“I really like meaty female roles,” Armidale-born actress Maleeka Gasbarri said. “I really like females who have strong opinions, and stick to their digs regardless.”
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You may know the 20-year-old from Neighbours, where she played drug addict Erin’s daughter Cat Rogers in 2015.
She’s just wrapped up filming on the ABC’s hard-hitting social drama The Heights, the biggest production ever filmed in Western Australia: 30 half-hour episodes.
Maleeka was in town for her grandmother’s 85th birthday this weekend. While she left Armidale as a toddler, she’s always come back for Christmas.
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Maleeka wanted to act from a young age – surprising, she said, given her family didn’t watch television.
“I was eight years old when I woke up, and proclaimed to my mother that I wanted to be an actor,” she said.
“It’s quite funny, actually, because we were never allowed to watch television growing up. The only show we watched my whole childhood was the gardening show. It came out of the blue!”
Her timing was right, though (a necessary skill in an actor). A theatre company had just moved back to her WA town, so she signed up for classes.
“Ever since then,” she said, “I’ve been hooked!”
Her Neighbours role was her first big television part.
“It really solidified me that that’s exactly what I want to do for the rest of my life,” she said.
Maleeka had met the show’s casting director Thea McLeod at an auditioning workshop in Perth.
“I’d signed up to do it, and I got really sick,” she remembered.
“I had pneumonia. I was very, very ill. I wasn’t going to go, because I just felt so horrible. The day of it, I thought: ‘No, do it!’ I drove up – which was three hours away. I was sitting in the car, dying. ‘Well, I’m here now, so I guess I’ll have to go in!’
“I walked in; I had to keep leaving constantly, because I was just coughing my lungs out.
“When I did my piece, Thea was really impressed. She kept in contact.”
Good luck, Maleeka believes, is hard work met with the right opportunity.
A month later, she was in Armidale when Thea sent her the role of Cat.
The teenager then moved to Melbourne, living by herself for the first time.
"The people that I met then, even now, some of them are my best friends."
Good Neighbours, in fact…
In The Heights (coming next year), Maleeka plays a wealthy party girl named Anais.
“We were constantly going out to parties, running amok, eating at nice restaurants,” she said.
“It was nice to film in such locations!”
Set in an inner-city neighbourhood, the show examines the different social structures of a housing block, and the gentrifying community surrounding it.
“You’ve got gays, lesbians, trans – all different social walks of life,” Maleeka said.
“It deals with their interactions, and how people relate to one another. It’s very real in that sense, and it doesn’t really shy away from any prevalent issues in society.”
She’s worked on both sides of the camera; her short film La Mia Tragica Storia was a finalist in the Cinesnaps student film competition in 2014, part of the CInefestOz film festival held in Busselton, WA.
While she’s working on other ideas for small films, Mlaeeka prefers being in front of the camera – and likes to bring as much of herself to a role as she can.
“That makes my view of the character authentic and different to anyone else's,” she said.
“It's a part of me, as well."
While she spent ten years acting on stage, Maleeka prefers the intricacy of film and television.
“You can see one tiny little thought,” she said; “you can look at someone so closely, and the camera’s right up in an extreme close-up.
“They might not be doing anything, but you can see them thinking; you can get a feel for what’s going on.
“You don’t really get that in theatre, where you’re sitting 50 metres back. You can’t get that intricacy and intimacy that I so very love.”
She’s just moved to Sydney, where there are more acting opportunities – but her successes show that it’s possible for someone from a regional town to have a career in film and television.
“Just do it!” Maleeka urged.
“If you love it, and if that's what really speaks to you, then make the effort. You can do it. There's been so many people before me that have done exactly that.
“You can make it work, if you really want to – but it definitely takes a lot of determination and sticking to it, because you will no doubt get rejected hundreds of times before you get your 'Yes'!"