When Joni was 14, her best friend Gracie Darling vanished during a séance and was never seen again. Twenty-seven years later, the small town where it happened still carries the scars.
Local kids have turned the tragedy into a ghostly ritual of their own, a game called Playing Gracie Darling. But when another girl disappears, the past collides with the present, pulling Joni, now a child psychologist, back to confront the trauma she’s been running from.
It’s the unsettling premise of the new drama led by Morgana O’Reilly, a performer who has built a career out of playing complex, unpredictable women.
From Neighbours to Wentworth, and cult Kiwi horror-comedy Housebound, O’Reilly has always brought sharp edges and vulnerability in equal measure. Speaking on Mediaweek’s Newsmakers podcast, she said Joni instantly struck her as the kind of character she wanted to live with.
“I love Joanie, even her name,” she said. “She is a real contradiction. She’s hard and soft. She’s warm and abrasive. She’s cheeky and she can be devious, but she’s got this really strong moral compass. What she deems to be right, she will fight for. She’s sexual, she’s unapologetically a woman. She’s a grown woman.”
Finding magic in the everyday
O’Reilly admits she’s long believed in the power of the unseen, which made stepping into Joni’s world feel instinctive. “I just believe in magic,” she told Newsmakers.
“I believe in tarot and I believe in ghosts and I believe in astrology, because stories, these are magic. Why not?”
The actress revealed that her own fascination with the mystical began as a teenager.
“I bought my first deck of tarot cards when I was about 14 and I still have them,” she said. “As a teenager, that time of life holds a kind of magic. It’s an incredibly powerful and vulnerable time in equal measure. You’ve got this sense of hope and self-loathing, this desperate need to express, ‘This is who I am. Oh no, this is who I am. I don’t know, I don’t know.’”
That blend of identity, fear and wonder runs through the show. When Joni returns to her hometown, O’Reilly says it forces her character to relive the chaos of adolescence while grappling with very adult stakes.
“I love that when you first meet her, she’s in her workplace,” O’Reilly explained. “You think, this is a woman who deals with things most of us only see on TV. And yet when she goes back home, it evokes her teenage self again, all the stuff she tried to run away from.”
O’Reilly with her Playing Gracing Darling co-star Harriet Walter.
Dedication to the craft
For O’Reilly, the role also speaks to her own relationship with acting. She discovered her passion early, joining a youth theatre company in Auckland that treated the work with unusual seriousness.
“I think I was about 15 when I realised this was the thing for me,” she said. “I went from high school straight to drama school. It was profound. I’d been quite a brat in high school, but theatre opened me up to how amazing this craft could be.”
She also recalls the freedom she found in acting. “There’s no right way or wrong way to do it,” she said.
“That was liberating. Of course, there are less secure ways, you can drag yourself emotionally through the ringer and come out with more issues than you went in with. But it can also unearth things in you that are yours to navigate. For better or worse, it’s magic. It’s one of the magic arts.”
Hear the full conversation with Morgana O’Reilly, including her reflections on craft, character, and the magic of storytelling, on the latest episode of Mediaweek’s Newsmakers podcast.