Teresa Palmer on turning 40, her prolific run of Australian projects, and new movie Addition

Teresa Palmer has a big birthday coming up.

Anyone who still remembers Palmer’s feature debut as an unnamed party girl in Wolf Creek will be shocked to know that she’s turning 40 next month. How can that be? Was that really 20 years ago?

The Adelaide-born Palmer spent the first decade of her career building a reputation as a genre queen, jumping between twisty sci-fi films and terrifying horror movies with ease.

But there’s something special about the past few years of her work, which has brought her home to Australia where she has had a prolific run in local productions including the film Ride Like a Girl, where she played boundary-breaking jockey Michelle Payne, and TV series The Clearing, The Last Anniversary, Mix Tape and The Family Next Door.

That purple patch of meaty roles lined up with an expanding brood at home, where she has five children, with the youngest arriving only a few months earlier.

“I’ve got five kids, so that was a pretty conscious choice on, ‘where do we want to raise them?’,” she told The Nightly. “We want to raise our kids in Australia, we want them to go to school here. So we put them in school and then I just got to work.

“I haven’t stopped working since we moved back here.”

Palmer has another film out this week, a romantic-drama-comedy called Addition, which takes a different look at dating when you don’t fit the profile of “normal”. Her character, Grace, has anxiety and an unresolved trauma from her childhood, which manifests as a compulsion to count.

Grace can tell you how many eyelashes you have or the number of poppyseeds on a slice of cake. She’s a likeable but multi-dimensional person, and Palmer had a particular love affair with her.

“I find her so interesting, funny, kind, wild and all over the place, and I can see myself in her,” she said.

“I love that she is so eclectic. She has many colours to her personality and she doesn’t fit in a box. I relate to that.

“I could be described one way but also in the opposite way. Sometimes I’m introverted, sometimes I’m extraverted, sometimes I like doing life like this, and other times I can be chaotic, wild, busy, rushed, and then I love life slow and unhurried, taking a breath.

“You can be anything in life and Grace is that way, and that’s why I adore her.”

Even though Grace has pain in her past, she has a lightness to her energy so that the film never feels grim.

Addition was also something of a reprieve for Palmer, who admitted she tends to gravitate towards darker material.

Filming for this movie slotted between The Clearing, in which she played a woman contending with a cult as well as the demons in her own past, and The Last Anniversary, a series that dealt with long-buried family secrets on an isolated island, and then The Family Next Door, another small community mystery.

“So I went back to the darker characters,” she said with a laugh, none of the heaviness of her onscreen alter egos. “(Addition) came at a really nice time where I felt like something could be all these things. It can have darkness, it can have vulnerability, but it’s also sexy and romantic.

“And I hadn’t done a love story in a really long time, and that felt nice.”

Coming off the back of a mind-blowingly productive stretch – most actors would kill to have this much work lined up – as well as her growing family, does turning 40 feel like a moment to take inventory?

“I’m excited (to turn 40) because most of my friends are in their forties. My husband is already in his mid-40s, so I feel like I’ve been waiting to get to this decade.

“If I knew I would have this family, that I would have these five beautiful children, and still get the opportunity to work in the film industry, that’s it right there.

“There is a tendency in life to continue to push the bar all the time, and want for more, and grasp for bigger, better opportunities. But where I am right now in my life, I already have everything I need. I’ve reached all the goals and anything else is a bonus.

“If it all finished tomorrow and I have my family, I just feel grateful. Where I’m at is peace.”

The rollercoaster ride is at no risk of ending, at least not anytime soon. Palmer has already been cast in a high-profile project that is certain to capture the attention of a built-in fanbase: the live-action TV adaptation of video game God of War written by Battlestar Galactica and For All Mankind’s Ronald D. Moore.

Filming for the American show will take place in Canada, and that means uprooting everyone for at least the new year, taking her back to the continent where she ventured in her early twenties, taking at a shot at making it as an actor.

“I remember those early days of my career, (thinking), ‘am I ever going to book a job again?’,” she recalled. “I was so riddled with self-doubt. If someone (had told me) ‘this is what’s going to happen in your career and in your life, I would’ve been like, ‘No way!’.

“But it all unfolded the way it was supposed to, and it has given me the most enriching experiences, especially in this last period in Australia. I’m deeply grateful.”

As a family of eight, the move is logistically challenging, but they’ve found a house, and the date is imminent. Palmer is excited.

“Onto the next family adventure!”

Addition is in cinemas now