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Toni Collette’s best performances cross genres and decades, but they’re all characters who hide behind fronts – steely faces, picture-perfect lives, twisted games.
Maybe they’re social outcasts desperate to fit in, as with the Australian actor’s 1994 breakthrough role in Muriel’s Wedding. Maybe she’s a mother terrified of her son’s visions, trying not to let it show on her face, as with her Oscar-nominated role in The Sixth Sense. Or a woman with dissociative identity disorder, who swirls through seven alters (The United States of Tara, for which she won an Emmy). Or an artist diving deep into the dark well of grief and never emerging to face a horrific reality (Hereditary).
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But none have been quite as devilish as Evelyn Wade, the leader of a secluded school for troubled teens at the centre of new Netflix mystery-thriller Wayward.
Eerie and earthy in equal measure, Evelyn’s new-age charisma and cardigans obscure a ruthless need to exert control and break people down – all under the guise of benevolence and self-actualisation. From under her wire-frame glasses, she oversees not just Tall Pines Academy but, unofficially, its namesake town, a small forest-eclipsed community in Virginia.
It’s a role that pulls from all of Collette’s power as an actor. Evelyn is magnetic, with the same warmth and groundedness that makes Muriel Heslop so painfully real – and pairs it with a stark darkness, one that is all the more chilling for the drop-off between the two masks.
Across Wayward’s eight episodes, Evelyn faces suspicion from Alex (creator Mae Martin), a cop who moves to Tall Pines with his pregnant wife, an Academy graduate. He soon makes contact with two of Tall Pines’ recent involuntary boarders/inmates who are desperate to escape.
The show’s been billed as a deeply personal project for Martin, inspired by their own wayward years as a teen in the early 2000s (also the show’s time period), during which their best friend was sent to a troubled teen camp. This industry – which includes therapeutic boarding schools, military-style boot camps and juvenile facilities – has faced growing calls for regulation in the US due to allegations of child abuse, led in part by Paris Hilton, who was institutionalised at four separate schools as a teen.
But Wayward dials up the cultish woo-woo element, making the show more conceptual than literal in its critique of this system. There are also many ideas under the hood. With Evelyn breaking down teens to build them into functional adults (cult members?), the academy is partially a metaphor for the brutal transition from adolescence to adult society.
The show isn’t exceptional; though there are some nice twists, it’s often a little unfocused and slow. But it’s a great acting exercise for Collette, and is worth watching for that alone.
It also arrives during an interesting point in Collette’s career, as the 52-year-old experiences a second wind carrying her towards more menacing fare after the smash success of 2018 psychological horror Hereditary.
As the mother driven mad by grief in Hereditary.Credit: A24
Starring Collette as a mother driven mad by grief (and featuring screams you will never forget), the film – director Ari Aster’s first – was a major breakthrough for then-emerging zeitgeist film company A24, making a reported $US87 million ($132 million) on a modest $US10 million ($15 million) budget.
Since then, Collette has routinely been cast in tense crime dramas (Unbelievable, The Staircase, Juror #2) and psychological thrillers (I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Nightmare Alley) or in satirical roles as a duplicitous, out-of-touch wealthy woman (Knives Out, Mickey 17).
These all allow Collette to do what she does best, revealing cracks in complex characters, or playing a woman on the verge of breakdown/breakthrough (Clockwatchers, a scene-stealing moment in The Hours, surprisingly not-fluffy comedy In Her Shoes).
As unlikely heroine Muriel Heslop in Muriel’s Wedding.
But still, it’s a sharp shift from before Hereditary, where Collette would work across genre and actively against type. After the international success of Muriel’s Wedding, in which the previously unknown Collette was nominated for a Golden Globe, she turned down similar awkward-girl offers, such as Mira Sorvino’s role in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion and the lead in Bridget Jones’s Diary.
In the decades between, Collette zagged from period dramas (Emma) to arthouse musicals (Velvet Goldmine), Samuel L. Jackson-led actions (Shaft), off-kilt comedies (Connie and Carla) to heartwarming dramas (About A Boy, Little Miss Sunshine). She’s often chosen small but memorable roles, and tends to favour first-time, Australian and female directors – occasionally all three at once, with Alethea Jones’s (unfortunately not great) Fun Mom Dinner. She offered depth to even the slimmest role – and some, in the years between United States of Tara ending in 2011 and Hereditary, were pretty slim (do not watch Christmas horror Krampus!).
Perhaps this moment of her career – of playing malevolent and/or mysterious white women – is offering a way to access meatier roles while they’re in-vogue even if repetitive in scope, especially as Collette enters her 50s, a time when offers for complex characters traditionally shrink.
With Mark Ruffalo in Mickey 17.
But there are signs that Wayward could be a sendoff to Evelyn Wade and her ilks, with Collette following in Nicole Kidman’s footsteps by producing films and television programs she’s eager to act in (see Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers and almost every show Kidman’s done since).
Her production company, Vocab Films, made its debut in 2023 with Mafia Mamma, one of Collette’s few roles post Hereditary that doesn’t fit in a neat box. Instead, it’s delightfully bizarre, an ultra-gory comedy where Collette plays an office worker who arrives in Italy to inherit the family business.
Her upcoming acting credits – including two Vocab Films productions, one of them Collette’s feature directorial debut, an adaptation of Lily King’s 2020 bildungsroman Writers & Lovers – seem to be distancing themselves from this era, returning to the glorious chaos of her earlier CV.
Wayward is on Netflix now.
What’s your favourite Toni Collette performance? Let us know in the comments below.
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