Stage and screen actor Hannah Fredericksen moved to Geelong a year and a half ago. She spoke to Matt Hewson about life in the entertainment industry and falling in love with Geelong.
Hannah Fredericksen’s acting career has seen her involved in all levels of the craft, from independent theatre and short roles in local television series to four years in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Australia’s longest running musical.
The nature of the acting business has meant Hannah has travelled far and often, and only last month she returned to her home in Geelong after playing Molly Ralston for a five-month national tour of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap.
Born and raised in Brisbane, Hannah was the lucky recipient of “a really beautiful childhood”.
Hannah said she had been drawn to entertaining people from a very early age.
“Some of my first memories are of trying to make my family laugh; I always loved making my mum laugh, and I still really enjoy doing that,” she said.
“I’m one of three kids, and I have very few memories of not being able to be outside because the weather was so great all the time, so I was playing on the street with other kids, lots of singing and dancing.
“I grew up loving performing and I was really entrenched in the amateur theatre scene in Brisbane. Whenever I would meet other creative kids I felt like I had found my people.”
When Hannah was 12 she joined Brisbane Arts Theatre, and her first performance was playing a princess in a production of Puss In Boots.
“I loved that we would finish the show and then I got to go out as the princess and sign autographs for all these kids,” she said.
“I remember that feeling of performing on stage for the first time, I really loved that… and it was like a bug.”
“When I announced I was going to audition for drama schools when I finished year 12, I think my parents thought I wouldn’t get in because I was so young, I was only 17. And they were thrilled but, I think, quite shocked when I got in, and then obviously they had to help me move away.”
Hannah went to the Victorian College of Arts (VCA) to complete a Bachelor of Music Theatre, graduating in 2011, which she said was an “amazing” experience.
“(The VCA) is a hive of creatives; you’ve got everybody from the musical theatre stream, to somebody studying composition, to sculpture artists, and everyone sitting in the one cafeteria,” she said.
“I did so many odd jobs. I did a lot of busking at the South Melbourne market, I used to sing with my guitar there… I’d have money in a literal bucket and then I’d count it to see if I could afford a flight home to Brisbane; I was quite homesick in that first year.
“I worked in the high rollers room at Crown, I did catering jobs, I handed out leaflets for gyms. That’s the thing as an actor, you live many lives. I’ve made a lot of coffees.”
With her degree in hand, Hannah was “quietly hopeful” about the career ahead of her.
“The first show I did was called City of Angels, a really great musical, that was on at the (Melbourne) Arts Centre for maybe five shows over a weekend,” she said.
“And then I had a long stretch until maybe the end of the following year where I wasn’t booking anything and I remember being like, gosh, is this what it’s going to be like?
“I remember really prolific actors coming in to talk to us in our final year of drama school and saying, it is going to be really hard and you will have to have other jobs, there’s just not enough work in this industry.
“I think every person sits there thinking, yeah, but I’ll be the exception to that rule, that won’t be me. And then of course, inevitably, it is. So that was my first shock at what that felt like to experience that level of rejection.”
Fortunately, that period came to an end. Hannah soon found herself acting alongside David Wenham and Jacqueline McKenzie in prolific Australian filmmaker Paul Cox’s final film before his death, Force of Destiny.
Her big break in musical theatre came along in 2016 when she won the role of Sandra Dee in Dream Lover, starring opposite David Campbell as Bobby Darrin.
The show was a hit; Hannah received a Sydney Theatre Award nomination for the role, while the soundtrack won an ARIA and Campbell took the award for Best Male Actor in a Musical in the 2018 Helpmann Awards following the show’s return season in Melbourne.
Since then Hannah has worked solidly, again on stage alongside Campbell in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, as Olivia Newton-John in Logie award-winning mini-series Molly, on SyFy Network’s Hunters and playing Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
She said had been “really lucky” to work so much in the twin media of stage and screen, but each had its pros and cons.
“The thing I love about theatre is that it’s live; that show, with that particular group of people in the audience, will never be repeated again,” she said.
“The risk and the adrenaline of it is kind of addictive in that way, what you do when something goes wrong, and it does all the time. It’s such an old art form and I don’t think it will ever go away because of that.
“And (in film) you get to explore a character further than you potentially do in two and a half hours on stage. If you play something for a long period of time you get to really stretch to the fullness of the character’s experience.”
In early 2023 Hannah found herself relocating from Melbourne to Geelong, a move she neither expected nor, by her own admission, thought she would ever want to make.
The reason, of course, was love. In a story straight out of a modern musical, Hannah connected with her partner Kane, a Geelong teacher, on her very first foray into online dating.
“Kane was my first online app date; I’d never used the apps before, and I obviously didn’t know how to use them properly because I had mine set to over 100km radius,” she said.
“So he came up in Geelong… we decided to meet for coffee and the rest is history.
“We laugh now, because I think maybe on the third date I told him, if this goes anywhere I’m never moving here, just so you know.
“He was like, okay, okay, and then obviously here I am. And I’ve really fallen in love with it, it’s a beautiful place to live. It feels like a really thriving, creative place and that’s sort of taken me by surprise.”
A month after returning from The Mousetrap tour, Hannah has settled back into a routine of teaching acting at her home studio and recording narrations of audiobooks.
And what’s next on the horizon for Hannah?
“We’ll see – that’s the beauty and the terror of this career, I never really know,” she said.
“I could tell you about the next three weeks, but I definitely couldn’t even tell you about the next three months. In January I never would have thought I would be touring for six months on The Mousetrap.
“I might eat my hat, but I don’t think I’ll ever be in a really structured job, I think I’ll always be piecing things together.
“It’s like a patchwork quilt; some years the quilt has lots of holes and is sort of falling apart, and some years it’s really colourful and amazing and unexpected, and I guess that’s the kind of life I love.”
