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Christmas in Australia is hardly the stuff of Hallmark movies – the snow, the mistletoe, the sweaters. It’s hot, there’s often seafood, and white wine in the sun.
A Savage Christmas, which opened in cinemas on Thursday, is putting a new twist on the classic Christmas comedy format by tapping into what Australia looks like today. With a story centred on fractured family dynamics coming to a head over the holidays, it joins classics like A Moody Christmas, newer releases including A Sunburnt Christmas, and wildly popular festive episodes of Bluey.
Thea Raveneau makes her feature film debut in A Savage Christmas, in cinemas now.Credit: James Brickwood
It stars newcomer Thea Raveneau, a 27-year-old Gunggari, Lardil, and Kullilli trans woman, as Davina, who comes home for Christmas for the first time in three years.
There she finds that her family are more messed up than she ever knew: her sister is addicted to pills and in the midst of a messy separation; her brother owes a local gangster $20,000; and her parents are hiding messy secrets of their own. Not to mention Davina, who harbours feelings of resentment and superiority towards her family, which come out in ugly ways.
“I love that Davina isn’t perfect,” says Raveneau. “She’s not a tokenistic trans person that comes in to represent the entire trans community. She’s just human.”
The release of A Savage Christmas, starring an Aboriginal transgender woman, comes at a difficult time for both Indigenous and trans rights, with the recent failure of the referendum and ongoing debate about trans people in sport.
“As someone who’s First Nation as well as transgender, being able to represent those two communities in a leading role in a feature film is so important to me,” says Raveneau.
“I get to show my communities that we can do anything that we put our minds to and that we are just as important as any other person who thinks less of us based on the colour of our skin or our gender identity or our sexuality.”
A Savage Christmas is the first feature from director Madeleine Dyer (who co-directed an episode of her sister Harriet’s series Colin from Accounts last year), and stars comedy mainstays Darren Gilshenan (A Moody Christmas), Helen Thomson (Colin from Accounts), Gary Sweet (House Husbands) and David Roberts (Please Like Me).
The more experienced actors were quick to offer guidance and support to Raveneau. “They were a bit of a safety net,” she says. “They would give unsolicited reassurance that I am doing a good job, and that helped me to push away any self-doubt.”
Raveneau says she identified with Davina’s strained but ultimately loving relationship with her family and was given space to explore her own feelings and relationships while making the film.
“Like Davina, I unfortunately have dealt with a lot of dead-naming and misgendering from my family. I know exactly how that feels. I’ve had to cut people off like Davina has, and I’ve had to figure out if I want to rebuild a relationship with someone who I’ve cut off.
“I don’t talk to my father, so to have moments with David Roberts’ character, as Davina and James, it was just so sweet. I could feel my heart being warmed in moments like that.”
Being a transgender woman starring in a Christmas movie as a transgender character is something Raveneau could not have foreseen when she was growing up in regional Queensland watching Home and Away and secretly aspiring to be an actor.
“Being a very flamboyant and feminine person who identified as male at the time, living in rural, regional places, it was not probably best to run around telling everyone that I wanted to do drama or acting,” she explains. “That probably wasn’t the safest, in terms of bullying.”
She didn’t even know what “transgender” meant until she was 20 years old. She says she wasn’t exposed to the full breadth of queer communities and identities. When Caitlyn Jenner came out in 2016, Raveneau recognised something about herself. “I did my research and was like, ‘Holy smoke, this sounds like me!’” she says.
That same year, Raveneau decided she was ready to finally give acting a try: she began taking youth drama classes at the Empire Theatre in Toowoomba and even booked an audition to get into an acting degree at Queensland University of Technology, but got scared and didn’t go.
Raveneau and Max Jahufer in A Savage Christmas.Credit: Bonsai
“That year was a turning point where it went from me being like, ‘Oh, this is the life I have’ to ‘This is what it could be’. And knowing that I’m in charge of that,” she says.
Three years later, she did make it to the QUT auditions, and got in. Since then, she’s performed in university productions and in a skills development program at La Boite Theatre in Brisbane. A Savage Christmas then is a huge moment for an actor who only started performing in 2019: “I couldn’t have asked for a better project to be a part of as my debut,” she says.
A Savage Christmas is in cinemas now.
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