She has a similar sense of pride about the role that returns her to the small screen in Australia in the ABC's much-anticipated adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas' award-winning novel The Slap. "After I was offered the role I went out looking for the book (in New York) and it was sold out, so I was, like: 'Oh my God, what is this book?' " she says.
The Slap traces the shattering repercussions on a group of family and friends of a single event that takes place at a backyard barbecue. Harry (Alex Dimitriades) assaults a misbehaving child, Hugo (Julian Mineo), who is not his son. The boy's parents (George, and Anthony Hayes) are so outraged they call police and legal action results. Friends and family are forced to take sides in this examination of parenting, the rights of children, race, class, sexuality and the perspectives of men and women.
George, who plays mum Rosie, says filming the slap scene had a profound effect. "It's my (character's) little boy who gets slapped. We're all in the backyard and it's all very messy. It was surprisingly emotional. The director was crying, the cameramen were wiping away tears," she says. "When Harry (Dimitriades) comes and bloody smacks and bashes her son across the face, Rosie does what any mother would do," she says. If you hit my kid in front of me, I'd do the same thing - when they called 'action' for the slap scene I forgot who I was. I drew blood from Alex Dimitriades. It was primal. You touch my kid, I'll rip your face off. I went totally nuts. I scratched his neck, it wasn't part of the script. I couldn't tell the difference between reality and filming. One minute Rosie is bohemian, the next she is violent, the next she is breast-feeding her four-year-old."
George expects some viewers will recoil at the sight of the breast-feeding. "Rosie is from nature. In Chile, you'll see a mother and the kid is walking along playing with a ball and opens her blouse and has a drink and walks off. I see nothing nothing wrong with it." To be honest, she admits, there were a lot of things (in playing Rosie) that she was scared about - "the nudity, the breastfeeding, the sadness, the fact that she was so sexual and then so violent and then so angry," she says. "And feeding her baby in front of all those people, you know, there was a lot that I had to overcome. But what's lovely about acting is, anytime I felt insecure I'd hide behind Rosie because Rosie can do whatever she wants."
The director, Jessica Hobbs, agreed: "The challenge of filming that first episode which has to introduce all of the key characters and yet keeping it in very much in Hector's [point of view] was one of the hardest things I've had to balance as a director," she says. Four-year-old Hugo was difficult to handle for Hobbs, who said directing the scene where Alex Dimitriades's Harry slapped him was 'terrifying'. "On the day we came to shoot the slap itself, I asked if the actors would be happy not to rehearse but just to shoot," she recalls. "The first take was so emotionally powerful that we knew we had it. We continued to shoot for the rest of that afternoon but it was that first take that we returned to in the edit."
The scene where Hugo is breastfed by Rosie was no less easy. "I'd spent months knowing we would have to convince an audience that this four-year-old was breastfeeding but having no idea how to do this," Hobbs said. "Being the mother of a delightful but unruly four-year-old myself only enhanced the fear I had of that sequence."
Television Series: The Slap (S01E01)
Release Date: October 2011
Actress: Melissa George
Video Clip Credit: DeepAtSea
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