GRACIE GILBERT

Sliding Into Character

SLiDE airs on Tuesdays at 5.30pm on FOX8 and 7.30pm on FOX8+2. Find out more at fox8.tv.

Perth’s Gracie Gilbert makes her return to the small screen with SLiDE, a brand spanking new TV series about life as a 17 year old in 2011. Gilbert first got a taste for TV back in 2007, when she starred in the television adaptation of Tim Winton’s Lockie Leonard series, and she hasn’t looked back since.

“I started acting when I was about 11 or 12 and it just started with some classes outside of school and a few TV commercials,” Gilbert begins when asked about her acting background. “I didn’t land my first lead role until I was 13, when I filmed Lockie Leonard, which is based on the Tim Winton books. That was filmed in Albany so I moved down there for six months and we filmed the first series and then we were fortunate enough to get a second series in 2009.

“It was a pretty surreal experience but an invaluable one,” the young star says of her first real role. “I learnt so much while I was down there, not just learning on the job but also time management with keeping up with school work. That’s the thing with those long shoots, you learn lots about the job and the industry but you are also forced to figure out how to juggle that with everything else that’s going on.”
After wrapping up high school and beginning a Law degree, Gilbert decided to see the world, taking off on a backpacking jaunt, during which time she was asked to audition for SLiDE.

“When I first received the scripts I was in Europe and wasn’t able to audition for it and that feeling of having to say no is really hard, especially being in WA because an opportunity like that for a show in the eastern states doesn’t come up all the time. In October they were still casting for it and I was home then and they got back in contact with me and said ‘we’re still casting, would you like to audition?’ and so I did a tape with my friend and sent it over and a week later I went to Melbourne for an audition and a week after that I’d moved to Brisbane and it was all happening. It was a crazy couple of weeks.”

Gilbert reveals that from the very first read of the SLiDE script, she was hooked. “It was reading about each character and the depth of work the writers had gone to to make the script what it is today. I read the outline and the synopsis and when I realised that the show is based around five 17 year olds, and when they were writing the script they got a group of 17 year olds to come in and say ‘this is what’s going to work or not work’, and ‘this is what we want to see on a TV show that’s meant to be about our age group’, and when I read that I knew they were serious about making this appealing to 17 year olds. There’s nothing worse than watching a show that’s been written by a bunch of adults trying to guess what young people do and want. When I found out these 17 year olds were involved in the script writing process I just thought ‘that’s really cool’.”

_EMMA BERGMEIER