Interview with: Josephine Starte, actor in the latest Aussie Indie Feature The Birthday Trip
By Franca Lafosse for Film In Revolt
The Birthday Trip is an unflinchingly funny drama following three millennial couples whose relationships are thrown into disarray when they descend on a luxury Southern Highlands farm stay for a birthday weekend they’ll never forget.
Franca: Josephine, thank you for speaking with us today! A couple of months back, you reflected on The Birthday Trip and said:
‘It felt a bit Chekhovian; these strange, emotionally arrested people being horrible to themselves, to each other, occasionally accidentally saying or doing something heartfelt, then running away and being ridiculous again. The twists of the knife are so slight.’ – Feb 2026
Is the sentiment still the same when you reflect on your debut feature film now?
Josephine: Yes, I actually do keep saying “Chekhovian”! But it definitely struck me as that when I first read it, in terms of the stasis that these characters are in, and in the way the script asks you to extend sympathy and empathy for “bad”, or flawed, people.
F: Is it true you’ve been working with BADLANDS since 2021, starring in Stephanie Jane Day’s short An Athlete Wrestling a Python?
J: Even earlier! An Athlete Wrestling a Python was shot in 2018, so I have been working with Steph for a long time.
F: How did Athlete first come about, and has your relationship with BADLANDS evolved since then?
J: Well, Steph and I met through a mutual friend from drama school, so I first met her at some music gigs and was aware of her as a music video director – also I thought she was just really fun and cool – and I think Steph had seen my film Blue Monday, which I did before drama school, and she liked it. But by the time she got in touch about Athlete, I’d actually moved back to the UK. Her message went: ‘This is so crazy, but if we can find a way to swing it… would you come back to Australia to do it?’, and I went ‘Yes. Absolutely!’.
So Athlete was the first time we worked together – it was just the most brilliant experience… I loved working with Steph, and that was also how I met co-producer James Robert Woods, and really got along with him too. (Read our interview with James here!). Later on, it was James who wrote to me about The Birthday Trip. I first heard about the script in 2022, and we shot it in 2023, so it took a long time for this project to come to fruition. It feels very miraculous to be working with BADLANDS, because I couldn’t be further away! But we really do speak each other’s language, and I hope to work with them for a long time.
F: You bring such a breadth of experience as an actor – from musicals at Edinburgh Fringe, to touring the world as the inaugural female cast of Potted Potter – but you also write and perform your own work for the stage and screen. Do you have a preference between the two?
Jo: I really enjoy being both, being the actor/writer or being more of an “actor-for-hire”. But, in some way, when I’m acting someone else’s words it allows me to shed a lot of the neuroticism – which is a wonderful feeling! Any kind of self-flaggelating questions like ‘Is this interesting enough? Is this a departure enough away from me? Is it too much of a departure from me? Am I allowed to tell this story? Or is this just autobiographical?’ – All of those things that can come up when you’re making your own work just fall away, and it’s just lovely to get to work with someone else’s idea and character, to fill them out. I feel freer in some ways working like that.
F: Was that also the experience on this feature, playing the documentarian Angie and working with a writer/director?
J: The Birthday Trip was a little bit different because James wrote this role with me in mind. Which, I didn’t know initially… but eventually became aware of – and that just added another layer of “the neuroticism re-enters” – I have been reassured that I am not Angie, I swear!
But I think there’s enough in Angie that I have access to emotionally or through similar experiences…
F: What was your first impression of her, did you see your character as a “bad” person?
J: Not at all. That has been such a journey with the piece, because when I first read it… I guess I thought she was a little bit naïve and that her understanding of some things was a bit shallow, in terms of her work and her politics. But, fundamentally, as an actor you have to find the love for them, and honestly when I first read it, I thought ‘This is Angie’s love story!’.
She’s in a relationship with the wrong person, and she meets this other person, and it’s love at first sight. The two characters felt like such a mirror to each other, and I never really questioned that. Saying this to James, he might have been like ‘what are you talking about?’, but I really felt like I was in my spotlight, playing the “romantic lead”.
I actually do still think there are some real, deep feelings there… but other times it is just delusion. Partly due to the intensity of meeting someone in this unusual set of circumstances… where you’re just thrown together into this environment, and something about them makes you instantly comfortable, and curious, and alive. That part felt very real to me. I think, possibly, that’s why it felt like this was a love story.
F: And what about Lars (played by Luke Jacobz) who is Angie’s actual partner in the film, what is it that makes their relationship so dysfunctional?
J: My read on Lars is that he is a Lovely Guy – with capital L and capital G. He is supportive and quite doting, but his attention feels a bit non-specific to Angie – for her it’s like, ‘Well, you’re a lovely guy to everyone, and I’ve met you at a point in your life when you’re ready to get married, and I’m what’s on the board. And you say you love me – which you probably do – but it doesn’t feel like you love me. Like, really me.’
I also think between those two characters there’s a bit of a gap, in terms of interests and intellectual pursuits… so, “lovely” only gets you so far, I suppose! Whereas, a relationship like Jim (David Quirk) and Clare’s (Nicola Frew) feels more “obviously” toxic because their fights are constant and vicious. Lars and Angie’s is a relationship that’s sort of sleepy… There’s something that’s not quite real in it, they are sort of circling each other.
F: Were there any surprises working on your first feature that you hadn’t experienced in previous projects?
J: Well, I’ve done a lot of plays, so there was some similarity there in terms of the length of the story… but this was an intense shoot, I think it was only around 2 weeks, possibly a bit longer including rehearsal time. Weirdly it felt longer, I think because it was such an emotionally full experience. It felt like a whole era of my life, there was a long lead-up and quite a bit of time post-shoot doing ADR.
I also think when you’re making things with friends and with people that you get on with really well, the projects have this sort of half-life because you’re still in each other’s lives and each other’s minds. Even when it came to the rest of that cast, I didn’t know them beforehand but we all got along really well from day one and became very close.
F: I was told that the infamous birthday cake was a complete surprise (see here!). What was your reaction when it came out mid-scene?
J: It was scary! Because, as you’ll see, it’s a fire bomb, it’s just huge! All I was thinking was, ‘my hair is down, I’m wearing a polyester dress – I’m gonna go up in flames!’, but also at the same time going ‘…there’s probably only one take of this. The cake is coming, the cake is ON fire, there’s really no way out!’. It was great for the scene, because it just led to this sort of manic-ness which couldn’t have been more real. I do love that moment too because of its horrible symbolism, and having a background in improv, it was a joy to film – I really get off on working with a “mistake”, or an error, or something unexpected.
Normally I love improvising, this film had some moments of improv but it was mostly scripted. So I would sometimes be begging James, going: ‘Can I, like… I would love to improvise’, especially that dining scene! But those scenes are so beautifully written, they’re quite musical yet difficult to pull-off, because the dialogue is so tight and there are overlaps with two people speaking at the same time, and then it all comes together really well. But yes, the cake was definitely a surprise to all involved.
F: Did your perception of Angie as a character change from rehearsals through to the shoot?
J: I was really lucky, because I was on board from so early on in the project, I’d had loads of chats with James going through the script quite pain-stakingkly… for him! One time we were on this Zoom, and because I can just talk and talk and talk about scripts all night long, the call must have gone for like, 3 hours? At one point James went ‘Jo, I’m actually gonna have to go to sleep’. And I went, ‘Yep, no, fair enough we have been going line by line’. But it was so important to get to ask ‘What do you mean by this?’ and say ‘This is what I see’, to sort of negotiate who the character was. That’s the conversation where I brought up the love story theory, which he never said “no” to, he just gave this quizzical look. I do think it worked though, because if I’d come in from the outside playing Angie as “Oh, how stupid is this person”, that was never going to achieve a full human, fallible individual. So I’m glad I let myself be as deluded as Angie possibly is.
Originally I kept trying to give Angie the benefit of the doubt. For example, when we hear the screaming coming from the Caretaker’s Cottage near the group’s holiday accommodation… I was saying to James, ‘If Angie thinks this is domestic violence, wouldn’t she want to do something about that?’. So it was quite useful for him to pull me back from making Angie too true to her ideals. Yes, she’s interested in these feminist stories, and she’s a documentarian so she is in pursuit of truth, but, being a good director James said ‘Well, the ideal would be that… but her flaw is that she’s a bit more self-centered’.
F: It’s interesting though that Angie is the one who gets closest to Sapphire (Sapphire Blossom) and Felix’s (Robert Preston) house…
J: Yes, she is the only one to actually go into the caretaker’s cottage, to go into their world, but only for her own gain – she goes in for the Internet! I love that scene, it just feels so icky… I remember shooting it, weirdly that one made me feel the most gross about myself as Angie. I felt like this horrible person who had just invaded someone’s home with a smiling face, judged just from the off, and then taken what she could get and left. It felt very horribly fake.
F: It’s also a fascinating parallel to the scene where she does try to defend Felix and Sapphire’s lifestyle to the rest of the group.
J: Totally! And, to be fair, I do think that’s realistic. Most people try to be as good as they can, but they don’t always put it into practice. I suppose maybe the difference with someone like Angie is that she really likes to present as “good”, so it’s surprising then to see the transgressions she does allow herself because, in her mind, she’s a good person. She allows herself to live a little differently to how she sees herself.
F: Do you think that’s true for all the characters, this dissonance between how they perceive themselves and how they actually behave?
J: I think it’s true for Jim, and I think that’s why they’re also drawn to each other… they both have a belief that they are, or have a desire to be, something better than their lived reality. I guess, Mark (Ben Gerrard) is more down the line – he’s unashamedly very dark. My read is that Clare’s character is possibly a bit more self-hating, whereas Angie has quite a thick veneer, there’s a wall that stops the world from penetrating her in the same way. She’s not as bruised by it as Claire is.
F: And after all the preparation and rehearsals you’d done, did anything new arise when you got to set?
J: Yeah, definitely! The set felt so lived-in. A lot of the crew were literally living on site, in the set, and we were only a little way away, so it felt extremely real. We also hung out a lot in our respective pairings, mostly by chance. With the way scheduling worked out, I didn’t spend much time with Ben, for example, who plays Mark. So some of the distance that our characters already feel to each other was sort of there. Annelise and I were living together, and David and Luke were very close by too, so we’d hang out and play games. Possibly the only be in exception is that I also lived with Sapphire, who came for the second half of the shoot, so I had to “act” more distanced than was real with Sapphire… it can’t all be method!
F: Indeed! And then – I just have to ask – in the group painting scene, are the paintings real?
J: Well, they’re not what we really painted. However – and this is revealing my own madness – they basically presented us the canvases that had been done by other artists, I think James had painted mine, and Angie’s was by far the shittest! That’s by design, it’s not a dig at James. It was… woefully childlike, essentially finger-painting. And I just couldn’t bear that she was as bad as that, so I was in the scene genuinely trying to improve on this painting – which now thinking about it is very Angie, just painting on top thinking ‘No.. I can make this good!’. And I didn’t make it good, but I possibly improved it a little. I think I was actually causing problems because of continuity, but I was really into it going ‘No, no, I really want to make this good’, which was a great Angie impulse.
F: That is hilarious! So, how does it feel to be getting to the end of this journey with The Birthday Trip, now that it’s releasing in cinemas?
J: So far I’ve been to two pre-screeners, one in Sydney and one in Darwin, which was amazing, and then the official screening is coming up! I think I’m going to be in deep mourning once I finally go home. I love The Birthday Trip, I can’t bear to let it go. It’s been a huge part of my life, not only the film, but also the relationships with everyone involved.
F: Are there any projects up next once you return home?
J: Yes, I made a short film last year called I Don’t Live Here that was produced by the BFI, and it’s now in development as a feature under a different working title. It’s a dark family drama-comedy that I’m really excited to do. So we’re “in-dev” with that, as Izi (Annelise Hall) would say! And then I’m doing a bit of clowning at the Edinburgh Festival. Oh! And I also have a play that I wrote, it’s going to be in R&D at Soho Poly in October. So lots going on, not too much time to cry!
F: That’s brilliant, and hopefully another project that brings you back this way again soon! Thank you so much for your time Josephine, all the best with the film release and safe travels back home.
For all remaining screenings of The Birthday Trip, you can head to: https://thebirthdaytrip.film/