Deborra-lee Furness

“Jude, my Jude—you always get very possessive of your characters. Jude is in a lot of pain. She comes across on the page as sort of grumpy, and she’s mean to her granddaughter, but it’s like anything, when you understand where someone is coming from, you get them. I love her strength to battle on, to fight through what she’s got to get through to come out the other side. There’s no handbook on how to deal with grief. When you’re suffering, you just have to go through it. She has incredible loyalty to her husband, they’re a great team, and as I see her, she’s a matriarch. She’s been in this town the longest and I think she feels a certain responsibility to make sure everyone else is okay, even though we find her at this time in her life when she needs to be looked after. For some people it’s hard to go back and let others take care of them. So she’s tough, she’s strong.

Men and women are very different and we deal very differently with grief. I don’t think the men really get to the nitty-gritty. I think women need, have the need, to talk more. We have to say, I feel this, I feel that. We need to talk about it. So I think women talk and men go fishing!”

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