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It sounds like the stuff of urban legends: a teenage girl has stomach pains, goes to the loo and welcomes a surprise baby. But not only is this a real phenomenon, it also makes a glorious premise for a television series, as the success of Bump has shown. Season one of the local production was released earlier this year, and immediately boosted the profile of the relatively unknown Nathalie Morris, who plays the two-minute instant mama, Olympia “Oly” Chalmers-Davis.
“Something like one in 475 women has a surprise birth,” says the 24-year-old actor, rattling off the statistic like it’s her phone number. “If I think about the size of my primary school, that’s one person it’s happened to. A make-up artist I know had a friend who struggled to get pregnant. One day she had sushi and that night was really sick, thinking it must have been bad fish. Then she gave birth!”
Nathalie has just stepped off the set of the Sunday Life photo shoot to chat ahead of the launch of the series’ second season. She’s happily scoffing a rainbow salad bowl, talking between mouthfuls and looking more comfortable now she’s out of the designer dress she’s been wearing and back into shorts and an oversized navy hoodie. Owing to her flawless skin and large, soulful eyes, minimal make-up was required for the shoot, but the glossy, tangerine lipstick she’s still wearing is in bold contrast to her relaxed, off-duty look.
Although the first season of Bump was a runaway success, Nathalie is still new to media interviews and photo shoots, and admits to feeling nervous.She has invited Carlos Sanson jnr, who plays her on-screen boyfriend and baby daddy, Santiago “Santi” Hernández, along for moral support. There’s clearly a close bond between the two, as he readily heeds her request for a green tea as she settles in for the chat.
“I never imagined myself with big earrings in, my nails painted and posing in a sheer designer dress,” she says, referring to the shoot. “I said to Carlos, ‘Can you send a video of this to my family because the whole thing is kind of funny?’ Sometimes I step outside of myself because I think about who I was or who I thought I would be and how I think of myself. It’s almost like this weird thing is happening to me.
“I’d never been self-conscious until Bump. It made me go, ‘Oh shit, people are really going to see what I look like and who I am. Maybe it will affect whether I work.’ It affects my livelihood, which is kind of intense.”
Nathalie needn’t have worried about the reaction to Bump. The first season, which followed 17-year-old Oly’s fast-track journey to birth and beyond, was not only critically acclaimed but also Stan’s biggest launch to date.
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“It doesn’t shy away from anything” is how Nathalie explains the show’s success. “It’s very layered; we’re not just going for gags. The characters are really specific, too. Oly is very weird. Weird in a real way, with her tics and her obsessions and her stubbornness. The way she can be romantic but also a total brat. It feels like every character isn’t just one thing.”
“[Bump] made me go, ‘Oh shit, people are really going to see what I look like and who I am. Maybe it will affect whether I work.’ It affects my livelihood, which is kind of intense.”
Oly is indeed a complex character: an ambitious, straight-A student who had no idea she was pregnant. Is she anything like Nathalie at that age?
“I was a perfectionist, overachiever, very focused on school and such a brat – in a lot of ways like Oly,” she says.
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“I also drew a lot [for the role] from my relationship with my mum. I recall asking my brother if he’d seen the show and he was like, ‘I couldn’t watch past episode three. It was too triggering. I’ve already heard you yell at mum too many times. I’ve lived this!’ ”
Oly’s mother, Angie Davis, is played by Claudia Karvan (who is also one of the show’s producers, along with John and Dan Edwards), and it’s their relationship that carries season one of the series. In turn, is Nathalie’s own mother anything like Angie? “She’s very different. So even though I am to Claudia what I was to my mum back then, she’s not like her.”
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Nathalie slips in mentions of her parents throughout the interview. She’s clearly close to both of them, and tells a heart-warming anecdote about her father’s “proud dad” moments.
“There’s this clock I made when I was seven and it’s on my dad’s wall in his doctor’s surgery,” she says. “Patients always go, ‘I love that clock’, and I feel like my dad has it there so he can go, ‘Oh yeah, my daughter made that. She’s an actress now.’ And they always go, ‘What has she been in?’ And he says, ‘Oh the show Bump‘, and they say ‘Who did she play?’ and he says, ‘Oly’. And they’ll go, ‘Oh wow!’ ”
Nathalie was born in Canberra and speaks of a delightfully insular childhood. “I grew up in Astrolabe Street [in Red Hill] and I never left that street. My daycare, preschool, primary school, the tennis courts, scouts, were all in the same street as my house. Literally that street.”
When Nathalie was seven, the family moved to Bungendore, about 30 minutes east of Canberra, to live on a farm until she was 15.
After school she took a gap year and worked in the Northern Territory before heading to New Zealand to study drama in Wellington. A few small roles followed but her breakthrough came when she auditioned for Stan’s Eden. She didn’t get the part, but as fate would have it, she was asked to audition for the role of Oly in Bump.
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Season two picks up just weeks after season one ends. The production notes say that “Oly will be caught between her big dreams and her very small, rather high-maintenance and yet adorable reality.”
As Nathalie explains it, Oly’s “trying to juggle doing well at school and being a mum and also being a girlfriend in quite a committed relationship. If season one was about her relationship with her baby and her mum, season two is about her relationship with Santi.
“It’s also about her ambitions and how she wants to be seen and who she wants to be. She feels that people see her as just a mum: her peers, her teachers and prospective employers. It’s intense not just to take care of a baby, but also to manage other people’s perceptions of you as a teenage mother.”
“I’ll have a conversation with someone and at the end they’ll say I really liked Bump and I’m like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you knew who I was.’ ”
It was the show’s portrayal of teen parenthood which struck a chord with many viewers. Nathalie says that after season one, young mothers, and women who’d been young mothers, thanked the producers for not judging the experience. “A lot of people judge teenage parents. There are shows like Teen Mom and there’s this feeling that they’ve got no future and that they’re stupid.
“I remember one woman saying she couldn’t watch it for a while because it was too triggering. She was worried it wouldn’t do it justice or be too difficult to live through. But when she saw it, she was like, ‘That was so moving.’ ”
On a personal level, the success of the show has been life-changing for Nathalie. “I’m not worried about paying rent now,” she jokes, quietly. But the new-found fame has taken some getting used to. “I’ll have a conversation with someone and at the end they’ll say I really liked Bump and I’m like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you knew who I was.’ ”
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“I got into acting because I really love reading plays and the theatre. Bump is great because it is this big, meaty role and I feel really part of it. But all the stuff off the back of it is totally foreign. It’s just a whole other side to the job, I guess.”
When the interview turns to the possibility of making it in Hollywood, Nathalie gently shuts down the idea. “That’s not going to happen,” she whispers, with genuine humility.
Why couldn’t she be cast in the next Marvel blockbuster? Nathalie laughs as though this is completely ridiculous. “That would be epic, that would be really cool,” she says, shaking her head.
But if Bump has delivered one life lesson, it’s to expect the unexpected.
Fashion editor: Penny McCarthy. Photographer: Manolo Campion. Hair: Keiren Street using Wella Professional Make-up: Aimie Fiebig using Sisley Paris. Fashion assistant: Prudence Gillett. Knoll “Spoleto” chair from Dedece.
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Season two of Bump will be available to stream on Stan from December 26.
To read more from Sunday Life magazine, click here.
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