And then she opens
her mouth – and it's straight back to Launceston.
“Ooh,
f***!” she exclaims in a thick Aussie accent, pulling her right leg
up into an ambitious yoga pose after one hour too long in the makeup
chair.
“My
accent couldn't be thicker, it just depends who I'm talking to,”
she explains, before shouting to her manager “Hey Dave, when did I
do the cover of Vogue?”
in much the same way as one might ask where the car keys are or if
there's any milk left in the fridge.
It's
the first hint of what you quickly discover about the 27-year-old
Tassie actress most Australians know as “that girl” - that girl
from Transformers,
that girl in the Bonds advertisements and, perhaps less positively,
that girl who was beaten by Matthew Newton.
She's a bit ocker,
she swears, she says what she thinks. Meet the real Rachael Taylor.
“I
can't remember the last time I even went to a restaurant or a bar,”
she says, sitting cross legged on a couch and wrapping her fur coat
tight as she sips a cup of tea.
She's in the lobby
of one of New York's trendiest hotels, the Maritime in Chelsea, a
notorious hangout for celebrities, hipsters and wannabes of both
kinds. But though she looks the part in her skinny jeans and patent
leather brogues, Taylor insists she's not into “the scene”.
“I
don't even know where the scene is,” she laughs.
“Everyone
says 'You're in New York, you must be going to amazing restaurants
and bars' and it's like, yeah - Friday night I had half a jar of
peanut butter and a glass of chardonnay, watched some television and
went to bed. And I felt really good about that choice.
“Sometimes
you just need to watch a bit of Khloe
and Lamar. Track pants,
peanut butter, Kardashians – thank you, great.”
The
Launceston-born actress and Bonds ambassador, who now lives in Los
Angeles, is in New York to film the pilot of 666
Park Avenue, a
supernatural TV drama in which she plays the manager of a haunted
apartment building.
Although
since the recent American ABC reboot of Charlie's
Angels, in which she
starred as cat burglar Abby Sampson, was cancelled after just four
episodes, Taylor's quick to point out that 666
Park Avenue may never
actually make it to television.
“I've
learned on a couple of different projects now that you don't count
your chickens before they've hatched,” she says.
Not
that she's bothered by such pitfalls of the industry. Even seeing her
face dismantled as Charlie's
Angels billboards were
taken down all over America didn't faze her: “That was really
amusing - I had lots of jokes with my friends about that,” she
says.
For
Taylor, who recently starred in Any
Questions for Ben? with
her actor boyfriend Josh Lawson and will soon feature alongside
Modern Family's
Eric Stonestreet and Prison
Break hunk Wentworth
Miller in psychological thriller Loft,
it's
all just part of the job.
“I
don't look very far forward these days. I'd love to be on a TV show,
I like going to work, but if I'm not I'm just not going to be
disappointed,” she says.
“It's
not that I don't care - I'm quite ambitious, but I just don't live
and die by this job. When I was younger I did. When I was 22 I
desperately wanted to be accepted and working and prove that I had a
reason to be here. And now I just don't mind if I'm in the club or
not.”
She's just as matter-of-fact about her abusive former relationship
with actor Matthew Newton, which ended in 2010 after he bashed her in
a hotel in Rome, leaving her with facial injuries.
She still has his name tattooed on her right wrist – something she
describes as a “complete aberration”, given she's never so much
as had her ears pierced.
“I
do want to get it removed but every now and again I look down on it
and I'm like 'Never, ever again will someone treat me that f***ing
way, ever'. And that's quite useful,” she says.
“It
makes me very proud of where I've been, in a way.”
It seems the tattoo and the painful memories attached to it are just
another reminder of Taylor's past that keep her grounded - like her
broad accent, which she says she will never drop.
“Sometimes
it's like Australians come overseas and the 'Aussie' gets refined out
of us. I don't know what that is and it's never happened to me
because I'm really proud of it,” she says.
“I
don't have an embarrassment about where I'm from or who I am anymore.
I know who I am. I don't fit in everywhere but I know where I do fit
in.”
First published in the Sunday Telegraph magazine, cover story, April 8, 2012.