This was published 7 months ago

From Love My Way to Bump , Claudia Karvan has won hearts playing complex, progressive mothers, women facing parenting challenges with humour and honesty. But the role of a single, empty-nester in an SBS Digital Originals short-form drama took her to another maternal space, and reduced her – and the entire cast and crew – to tears.

“ Homebodies is a love letter to the parent,” says Karvan. “I’d never seen anything like Nora’s journey. I think, as do all parents of teenagers and children in their early 20s, there’s so much energy and sacrifice and love and sleepless nights that go into raising a child, that a lot of people have an expectation that, ‘Oh good, now we’ll be friends and I’ve earned this.’

Claudia Karvan and Luke Wiltshire in Homebodies.

“Then you get to that period of life, and you go, ‘Oh, now I’ve got a whole other mountain to climb.’ With Nora, there’s self-pity and inflexibility, and disappointment, and she’s hanging on to the past, which I think a lot of…