Why is one of our most talented actresses so filled with doubt?

You can’t do this. You’ve got nothing new to offer. You’re going to forget all your lines on opening night. They’re going to have to recast. You’re going to put your back out during a quick change. You can’t physically do it, you’re too little, you’re too weak, you’re not fit enough, you’re too old.”

Bojana Novakovic has shared the screen with the likes of Margot Robbie and Mel Gibson. She’s played the lead role in two seasons of Love Me. She’s been nominated for Logies, AACTA and AFI awards, and in 2004 was named best actress in a leading role for Marking Time. None of that stops the barrage of thoughts an actor has to contend with.

“A lot of us don’t talk about that. Actors feel imposter syndrome. It’s your mind working one thousand miles an hour, your fears and your doubts coming at you.”

I last spoke to Novakovic about a year ago, after she had come off a string of auditions, and the doubts were crowding in: “Every actor from Russell Crowe to Rose Byrne thinks ‘I’m never going to work again’. It’s a real feeling. It’s like a nightmare you want to wake up from. It’s in your bones. ‘This is a real potential, because I’ve just done five auditions and they don’t need me any more.’”

Crowe did in fact acknowledge that nightmare in his opening speech at the 2021 AACTA awards: “I started acting at the age of six and still today, after every gig wraps, the same thought goes through my mind: ‘Will I ever work again?’”

He was speaking to an audience that included some of the country’s most lauded actors. No one laughed. Novakovic “loved hearing him say that because it’s so ridiculous coming out of his mouth. But it’s real.”

At that time, she says now, “I was thinking of quitting America. Which I kind of did. It was because I wasn’t really interested in acting at that time. I think I’m just not interested in doing shit things for money.”

Growing up in Sydney, Serbian-born Novakovic thought her first name came from “boja”, or “colour”. “I thought my name meant ‘full of colour’. But Bojana is actually a derivative of the word for ‘battle’.”

So when she was reconsidering her relationship with her long-time profession, it was as much because another battle was taking up most of her time and energy. For several years she’s been engaged in a sustained campaign against Rio Tinto and other mining companies that are attempting to set up operations in her birth country.

“Rio Tinto is now publicly speaking out against what I’ve revealed about them. It’s pretty intense,” she says.

Along the way she discovered that she has become a person of interest to various governments. “The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade keep tabs on me. We found this out accidentally.”

After submitting a series of freedom-of-information requests, Novakovic was sent a pile of documents. They weren’t what she’d been asking for, but did include email exchanges between some high-level executives with the subject title “Bojana Novakovic tweet”.

“So we asked for documents containing my name and got 20 pages of correspondence. It’s all things that I post and articles about me.”

Novakovic says that every Serbian is born with the country’s history of collective trauma baked into their systems. “We’re born with it in our DNA, so it’s better that I use that energy not against myself but against a real enemy.”

Taking on a multinational corporation sounds just about as crazy as living the precarious life of an actor. “I’ve got a good amount of crazy,” Novakovic says. “I think my crazy is channelled really well. It’s not like I don’t have doubts about myself. If you don’t have doubts about yourself you’re a sociopath.”

I’ve got a good amount of crazy. I think my crazy is channelled really well.

Bojana Novakovic

Speaking of which ... There are few characters as magnetically sociopathic as Lady Macbeth. Novakovic is back in Melbourne to play the role in Malthouse Theatre’s Macbeth (An Undoing). If every actor has to face that internal critic, hers is in overdrive right now. She hasn’t performed in a play for a decade.

“I got a call from my agent saying that this was on the table, and I immediately said, ‘No, I can’t do this role after 10 years.’”

For actors, the role of Lady Macbeth has traditionally inspired the same mix of awe and trepidation as Hamlet or Lear. To take on such a formidable character after so long away?

“It’s like running a marathon after not having even trained for the 1500,” Novakovic says. But a chorus of external voices urged the actor to reconsider. Eventually she relented. “I don’t think anybody would be saying ‘I think you can do it’ if they didn’t think I could. Sometimes it’s important to see yourself through other people’s eyes.”

Macbeth (An Undoing) is the most recent work by British playwright Zinnie Harris. For the longest time, Harris says from Edinburgh, something about Lady Macbeth didn’t sit well with her.

“We’ve got this very strong, ambitious, clear-sighted, dastardly woman who will stop at nothing. She’s really fearless. And then at the end we’ve got this woman who’s totally broken by her own guilt, and there’s very little explanation of how she gets to that point.”

Macbeth’s character arc is clear: unfettered greed leads him to murder, and after he bungles his attempts to conceal his crimes, he descends into madness. His wife, on the other hand, stays firm in her resolutions before vanishing for half the play and resurfacing with a completely different personality.

When Harris teaches playwriting, she’ll often explain how dramatic trajectories operate. A character might disappear from the stage for a significant period, but if they leave with enough trajectory and momentum, the audience will fill in the gaps as to what they’ve been up to until we meet them next.

“Shakespeare understands trajectories really well,” Harris says. “But with Lady Macbeth, there’s this odd thing where the trajectory just isn’t right.”

Novakovic agrees. “In the first half, he starts to go quite mad, and she’s still very stable and determined to keep things together,” she says. “In the second half she disappears until pretty much the end, and comes back mad. What happened?”

This strange lapse has led many scholars to wonder if a section of Macbeth is missing. The play is notably shorter than the rest of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Hamlet and King Lear usually require an interval, whereas many productions of Macbeth happily power on through.

“There’s a school of thought that the Macbeth that we have isn’t complete,” says Harris. “I think that was all the encouragement I needed to go, ‘Well, how can I sort out this oddity?’”

Macbeth (An Undoing) is Shakespeare’s play with none of the missing bits. Rather than vanishing into the wings for much of the action, Lady Macbeth increasingly takes centre stage as the drama progresses, and eventually begins to rail against the fate the Scottish play has preordained for her.

Once Harris had begun the project of imagining for Lady Macbeth a more considered character arc, she began to notice other omissions that don’t hold up well today. “Lady Macduff we meet in the original just at the moment of her destruction. She’s not a character that we’ve had anything to do with. I didn’t feel a modern audience would accept that.”

There’s also the case of the witches. Macbeth was written during the reign of King James, who was notoriously terrified of witchcraft. “Four thousand women were burned during the King James bullshit because he was so afraid of black magic,” says Novakovic. Harris began to imagine the equivalent of those women today: marginalised for the perceived threat they pose to the status quo.

Whether or not Shakespeare wrote additional scenes for Lady Macbeth, she’s a character who demands more attention. Harris has spoken to many actors who have played the role to determine how they made sense of her lack of consistency. “Every single one has had to make up a backstory of what’s happened in the middle of the play in order to arrive at the last scene,” she says. “There’s shared experience and belief that there’s missing stuff, even if it’s not explicit.”

Macbeth (An Undoing) is surprisingly faithful to its source – at first, at least. Much of Shakespeare’s evocative imagery and language is in there during its first half. Once we start filling in the blanks of Lady Macbeth’s journey, however, things start to glitch. The sheer weight of theatrical history seems to work against her attempts to retain her agency as a character.

“It’s almost like the play that we all know is funnelling her towards the scene where she is sleepwalking and ultimately kills herself, but the character who is taking on all of the strength of the first half goes, ‘But that isn’t me!’” says Harris. “The play is trying to constrain her and send her in this direction and she’s going, ‘Hang on a minute, there is another play in here, there’s another way to tell this story.’”

Novakovic says: “The second half is about her saying, ‘I’m sane and you will not reduce me to a madwoman who hallucinates things. I have ideas about this show.’ She’s refusing. She’s not mad. That’s the point of this. Everybody else is trying to make her go mad, and she’s refusing to allow them.”

She says that Macbeth (An Undoing) is less fascinating for the way it tackles the politics of Shakespeare’s original text than it is for reckoning with the centuries of interpretation that weigh down so hard on Lady M. “It does address the misogyny within the play, but it also addresses the historical analysis. That misogyny. Not Shakespeare himself, not this brilliant poet who wrote during a time when every woman was married by the end of a play or mad or a spinster. But actual non-stop historical analysis where this woman is made the reason why he murdered all these people.”

If Harris’ play gives its audience a chance to get into the mind of one of the theatre’s most complex characters, it’s also a chance for Novakovic to put her own mental reserves to the test.

“Half of the battle is your own psyche,” Novakovic says. “It’s one thing to be physically ready, rehearsing it, learning the lines, being present, but the other half is the mindf--- when you’re by yourself.”

She raises the example of fellow Serb Novak Djokovic: “He was just as good a tennis player, and then he went and got a psychiatrist and someone to help him with his mind and that was it – he changed and became the most successful tennis player in the world.”

Perhaps that’s why Lady Macbeth looms so large in the theatrical canon: we’ve never reckoned with her on her own terms, instead projecting onto her all kinds of unexamined anxieties. She’s the voice that won’t be silenced, as much a haunting presence as any of Shakespeare’s more obvious ghosts, or the voices that haunt an actor’s mind.

For Novakovic, facing up to your spectres – political, historical, personal – is the first step in achieving change. “Talking to that element of yourself about that element of yourself. Confronting that element, walking with it, not just fighting it.” Ultimately, she says, “walking on stage with it” is how the battle is won.

Macbeth (An Undoing) is at the Malthouse Theatre from July 5.