Less than five minutes into the first episode of Dear Life, Brooke Satchwell’s character, Lillian, dressed as a respectable bonneted 1850s lady, vomits violently in front of a crowd at Ballarat tourist attraction Sovereign Hill. Lillian is in the depths of grief and she’s messy – drinking way too much, crying, and eating raw two-minute noodles dipped in wine. And the former Neighbours star and two-time Logie winner couldn’t be happier with the role!
“Lillian is very, very messy when we meet her,” Brooke, 45, tells TV WEEK. “This was superb, because one of the hardest parts of our work in television is that you’re being constantly rearranged to look a certain way for every take. So, to be in a role where that went completely out the window was so liberating and so brilliant.”
Lillian is grieving because she’s lost the love of her life – and Brooke can relate.
“I’m lucky that I’ve found my person,” she says. “I know what it is to have that light in your life and someone who sees you for everything you are and champions everything you are. That is a holy grail in life and Lillian has lost that.
“I know deep grief and I know deep trauma and I’ve done my work personally to process that. But, as we all know, experiences live in the body. And I’m lucky that my body is precisely what I use to do my job. So to have the opportunity to exercise the understanding of those emotions through a different story… it was very cathartic.”
Brooke has come a long way since she joined the cast of Neighbours as Anne Wilkinson in November 1996, when she was still at high school.
“I’m so grateful for that door to this life,” she says. “I still have all my friends who are my family from that experience.”
Roles in shows such as Water Rats and Packed to the Rafters followed, and then, in 2014, Brooke took a risk by playing Tiffany, a white woman who “acted black” to impress her Indigenous boyfriend in Black Comedy.
“I thought I was going to get arrested and kicked out of the country and never work again,” she admits.
Instead, the series resonated with viewers, and also changed Brooke’s life: “My industry turned to look at me and went, ‘Oh, you can do other things?’ I thought the clue was in the word ‘actor’!”
Brooke says working with the First Nations team behind Black Comedy opened a door for her that she couldn’t have opened on her own.
“It broke any perception of what I was or who I was. It changed the game. And that’s why I now dedicate myself to opening as many doors in return, and work with a lot of organisations and boards to make pathways.”
Brooke’s recent roles have included the wealthy Chloe Walcott in the series Black Snow, set in a Queensland South Sea Islander community, and Georgina Merrick, a juror with an abusive husband in The Twelve. She says she’s thrilled to be being offered these kinds of roles.
“I’m just chuffed that I’ve managed to stay standing in this industry for something like 30-odd years now, having had no idea what I was getting into.
“And I feel both lucky and incredibly proud of myself that this chapter of my life has found me in a place where I’m getting to do jobs that have immense value in terms of the conversations and stories being told.”
In the town where she lives, Brooke gets people coming up to her to talk about the domestic violence storyline in The Twelve.
“It’s a lovely chill place, where a lot of retired coppers move to. It’s a nice place to be. I’ll be in the coffee shop and they’ll walk up and just say, ‘Thank you for showing it like it is.’”
Brooke isn’t on social media, saying she’s “not a super tech person”. She still uses a diary and prefers to connect to the people in her life “in a real way”. But, having made a choice not to be on social media, there’s something she finds frustrating.
“There’s a bunch of people pretending to be me on all of these platforms,” she explains. “I can’t get them taken down, which is a shame.
“I think if people think they’re connecting with me and they’re not, that’s incredibly uncool.”
Personal connections matter a lot to Brooke. She describes herself as a “third-gen hoarder” and, over the decades, has “gathered and gathered and gathered” things that hold memories for her.
“Even if I’d left my bag in the green room at Neighbours and one of the crew, one of my mates, left me some jokey note, I’ve still got all of that. I have all my birthday cards.
“I have all the letters that my school friends wrote me when I first started working on Neighbours. They used to write me letters so we could still communicate. I have everything. Every Logies invite, every placard.”
Speaking of TV WEEK Logies, Brooke has won two of them: in 1998 for Most Popular New Talent, and in 2023 for Most Outstanding Supporting Actress. She says the win in 2023, for The Twelve, was “beautiful”.
“That’s decades of work,” she explains. “It was like a bookend to a very big chapter. And now I’m mid-forties, and it’s a very powerful time for women, I think. I’m really, really enjoying it, so I’m pretty excited about the next chapter ahead.”
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
