Lisa McCune’s biggest career moments and her emotional new show

Although she’s starred in some of Australia’s biggest shows of the past 30 years, Lisa McCune doesn’t always want to be in the public eye.

”There are sometimes that you probably want a little more privacy and so you just take that privacy,” she tells TV WEEK.

”You’re entitled to that, like anybody else.”

That’s one of the things Lisa admires about the people featured in Big Miracles, the new factual series she narrates.

Big Miracles features couples and individuals trying to get pregnant through IVF and other fertility treatments.

”They are sharing some of the most intimate and personal details about their life in a documentary series, over a really long period,” Lisa explains.

”I know I probably wouldn’t have done that. That I find truly courageous.”

As narrator, Lisa is watching the completed episodes, as viewers would watch them – and she’s finding it a very emotional experience.

”There hasn’t been an episode where I haven’t cried,” she says.

”Sometimes it’s joyful – they’re not tears of sadness, they’re tears of just being moved, on a really human level.”

Lisa says the series celebrates the fact that families come in ”different shapes and sizes”. It’s something she learnt as a child.

”My dad had a beautiful lady in his life who fostered him for seven years,” she remembers.

”She and her husband were unable to have children, and she was the warmest, kindest, most wonderful person. So finding a way to be a parent doesn’t necessarily have to be the way we’ve grown up thinking about it.”

For Lisa, working on Big Miracles and learning about IVF and other fertility treatments has been an eye-opener.

From a young age, she knew that she ”absolutely” wanted to have children, but didn’t go through IVF herself. Archer, her first child with her then-husband Tim Disney, was born in 2001, followed by Oliver two years later and Remy two years after that.

After Archer’s birth, Lisa joined a local mothers’ group, and she’s still close to the women she met there.

”My mothers’ group, for me, in the early days, when it was really difficult with a baby who wasn’t sleeping, became a place of honesty where you could go, ‘I don’t know how to deal with this,”’ she says.

”Twenty-one years later, they’re some of my oldest and dearest friends, and our kids are all friends.”

By the time Lisa had her first child, she had already left the show that had made her famous, Blue Heelers.

Looking back on her years as young cop Maggie Doyle, she remembers it as a ”remarkable” period.

”I was so lucky to have that gig, to have six years of absolute joy and friendship,” she says.

”It was a very good time.”

As fans know, Maggie died in a hail of bullets in 2000 – a death that shocked viewers, and Lisa, at the time. But more than two decades down the track, the actress can see why Maggie had to die.

”I think I had these grandiose dreams of popping back every now and then and visiting, but you can’t do that to an audience, and the producers probably made the right choice,” she admits.

”I reacted on a very emotional level, thinking, ‘Why did I have to be killed off?’ But it did take five bullets to take her out.”

At 51, Lisa has no regrets when it comes to her career, which has also included starring in drama Sea Patrol and comedy How to Stay Married.

”What I love about my career is that I’m getting to do things that are different,” she says.

”I’ve done a big body of work in live theatre, I do musicals and I get to do beautiful shows like Big Miracles, where I don’t have to be front and centre.

”I try to make sure I mix it up a little bit. I like to do a bit of everything. I like to touch audiences in a different way.”