The Clearing: JP Pomare’s book about Australian cult takes frightening turn in Disney+ adaptation
The Clearing takes a novelistic approach and jumps between time periods, the present focusing on the abduction of a child, which might have ties to the “Blackmarsh” cult from years past. Photo / Supplied
Miranda Otto has played many characters deserving of a cult following. There was Dimity in her early movie Love Serenade, warrior princess Éowyn in The Lord of the Rings, and Aunt Zelda in the recent campy witchcraft series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
But in her latest, The Clearing, a cult following comes with her character.
In the mini-series adaptation of JP Pomare’s book In the Clearing, she plays Adrienne Beaufort, a character the New Zealand writer based on Anne Hamilton-Byrne. As the head of notorious Australian sect the Family, Hamilton-Byrne claimed she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, while preaching a New Age mix of Christianity, Hinduism, and space alien theory to her followers.
Otto may not be playing Hamilton-Byrne, but her big hair, big glasses and dramatic make-up suggest the show isn’t fudging any connection to the real figure.
“Yeah, I guess people could say that there are visual similarities,” Otto tells the Listener. “I really didn’t think about her. I’ve done so much research on other cults and I guess it’s been a fascination for me over the years. So, realistically, for me it was more about drawing from lots of other material that I could find and a lot of it is the script and imagination, to make up this character for myself.”
But the hair and the specs …
“Well, that’s not actually my hair,” she laughs. “The look was so great. I loved it.”
The real Hamilton-Byrne adopted more than a dozen children – some of them were offspring of cult members – dying their hair blonde and raising them as her own as part of a plan to face a coming apocalypse.
The Family was raided by Victorian police in the late 1980s, but Hamilton-Byrne largely escaped punishment for her actions, which included dosing her “children” with psychiatric drugs and LSD. She died in 2019, the year Pomare’s mystery thriller, his second, was published. It followed documentaries, books by cult members and other non-fiction works.
In the Clearing, though, took a novelistic approach and jumped between time periods, the present focusing on the abduction of a child, which might have ties to the “Blackmarsh” cult from years past. Its echoes of the real-life Family combined with its narrative sleight of hand make it easy to see why its Australian producers grabbed the screen option, with Disney+ taking it to the wider world. The show comes complete with a cameo by the Melbourne-based writer in a scene where Adrienne is addressing her following.