Finding her own path

Matilda Brown can thank her father, actor Bryan Brown, for encouraging her to persist with a career in the film industry. “A couple of years ago I felt like I didn’t want to [work in the industry] anymore and I was thinking about studying psychology and I was really serious about it,” says the vivacious 30-year-old over the phone from the family farm on the NSW Mid North Coast. 

“He was just really devastated,” she says of her father’s reaction. “He was like, ‘I just really believe in you and I think you’re so talented. It makes me sad that you’re going to give this up’.” That strong paternal encouragement prompted a rethink and today Matilda is busy juggling film projects.

After graduating from film school, Matilda developed short films including the 2010 Tropfest finalist How God Works, in which she played two characters who were polar opposites, and the ABC iview miniseries Lessons from the Grave. She also wrote and starred in the short film Am I Okay? that explored how she felt overwhelmed by the amount of choice in the world. 

“I didn’t know how to navigate my way through all that choice,” she says. “It was disabling. I wanted to talk about what I was going through. Lots of people connected to that film. I had a lot of people get in touch to say it helped them – one boy said it stopped him from killing himself. I was like, ‘Wow – that’s the effect you can have in the world just by sharing your vulnerabilities and what you’re going through. That’s worth something’.”

She’s now working on a third series of her AACTA Award-nominated TV series Let’s Talk About, as well as penning a feature film that’s “really loosely” based on Lessons from the Grave. In fact, she’s just pulled up at the farm fresh from writing a first draft during a month in a cabin in tiny Coorabell in northern NSW. “I made that show with my dad when I was 25,” Matilda says. “I love father-daughter stuff but when you write something at 25, it’s so different five years later – all the things you want to talk about are different, your relationship’s different, you’ve grown up quite a lot.  

“It’s about an estranged father and daughter – they haven’t been in contact for 10 years – and she comes back after finding out he doesn’t have long to live. It’s about them finding peace. It’s about her appreciating the small things in life and reconnecting with family – I guess it’s all the stuff I’ve been going through with going back and forth to LA and working out what I want in life.” 

Matilda now feels grateful for the frustrations she encountered as an actress. “If it was all job after job as an actress, I probably wouldn’t have pushed myself to write and make my own stuff,” she says. “I’m actually so glad it was difficult because I’m so much happier creating than being a puppet for someone else’s words. I like that idea of being in control of your own destiny. I prefer writing and directing these days more than acting.” It helps too that actor friends, such as Damian Walshe-Howling, are also focusing on writing and directing. 

She credits her mother, Rachel Ward, with nurturing her creative talents.  “My mum was really into encouraging us [Matilda is the middle of three children] to be creative in all sorts of different ways, whether it was painting or taking photos or making clay stuff. It was inevitable that I was going to go down a creative path but I guess I was also steered down that path because my parents are in the industry.” Matilda’s creativity is apparent in her Instagram account. “I do love taking photos and telling little stories and I’m also very interested in people,” she says. “It can be quite distracting for me. There are times when I’m like, ‘Enough, it’s consuming me, I need to get off it’.”  

Her father also helped along the way with his own personal motto: that every no is closer to a yes. “Before he was an actor, he sold insurance,” says Matilda. “He knew statistically there’d be a certain amount of nos and yeses, and more nos than yeses. So every no he got he was like, ‘Yes!’ I thought that was a great thing in general – you can apply it to anything, like dating and job interviews.”

As for her own style Matilda, who lives in Sydney’s inner west, confesses: “I really like to be comfortable in everything that I wear. Right now, I’m wearing the baggiest jeans and a baggy cashmere jumper and bare feet – I love bare feet. But I do love a flowy dress – I’m pretty curvy so I like a nice wrap dress. I also like flats because I like to feel grounded. I feel silly in high heels and I’m minimal when it comes to make-up. I’m a bit of a tomboy, I think.” 

The Audi and InStyle Women of Style Awards recognises outstanding women and their achievements across a range of fields each year. As part of the awards, the InStyle and Audi Style Scholarship is presented to an outstanding individual, Then there is also the InStyle and Audi Style Scholarship, which each year recognises the efforts of one individual and their pursuit of excellence, giving them a $10,000 bursary to help the recipient further their efforts in their chosen field.