The many layers of Caitlin Stasey: 'A lot of people think I'm a really angry person'
A revealing interview that was canned after the actor and activist refused to appear semi-nude in the photographs is published by Guardian Australia
Words by Darryn King, pictures by Barry J Holmes
Stasey began self-harming at the age of 13. She had completed six months filming her first television role in ABC TV’s The Sleepover Club, during which – always gregarious with adult strangers growing up and encouraged by her drama teacher mother – she had become used to the attention of those much older than her.
She now identifies as lesbian despite having almost exclusively dated men. She is currently in a self-described “somewhat open” relationship with Lucas Neff, an American actor. They see other women, together and separately.She’s also an avid sexter, as her own mother recently learned when she picked up Stasey’s iPad by mistake.
Earlier this year, a photo shoot for Fairfax Media’s Good Weekend magazine was cancelled because its intended subject, the actor and activist Caitlin Stasey, declined to be photographed in lingerie. Stasey felt the concept was inappropriately leery for a story about the empowerment of women.
The interview – commissioned in January when Stasey was making headlines around the world with the launch of her new website, Herself.com – was postponed indefinitely. Stasey concluded the magazine had lost interest because she had refused to pose semi-nude.
Her vengeance was swift. She took to Twitter, calling out the magazine and slamming its editor, Ben Naparstek. She published some of her correspondence with Good Weekend, pointing to inconsistencies in Naparstek’s recollection of events, and wrote an essay recounting the events for Jezebel. The piece was illustrated with a topless picture Stasey had supplied herself – a Polaroid captioned with a message to Naparstek in her own handwriting: “FUCK YOU”.
Good Weekend was widely walloped in the hailstorm of ensuing coverage, both in Australia and abroad. “These kinds of acts perpetuated by men in positions of power against women so often go unanswered,” Stasey said of the episode recently. “My intention was nothing more than to shed light on an issue that I know young women have faced.”
Her restless social conscience and level of engagement is less remarkable for her age than for her profession. In an industry more associated with ego, vapidity and self-investment, the 25-year-old former Neighbours actor, who broke out at the age of 20 with the Tomorrow, When the War Began movie, increasingly views her career as a distant sideline to her commitment to activism and raising awareness.
“I’ve done some incredible projects I’m really proud of that I really love. But I don’t feel what I do, what we do, is important,” Stasey told me. “The Oscars, the Golden Globes, even the IF awards … I think it’s really self-aggrandising. We all sit around patting ourselves on the back, and for what? Spending millions of dollars while people are dying. It sounds incredibly hypocritical for me to continue to be an actor and to have this feeling but I see it an opportunity to talk about things that I care about. I think that’s the important thing.”
The Good Weekend episode highlighted everything that made Stasey an attractive magazine subject in the first place: her social media celebrity, the fierceness of her feminist crusade, her tussles with the media and her general badassery. It’s also a fitting appetiser for a version of the original interview, published now for the first time.
‘People don’t rally in the streets for happiness’
In the clamorous Twittersphere, where the more moderate voices get drowned out, Stasey’s online presence is regularly pitched at the rabble-rousing volume of revolution. Her style is mutinous and militant; you can sense the pugilistic percussion of her thumbs on her smartphone screen as she bashes out her rallying cries to her nearly 100,000 followers.
For a long time after joining Twitter in 2009, Stasey used the social media platform in the same way most of us do: to post selfies, cat pictures and YouTube clips. These days, Stasey treats Twitter as part-philosophical salon, part-soapbox from which to rail against the evils of the world – climate change, homophobia, child abuse, animal abuse, gluten, religion, racism and (she says) Nickelback.
“A lot of people think that I’m a really angry person,” Stasey said, sipping Glenfiddich in a hotel restaurant in downtown Toronto. “‘Do you enjoy anything? Do you like anything? Are you happy about anything?’ Yes, I am! But I don’t tweet about it. People don’t rally in the streets to engage in happiness. People talk about things they’re unsatisfied with.”
In person, Stasey’s tone more closely resembles that of mellow hippy than furious firebrand. It takes a while to register the profound bleakness of her worldview. Even her most apocalyptic pronouncements – she calls the human race a “cancer on the Earth” – are delivered in polite tones not dissimilar to the received pronunciation English she speaks in the Tudor-era US soapie Reign.
While a local musician performs a yearning rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow at the other end of the room, Stasey laments the corrupt handling of the drought in northern California, the targeting of low-income women to sell their breast milk, the impeding of cancer research by human gene patenting, and the devastation of the natural habit of mountain gorillas, all before our drinks have arrived. Perusing the menu, she admits that she draws the line at the rights of vegetables.
“People always get on me, ‘Well, what about carrots? Carrots have feelings,’” she says. “I’m not about to start eating an animal that has been caged since birth, has been milked until it’s no longer useful, because someone thinks asparagus might be sentient. Because I don’t think that it is.”
She orders the baby kale and quinoa salad, the only item on the menu with no animal products.
Something tells me not to order the foie gras. Her disregard for the plight of asparagus notwithstanding, Stasey seems not only well informed about injustice, but also personally affected by it. She speaks earnestly and openly, and doesn’t do do small talk. “This is how I engage,” she says. “I’m acutely aware of my mortality, and the only way I know how to combat it is to try to connect with as many human beings as possible.”
The curse of caring intensely about so much, Stasey herself is burdened by feelings of failure and impotence. During the interview she chides herself for unconsciously using “ablest” words like “crazy”, “lame” and “insane”. She’s not entirely sure if the recently purchased top she’s wearing wasn’t made in a sweatshop. She owns leather products and a Canada Goose jacket – items “heavily endowed with sadness” – from before she went completely vegan in 2014. Even her veganism is a source of guilt, since it means not supporting the cruelty-free meat industry.
Her devoted young female following is drawn to the strong female characters she plays as well as the strong female character she is. Stasey’s sense of responsibility to her legion of female fans has, in turn, inspired her feminism. Stasey applies her fieriest energies to speaking out against the fundamental inequality of the sexes: sexism, sex negativity, misogyny, victim blaming, slut shaming and rape culture.
On Twitter, Stasey’s feminism sometimes takes the form of deadpan misandry along the lines of, “My resolution for 2015 – kill all the men.” But Stasey’s actually against a society that favours men, not men themselves. “Feminism is as simple as a woman choosing for herself and being able to do what she believes in. Feminism is nothing more than freedom.”
‘You are a superstar in my eyes’
Last year, Stasey and Toronto-based photographer Jennifer Toole put out a call for women of all body types, nationalities, ethnicities and orientations to participate in a new project to promote female solidarity. Herself.com is the result; a place for women to share their thoughts and ideas on sex, sexuality, gender, feminism, monogamy, masturbation, and much more besides, accompanied by artful nude photographs.
Stasey conceived Herself.com as an alternative to the finitude and fleetingness of typical internet outrage. “I noticed that every time a woman had an opinion about something, she was just shouted down by everyone around her,” says Stasey.
“I wanted to create this one-way flow of information from woman to world about the things they ordinarily aren’t asked. I wanted to ask women what they thought about how the world saw them, because I was witnessing injustice and discrimination and I wondered if other women saw it too. I felt the world should hear that this woman was sexually assaulted, or that she was raped, or that she had an eating disorder.”
Her shrewdly simple act of female solidarity resonated with readers in a way even she didn’t imagine. Stasey’s social media accounts, sites of gushing fan worship any other day, have been overwhelmed with glowing responses to Herself.com. A sample: “Love the idea of @herself.com and have read every single interview twice. Thank you for being open and candid about issues that so often are pushed to the side. You are superstar in my eyes. Thank you @caitlinjstasey and fuck the haters.”
Or: “You are amazing and I truly appreciate all you do to raise awareness of our rights as women!”
One might be forgiven for wondering if a collection of generic template interviews constitutes genuine societal change or, instead, simply offers a reassuring simulacrum of change – even, as Malcolm Gladwell has suggested of online activism, a substitute for it. But Stasey’s own decision to take up feminism was the result of conversations she had tuned into online. Before then, she says, she had been blissfully insulated in the liberal, like-minded company of actors and artists.
‘I’ve always felt like I was gay’
As a child Stasey was a tomboyish child, permanently trudging around in Blundstone boots. She distinctly remembers, as an 11-year-old, the realisation that her friend was wearing a slinky black dress while she was in a T-shirt that had been bought in the gift shop of a zoo. She was also a dark-haired, dark-skinned girl surrounded by girls who, as she tells it, were all blond-haired and blue-eyed. With a British mother, an Australian father and two white names, her peers, even the parents of friends, jokingly called her “blackie”. She absorbed it, rather than correcting them.
Stasey was also confused about her own sexuality. “I’ve always felt like I was gay,” she says. “But when I was 13 I felt like it was sitting on my chest and I couldn’t move and there was nothing I could do about it. I was scared of being gay but I was also scared of approaching women. I couldn’t think of anything more frightening than asking a woman out or kissing a woman or taking a woman home.
“I knew I was different and I knew the world that I was growing up in wasn’t interested in nurturing that.”
She sought out female nude imagery in art history books (“I loved impressionism because it was actual depictions of naked bodies. I couldn’t get into Picasso. I thought, ‘Boobs don’t look like that’”). To the amusement of her family, she doodled her own nude pictures. She was confused to not be able to find her feelings reflected anywhere in her community, in the books she was reading or the television she was watching. And, though she was raised in a secular household, she attended an all girls’ Catholic high school that, though supposedly committed to inspiring its young women, only filled her with Christian shame for her bodily desires.
Stasey began self-harming at the age of 13. She had completed six months filming her first television role in ABC TV’s The Sleepover Club, during which – always gregarious with adult strangers growing up and encouraged by her drama teacher mother – she had become used to the attention of those much older than her. Unmoored from the sense of importance that she had enjoyed her on set, the return to school, and schoolwork, depressed her.
Not long after her 14th birthday, her parents found the razor blades she was using to slice her forearms. Suddenly, she felt silly. “I stopped equating self-harm with self-help,” she says. “It began feeling self-indulgent. Rather than fall deeper into a hole of self-despair, I guess I saw that I had to find a way out to survive.”
She began paying attention to what was happening around her, tuning in to nightly news forecasts and developing what Stasey’s younger sister Victoria refers to as a “precocious interest” in current affairs. “To be honest, she always annoyed us a little bit,” Victoria told me recently. “She was so socially minded and very aware. We’d be watching the news and she’d be commenting on it and trying to get us involved … we’d always just kind of roll our eyes a bit.”
“My dad always said I was really naive and that I wasn’t living in the real world,” Stasey says. “My response to that was I just have an unfailing commitment to a world that I wish we were living in. Because if you live by the parameters of what you exist in, then you might never see change.”
Stasey on the set of Neighbours with co-star Matthew Werkmeister.
‘It’s important to seem steely’
The turbulence of her adolescence behind her, the Stasey of today is staunchly sex positive. She has railed against the double standards in the censorship of women’s breasts on Facebook and Instagram, spoken out in support of sex work, and raved about the joys of everything from masturbation to casual sex. (For the premiere episode of Reign, she acted out a stairwell masturbation scene that, much to her disappointment, was cut considerably for broadcast.)
For a long time, Stasey’s all-purpose profile picture was a topless photograph of herself, which she used for both Twitter and the dating app Tinder. (Her entire Tinder bio: “Cum at me ladies.”) She now identifies as lesbian despite having almost exclusively dated men. She is currently in a self-described “somewhat open” relationship with Lucas Neff, an American actor. They see other women, together and separately.
She’s also an avid sexter, as her own mother recently learned when she picked up Stasey’s iPad by mistake.
Stasey’s sexual candor occasionally feeds right into the vulturous appetites of the tabloids and their blogging brethren. The Daily Mail, News.com and TMZ – the same outlets that pick apart Stasey’s “social media outbursts” and “bizarre Twitter rants” – frequently tsk and tut in tones of puritan outrage even as they gleefully publish Stasey’s words and pixelate her private parts.
When Stasey criticised celebrity blogger Perez Hilton for publishing leaked photos during the celebrity phone hacking scandal, he responded with “Great tits!” But Stasey refuses to censor herself.
“I think it’s important to seem steely, right? If you appear hurt, then they’ve won. If someone trolls me and makes me feel like shit, if somebody writes an article about me that makes me cry … I’m never going to be silenced by bigots and I’m never going to be silenced by trolls. I don’t want other women, who might be looking to me as a source of comfort, to feel like anything that’s thrown at me has any weight to it. You just have to be fucking boss.”
In movies and television, Stasey has done her best to take screen roles that agree with her politics. Her character on ABC’s Please Like Me pursues a sustainable forestry project all the way to Europe; on Reign, she played the King’s sexually forthright mistress Kenna, whose bohemian tendencies are strongly implied by her beaded headpieces and wristlets. (One of Kenna’s defining moments has been immortalised in a fan-made gif: “You have no idea what it’s like to be a girl in this world,” she says. “Owning nothing, having no power except the effect you have on men.”) Stasey calls Kenna “the clitoris” of the show.
In an industry notorious for retrograde gender politics, Stasey knows her views get in the way of her career longevity. Right now, however, she regularly finds herself going head-to-head with agents and casting directors. “In those scenarios you feel like you have to make yourself as attractive as possible. But I have so little interest in that now.”
“Women are so often asked to take on roles to portray their entire gender,” Stasey says, “much like any member of the LGBTQI community is asked to take on roles portraying their entire community, because they’re standing as a figurehead. Whereas men get to be nuanced, fluid, interesting people who can do shit things and people still love them.”
Even on set, Stasey fights the “well meaning sexism” of crew members calling her “sweetheart” or “darling”, retaliating by referring to them by their eye colour. “I’ll say, ‘Hey, Chocolate Eyes …’ They’re quite taken aback,” she says.
More fundamentally, making the sort of statements that would make any agent squirm, Stasey says she’s no longer really that invested in acting – except insofar as it provides her the platform and free time to be involved with issues closer to her heart. The boundless energy that propelled Stasey to her career in the first place has found a new outlet.
Asked what she sees herself doing in five, 10 years, Stasey responds with fully formed schemes for several lofty humanitarian and ethical projects. None of them involve her being in front of a camera.
Recently, she’s been in talks with photographers in Ethiopia, Somalia and Istanbul about broadening the reach and diversity of Herself.com and highlighting the stories of women in more far-flung locations.
Beyond those plans, she hopes to set up a refuge for women and children leaving abusive relationships; launch an organic restaurant; devise a more inclusive and less transphobic sex education curriculum; care for animals; and run an ethical, trans- and queer-inclusive strip club showcasing more diverse bodies.
She has also considered politics, but isn’t convinced she’d stand a chance at being elected. “I’d be like, ‘Decriminalise all drugs! Decriminalise all sex work! Let’s get more abortion clinics!’”
In her personal life, she wants to “adopt as many children in need as possible” while also regretting how “Angelina Jolie” that sounds.
Stasey has reined in her Twitter activism in the months since Herself.com launched. Every now and then, though, something sets her off.
“The world is fuuuuucked,” she says, her garden party elocution briefly freefalling into something more recognisably Australian. “The world is entirely darkness. But there are moments of light that permeate it: great acts of empathy, of compassion, of charity, ingenuity, creativeness, art and engagement.”
Ultimately, she’s optimistic about the possibility of widespread change.
“People get so overwhelmed by this sense of despair. They just shut it out, like, ‘Fuck it, I want to eat McDonald’s and I want to waste water and I want to leave all the lights on in my house because I’ve only got one life to live. I’m only one person.’ But you can effect real change. I implore people to care as much as they can about something. If everyone cared a lot about just one thing, it would alleviate the burden from others. And from the planet.”
Stasey turns to applaud the musician, who has just performed Paul McCartney’s Blackbird, singing of broken wings learning to fly.
“But yeah, I sound like a drug addled maniac: ‘We should just love each other and live in the mud together!’ But that’s what I’d really like.”