum security prison, Terakes joined the cast in season eight as Trans man Reb Keane alongside Kate Box as their homicidal lover Lou Kelly. Reb Keane escaped a conversion therapy camp with her lover, unaware nine people had been murdered, and the camp had been burned to the ground. For its eighth and ninth seasons, the show received a soft reboot and the tone of Wentworth Prison became considerably darker. Pamela Rabe reprised her role as the former prisoner Joan Ferguson, more akin to Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal than Maggie Kirkpatrick’s creation of The Freak in Prisoner. The final two seasons consisted of the strongest batch of episodes in the show’s entire run and Terakes was instrumental in its success.
‘Wentworth Prison’ Gave Zoe Terakes A Vital Role To Play
Terakes’ role in the show was utterly vital in representing a member of a marginalized community — Terakes themselves is Trans and is playing a Trans character. It had less effectively explored issues pertaining to gender identity in the earlier seasons. The role of Maxine Conway, although handled sensitively, was still played by cisgender actor Socratis Otto. Terakes has become a prominent spokesperson for LGBTQ+ rights and has responded to Kuwait’s ban of Talk to Me as “dehumanizing.” In Wentworth Prison, Reb is the victim of conversion therapy and being a Trans man in a women’s prison and the difficulties they face in that situation. It really highlighted the vulnerability of non-binary and Trans people, regardless of their location. Their storyline came to a tragic end when cult leader Sheila (Marta Dusseldorp) was apprehended and landed in prison, wanting revenge against Lou, she murdered Reb in their sleep.
Terakes excelled and the popularity of the show brought them international attention. Their role was followed by the high-profile Nicole Kidman vehicle Nine Perfect Strangers, a show about a disparate group of people whose lives overlap at the wellness retreat and will appear in the Disney+ show Ironheart, which expands the Wakanda universe (at least peripherally) into TV drama in the next Marvel outing. And let’s not forget the Talk to Me sequel greenlit by A24, which has the potential to explore Hayley’s nasty character more.
The Legacy of ‘Prisoner: Cell Block H’ And The Popularity Of Women-In-Prison
It has been decades now since the cell doors of Wentworth Detention Center slammed shut for good but the iconic Oz show still has a huge following. The inaugural season of the violent female-dominated soap opera Prisoner (or Prisoner: Cell Block H abroad) – broadcast on Australian television from 1979 to 1986 – started out with a run of 16 episodes, later extended to 20 and the show proved so popular with fans that it became a twice-weekly soap following the incarcerated lives of a group of frightening women languishing behind bars in the high-security Wentworth Prison. Prisoner was a major influence for prison-centric shows like HBO’s Oz, Channel Four’s Buried, Bad Girls from Shed Productions in the UK, the titillating and exploitive Spanish show Locked Up, Orange Is The New Black and of course, Foxtel’s gritty revamp Wentworth Prison.
At the time of transmission, nothing quite like it had been seen on television before, at least never outside the girls-behind-bars exploitation film genre anyway. It was a breath of fresh air when compared to contextual dramas like cop shows and daytime soap operas of the time. The main character was usually the woman right at the time of the prison hierarchy (The Top Dog) often wrestling with the season adversary for stirring up trouble among the women or attempting to usurp her as Top Dog.
Some of the show’s popular storylines included Bea Smith’s (Val Lehman) rivalry with illiterate and violent lesbian Franky Doyle (Carol Burns), the Nola McKenzie (Carole Skinner) arc, serial killer Bev Baker’s (Maggie Dence) disturbing stint behind bars, serial killing prison officer David Bridges (David Waters) butchering the inmates, “phantom lagger” Eve Wilder’s (Lynda Stoner) infamous lynching scene, the rise to Top Dog of child-killer Kath Maxwell (Kate Hood) and her feud with biker Rita “The Beater” Connors (Glenda Linscott). The legacy of Prisoner can be seen in the aforementioned shows and how its controversial storylines enabled other screenwriters and producers to take more risks and cover controversial – at least at the time – terrain. Prisoner might be one of the first shows to incorporate LGBTQ+ ideas into its narrative in a non-fetishistic, non-issue-led capacity, paving the way for successors like Wentworth Prison to take original and creative risks.
