Acting is a notoriously cut-throat industry to make a name in, but 10 years ago Fremantle-born Claire Lovering was a bona fide star on the rise.
After graduating from the prestigious WA Academy of Performing Arts, in 2010, she hit the ground running enjoying the kind of dream run most aspiring actors would kill for.
Straight out of WAAPA, she scored a role in Black Swan State Theatre Company’s rendition of Tim Winton’s play in 2011, Rising Water, in what The West Australian called a “dazzling first-time performance” as a drunken backpacker led to more work with theatre companies across Australia.
By her mid-20s, Lovering was the talk of creative circles when she won a coveted Blue Room award for her self-penned one-woman show, River, in 2015. She received the Mike Walsh Fellowship, so she could to travel to New York to study method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute.
But just as quickly as it seemed her trajectory was assured, the phone stopped ringing. And Lovering admits the sudden, unsettling silence, which came just before the pandemic, made her reassess whether she wanted to be a part of the acting industry at all.
“I’d been kicking around for about eight years at that point, doing a lot of theatre, but I wasn’t getting much screen work,” Lovering explains from South Australia, where she’s spending time with her partner before heading to LA later this year.
“I’d won this award and I thought, ‘oh wow, NOW I’ve made it. Everything is going to change’. And then I didn’t work for a year and a half.”
It led to something of an existential crisis — “my Saturn’s Return period” says Lovering, referring to the pop culture astrology term that believers think shakes up people’s lives in their late 20s.
As she began to navigate who she was if she wasn’t going to be a performer, she made big changes, both physical and emotional.
“I had been dying my hair blonde — I thought that would get me more roles — so I stopped doing that, and I cut it all off,” she laughs.
“I deleted social media, and stayed off it for four years; it was about me kind of getting back to the base level of ‘who am I, without acting?’”
At her lowest ebbs, Lovering says she considered quitting the industry she loved, but that didn’t appear to love her back.
“I wasn’t working and it becomes humiliating when you are trying, and you feel like you are failing,” she says. “You start to feel like the only way you can put yourself out of your misery is if you throw in the towel, and that kind of makes the pain stop.”
But she hung on and small roles turned into bigger ones, from Class Of ‘07 to Celeste Barber’s Wellmania, stints on Home And Away and Wolf Like Me, with Isla Fisher and Josh Gad, then a starring role in the offbeat ABC comedy Gold Diggers.
This week, she’ll appear on the much-loved and buzzed-about ABC comedy Austin, which stars Michael Theo, who found fame as the breakout on reality dating show Love On The Spectrum Australia.
Austin, which also features Bridget Jones’s Diary star Sally Phillips and actor and writer Ben Miller, is a hit at home and in the UK.
In the second season, Lovering plays Austin’s “posh, poised and ruthlessly effective” new book agent, Greta, who is determined to turn her new client into a neurodivergent media brand and poster boy.
For Lovering, who has played both comedic and dramatic roles, the gig was a relished opportunity to join an already acclaimed cast — even if she didn’t know exactly what she was signing up for.
“I actually auditioned before I’d seen season one,” she explains. “I was in LA last year, so I couldn’t watch it without a VPN (virtual private network) and when I was finally able to watch it, I had already booked the role.
“I immediately thought, ‘this is genuinely funny, delightful and very watchable’. Sometimes watching shows feels like homework or hard work, but I found that I really wanted to keep clicking through to the next episode. I’m pretty sure I watched it all in one night.
“It’s just this lovely, charming show, and I was already a fan of Michael’s from Love On The Spectrum.”
The role came at the perfect time for Lovering, who has lived something of a nomadic life these past few years.
Five years on from her crisis of confidence, she has radically remade her life, including whittling her possessions down to two 23kg suitcases.
She goes where the work takes her; this year alone that has included Bondi, Canberra, Hong Kong, South Australia, and soon LA.
“I don’t really have a home anymore — I am location-less,” Lovering says. “In January I had lived in Bondi for five years, and I had been in Sydney for over 10 years, and then the apartment building I lived in was being developed, so there was no choice but to move out.”
At a crossroads, Lovering decided not to sign on for another place and instead “live out of a suitcase and follow my nose for a bit,” setting her sights on returning to LA, where she’d been based the year before.
Her nose led her to Canberra to film Austin, then home to Perth (including a week on Rottnest), off to Bali and then two months in Hong Kong.
Lovering was in the Asian city filming a project called The Season, set on superyachts and produced by the same people behind Crazy Rich Asians. It also features her good friend, Last King Of The Cross actor Lincoln Younes.
“When I got that audition, I was like, ‘this will be nice for whoever gets this role’ — and then I got it,” she says. “It was me — I was the lucky girl!”
The wherever-the-wind-blows philosophy is paying dividends; The Season is due out later this year, as is a film she shot last year called Play Dirty, which stars Mark Wahlberg.
For Lovering, it’s been a dream run — and given the roller coaster of the past, she doesn’t take a second of it for granted.
“Actually, I am really glad I went through it all,” she says.
“When work started to trickle back in, I could hold it lightly and not be like, ‘this is everything’,” she muses.
“Now, I just try to make peace with the unknown; downtime between jobs I try to embrace, and lean into the peace of it.
“I know I will be OK no matter what, whether it’s two weeks between jobs, six months, or even two years. Life is good regardless.”