In partnership with Cartier

The period between adolescence and adulthood can feel either brimming with possibility, or endlessly precarious. For Philippa Northeast, it was both. At just 18, she found herself abruptly leaving home in Melbourne for a role on Home And Away. It was her first full time job and, in Northeast's own words, she had no idea what she was doing. “I didn’t know what a mark was. I didn’t know what a boom was,” she says. “I didn’t even have a tax file number.”

Just weeks earlier, her life looked very different. The plan was simple: keep working at the café she’d been at since she was 15, and study criminology at Melbourne University. Acting wasn’t the goal — it was something she’d only just started exploring, almost impulsively, when she signed up for part-time classes at 16th Street Acting Studio. But just a term in and an audition cropped up for the iconic soap opera responsible for launching the careers of Heath Ledger and Naomi Watts, to name only a few.

“I moved out of home for the first time, went to Sydney, and suddenly had a full-time job,” she says. “I was learning everything on the spot.” But what could have been overwhelming instead became formative, in more ways than one. “It felt like an apprenticeship. I was working, but I was also figuring out how to live.”

In hindsight, it’s perhaps not all that surprising that Northeast found herself on a set before she could even articulate the idea of wanting to be an actor. Growing up in Melbourne, she attended a Steiner school where creativity was approached not with the bells and whistles of a traditional drama education, but with an emphasis on imagination and play. “Everything was pretend,” she says. “Whatever you had, you used as your costume or your prop.”

It’s a sensibility you can feel in her work today, particularly as her career has expanded beyond the expectations that tend to follow an early breakout role. After four years of steady work came the unspoken task of proving range; of moving beyond the familiarity of that one character, and into something less predictable.

In the years since, Northeast has built a body of work shaped by one consistent thread: strong, complex women. In The Family Next Door, that interest takes shape in Essie, a new Mother at the centre of a story that amplifies, rather than smooths over, the realities of early parenthood: the isolation, the exhaustion, and the immense shift in identity. On the set of our shoot, wearing Clash de Cartier collection, it's clear why she was the perfect person to bring a character like Essie to life. There’s a similar refusal to sit neatly within expectation. The pieces, too, echo a sense of rebellion — it's Cartier, but not as polished as you'd perhaps expect. In wearing them, Northeast shifts slightly too into a version of herself that feels edgy, a little undone.

Despite not having firsthand experience of motherhood herself, Northeast found that the most valuable insight in preparing for the role came through conversation. The women in her life were, she says, generous and unguarded in the way they spoke about their own experiences.

“The minute you say I’m playing a character that’s having – well, we didn’t title it – but postnatal depression, 10 women jump up and say, ‘Thank God. This is my experience. I would love to talk to you about this.’” she says. “It’s a lifeline for a lot of people. It’s more than just a story they relate to. It makes them feel like they exist, in a period when they can feel completely invisible.”

That idea of visibility, and of women whose experiences don’t always sit neatly on screen, is set to become even more pronounced when Northeast stars in Netflix's upcoming adaptation of My Brilliant Career, where she'll step into one of Australian literature’s most enduring female figures.

The semi-autobiographical story of Sybylla Melvyn was written by Australian writer and feminist Miles Franklin when she was still a teenager, and has long existed as a character defined by contradiction. She's ambitious and restless, headstrong and uncertain, and resistant to being shaped by expectation. For Northeast, that complexity was central to the appeal. Sybylla is not a character designed to be palatable; she is allowed to be inconsistent, to change her mind, to want too much and not know what to do with it. In many ways, she exists in that same space Northeast has been circling across her recent work: women who are still in the process of defining themselves, rather than arriving fully formed.

"She is such a well-loved character that, over 125 years later, still resonates so loudly and urgently," Northeast says fondly. "It's got all the loudest, most demanding, most self righteous, most joyful, most determined emotions of a teenage woman. And not even a teenage woman now, but a teenage woman at the turn of the 19th century, where the pressures for women were different, but also very similar to those of today. And as we see the world get harder now, and we see female rights get reversed all around the world, the cry for this kind of story is so loud."

It's clear Northeast has an instinct for characters like Sybylla, and stories that resist neat resolution such as hers. The actors she most admires are those whose careers are defined less by singular breakthroughs than by endurance and longevity. This year’s Oscars, for instance, sharpened that perspective, with a field dominated by women whose work has unfolded across decades rather than overnight success. “We were admiring the women who put in hard yards for a long time, who played various characters, who chipped away, who never gave up, who followed their passion any way they could, and stayed the course even when they weren't getting huge opportunities," Northeast laments.

It's not hard to imagine Northeast fitting into that category, although she resists the comparison. She's not interested in mapping out her next move too precisely, either. What she is certain of, however, is the shape she wants it to take: something evolving, and built to last. “The career that I want is the career that goes for 30, 40, 50 years. And I want to look different each time I play a new character because I've aged and because I've stepped into new boots.”

PHOTOGRAPHY Jake Terrey @ Hart & Co.

FASHION Hannah Cooper

TALENT Philippa Northeast

HAIR Steph Dell @ Hart & Co.

MAKEUP Isabella Schimid

PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT Ryan Flanagan

STYLIST’S ASSISTANT Koby Dulac-Daley

Feature image (left): JOTEO dress; CARTIER earrings, bracelet and rings. Feature image (right): PHILIPPA SIGNORELLI dress; stylist's own tights; CARTIER earrings, necklaces and rings.