Asher Keddie in Fake: The Comedy-Drama Queen is brilliant

Every great actor has a way of telling us something more, a way that brings the implicit into the explicit without resorting to easy explanations. With Asher Keddie, it's the moment of surprise. Looking back at the Australian actor's work, which has steadily grown in popularity, there is often a moment when Keddie's character is surprised. She has a melodious “oh” that ends with a hint of uncertainty, but there is a sense of realization in her eyes. Something has changed.

When Keddie gets caught, she notices. It makes sense in the syntax of the comic drama, where Keddie’s breakout role in Network Ten’s Offspring resided. Embarrassment can be funny and enlightening. But Keddie instinctively took it further. While her comic roles found a harder edge and the dramatic pieces offered a more austere accompaniment, Keddie has made that moment when discomfort can become painfully revealing a trademark. It is there in Fakethe current Paramount+ drama, in which she delivers a masterful performance.

Keddie, who recently turned 50, went from actor to star when Offspring debuted in 2010. In the years that followed, as audiences delighted in the travails of Melbourne midwife Nina Proudman, she won so many Logies, including the 2013 gold medal, that her mantelpiece probably needed a boost. That's the short-term game of success, but Keddie has played the long-term one too. The range of her roles and the depth she found in them were exemplary. Keddie is famous for her red carpet looks, but now her talent is actually underrated.

To some extent, that's because Keddie has stayed. Any Australian actor who can combine Hollywood with his career is automatically lauded by the public – our national pride breeds open praise. But as with Claudia Karvan, with whom Keddie starred in the influential Australian drama Love my way Building a body of work in Australia between 2004 and 2007 allowed you to have a secret conversation with a national audience, hitting the high and low notes of a collective psyche.

Keddie has a comedian's instincts and romantic comedy comes easily to her. One or two early leading roles may have tilted too far in that direction, but in turn some of Keddie's nominally lighter roles now have a sharp edge. I found her to be a revelation in Binges Fightthe comedy-drama series about an anxious career woman from last year. As media commentator Evelyn Jones, Keddie plays someone who can't seem to balance work and family. She finds fulfillment in her women's website and is frustrated with her husband raising the children.

Evelyn's missteps as a sports mom at school are amusing, but both Keddie's and Sarah Scheller's shows are serious about portraying a woman who is not defined by motherhood. Evelyn wrestles with this in fundamental ways, and while she also has to grovel to Dannii Minogue in a really funny example of celebrity casting, the show has painful parameters. One of the criticisms Fight I had the old bugbear that Evelyn was not likeable, but for me that was the whole point. Evelyn had accepted that, and the audience should too.

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Keddie is not afraid to create discomfort. The 2020 ABC series Stateless (now on Netflix) remains a telling indictment of this country's obsession with border security, but the performance I like best, alongside the top-notch work of Yvonne Strahovski, Fayssal Bazzi and Cate Blanchett, is Keddie's supporting role as Clare Kowitz. She's a scrupulous immigration bureaucrat assigned to an outback detention center, and an executive who must realize she's become the head of a prison camp. It's, like the facility itself, uncompromisingly absurd, and Keddie captures a life spiraling out of control.