Miranda Tapsell from "Top End Wedding" Tells Us About the Power of Representation in Rom-Coms

"I wanted a popcorn film where sisters who looked like me could sit down, have pizza and wear face masks and laugh and cry and swoon over the characters."

Miranda Tapsell, a proud Larrakia/Tiwi woman from the Darwin Region, is used to not seeing actors who look like her on the big screen.

That doesn’t mean she’s settling for it.

"You ask any black or brown person, and they’re very used to having to look past that, because unfortunately if you want to invest in any form of pop culture, you know that you’re not gonna be at the centre of it," she tells Student Edge.

"That’s not something that’s disappointing. That’s just become a fact of life."

That changes with Top End Wedding, a new Aussie romantic comedy she has co-written and stars in, reteaming her with director Wayne Blair, who helmed her breakout flick, The Sapphires.

Tapsell plays Lauren, a lawyer who heads back to Darwin for a whirlwind wedding to her fiancé Ned (Gwilym Lee). Problem is, upon arriving in the "top end" of Australia, she learns her mum has run away from home, leaving Lauren and Ned to find and bring her back in time for the ceremony.

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"I know a lot of people don’t consider rom-coms to be high art," she confesses.

"I know that they’re not. And I know people don’t treat them with a lot of weight."

However, she says seeing how much people loved the characters in Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail convinced her it was the perfect genre to tell this personal tale.

"What I came to realise as we came to making it, [was] this is such a beautiful window into a community I care about so much, because I did go grow up in the Territory and I do have family in the Tiwi Islands [where part of the movie is set], and this was my way to show how much I love who raised me and where I come from," she says.

"I think I wanted to show that, because I think a lot of Aboriginal communities have been sort of stigmatised. It is important to remove that stigmatisation and highlight why people should make the issues that affect that community more of a priority."

She also appreciated how rom-coms are the rare pictures to actually give female characters agency.

"The really good [rom-coms] are ones where women have a very clear understanding of the kind of relationship they want to be in, however heteronormative," she says.

"Also, they know exactly the career that they want. I feel like a lot of women’s dreams and desires get policed, so I felt really comforted by the heightened world that was rom-com."

Miranda appreciated the significance of taking the lead role in a romantic comedy; a part rarely given to non-white actors.

"I knew the kind of story that I wanted to see at the cinema and I wanted a popcorn film where sisters who looked like me could sit down, have pizza and wear face masks and laugh and cry and swoon over the characters," she says.

"They deserve that as much as any other woman in Australia. That’s why I wanted to make them the center of it."

It therefore made a lot of sense to reunite with Blair, whom Tapsell says "gave humanity back to Aboriginal women in The Sapphires".

Also serendipitous: her co-star Lee blowing up prior to Top End Wedding's release, thanks to his part in one of 2018’s biggest hits, Bohemian Rhapsody, where he played Queen co-founder Brian May opposite Oscar-winner Rami Malek.

"Rom-coms are so known for having really horrible guys at the centre of it, so I was really conscious of making sure that Ned would not be that, and I’m so glad Gwilym brought that kind of vulnerability to the role," she says.

Top End Wedding follows Miranda’s Earth-shattering performance in the series finale of Get Krack!n, in which a version of herself took over the reins of a faux Australian morning show with Nakkiah Lui and delivered a devastating monologue about living with racism. (Key incendiary excerpt: "Thirty years of smiling, and making big eyes and not showing my anger. I'm done not being angry. I am angry. And if you don't like me being angry, then by all means Australia, take my furious baton and run this race for me! Because we are dying in infancy, we are dying in custody, and we are dying decades earlier than you. And you should be as angry about that as I am.")

"I was so blown away by everyone’s positive responses," she tells us several weeks after the episode's airing on the ABC.

"Some people were penning it as a 'historical' piece of television, and that just blew my mind. I feel like as an individual I’ve been very blessed to express myself freely as an artist. I feel like a lot of my non-Indigenous peers have been given that same permission. I can only hope now more Indigenous actors get that same freedom."

Top End Wedding arrives in Australian cinemas 2 May.

Header Image: Universal Pictures Australia