There’s busy. And then there’s Teresa Palmer busy.
The actor has an easy, breezy air about her that belies the fact she’s got enough going on to make your head spin: back-to-back projects for two years, including working with Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Russell Crowe and Liam Neeson, all while parenting five children and this year, balancing the demands of pregnancy.
Palmer is the first to admit she made a conscious decision to “bust my balls” and go at breakneck speed, so she can hit the brakes hard when her next child is born later this year.
“I was like, ‘alright, I am just going to work back-to-back-to-back so that we can have another baby, and I can take time off, and still have stuff coming out,” she explains.
“But I have also been very selective with the projects I take — I won’t take just anything.”
There have been movies (Bruna Papandrea’s Addition, The Fall Guy with Gosling and Blunt) and TV series (The Last Anniversary and The Clearing, with Miranda Otto), with more to come this year (action-thriller Bear Country with Crowe and the black comedy heist movie 4 Kids Walk Into A Bank with Neeson).
While Palmer agrees it was a lot, it was a means to an end that she’s looking forward to.
“I knew that I was in this season of (work), so it was like, ‘Alright, for the next 18 months, I am going to bust my balls and then I can have this baby, and take a breath, and focus on being a parent, and taking my kids to school every day,” she says.
The next cab off the rank is her role in the Binge adaptation of Jane Sanderson’s novel Mix Tape: a four-part miniseries about the teenage romance of Daniel and Alison in the 1980s, then picking up with them again as adults, played by Jim Sturgess and Palmer, living on opposite sides of the world.
As kids, the young friends, who live in Sheffield in the north of England, fall in love and connect through the making of mix tapes. After a long period of estrangement, they find a way back to one another through music once more. Needless to say, the series boasts a killer late-80s soundtrack.
It struck a chord when it made its debut at SXSW Film and TV Festival in Texas earlier this year, winning the coveted Audience Award in the TV Spotlight category.
“I am not surprised that people connect with it, because it’s so nostalgic,” Palmer says. “I think we dream of a simpler time, when we were making our lovers mix tapes, and burning CDs.
“It’s that ‘first love’ feeling and there’s nothing more intoxicating and more beautiful than those butterflies, and that intensity.”
Though much younger than the characters in the book — Palmer was born in 1986, three years before the series is set — Palmer still remembers playing mix tapes in her mum’s Holden Barina before graduating to CDs, and her own car, a few years later.
“I had an external plug-in CD player from Cash Converters and a $40 Cash Converter sub-woofer,” she laughs. “The car was a bright yellow Hyundai Accent, 2002, and I would crank Dr Dre, Eminem, and Snoop Dog with the windows down and drive up to my private Catholic school.”
It’s hard to imagine that Palmer — esteemed actress, podcaster, earth mother, Byron Bay resident and co-founder of the parenting blog Your Zen Mama — was ever a rebellious schoolgirl blasting rap music out of the windows of a canary-coloured car.
But if there is one thing Palmer insists upon, it’s being true to herself.
Not long ago, she and her husband, director Mark Webber, relocated to Byron Bay, after splitting their time between Palmer’s hometown of Adelaide and Los Angeles, where Webber’s son is based. They’re now in the process of planning their forever home on rural acreage outside of the town.
Palmer says she owes her sanity these past few years to her steadfast commitment to herself to always “keep things real” as a public figure, as she navigates motherhood and her acting career.
She’s always careful to be authentic online, sharing the grief of a miscarriage last year and intimate stories of her pregnancies through her blog.
“I would never be able to do all this without being myself,” Palmer explains. “I am just so grateful, and so lucky that I am living this beautiful, dream life. But if I suddenly start being a version of myself online, and people start to be in a state of comparison with me, I just . . . I can’t. I have just got to keep it real. Because I would go crazy if I wasn’t like that.”
But if Palmer has felt like she was in the eye of the storm the past couple of years, she’s about to take that to a much more literal place — she’s taking her family on a five-week caravan trip across the US, including her “bucket list” destination of Tornado Alley.
“We are taking all the kids.” she says with a laugh. “My stepson Isaac (who lives in America with his mother, actor and director Frankie Shaw) finished year 11 today, so he is coming with us.
“We’ll all be in a 30-foot RV that my husband drives, going up through Texas, staying with the Van Der Beeks.”
And yes, the Van Der Beeks that Palmer speaks of are the family of Dawson’s Creek star James Van Der Beek, who has six children with wife Kimberly Brook.
But 11 kids running around is not even where the chaos ends, Palmer laughs, because then they are driving north through the centre of North America known for tornadoes.
“I wanted to do Tornado Alley during tornado season; me and my son Forest are obsessed with Twister, and we watch Storm Stories. I think we have watched every single tornado documentary that has ever been released.
“It’s our thing that we do together and he and I secretly want to see one, but also — not.”
Palmer admits her husband isn’t fully on board.
“(He) is like, ‘Do you want to be Helen Hunt (from Twister) or something?’” she says. “I said, ‘I just want to experience real weather’, and Mark is like, ‘Wow, that is some weird pregnancy craving’.”
But when this flurry of work is finished, the bucket list item is ticked, the caravan is stowed and Palmer returns home to Byron Bay with her family, a new, slower pace awaits. And she’s ready for that season, too.