My Brilliant Career 2026: Philippa Northeast, Liz Doran on keeping Miles Franklin’s heroine alive

For 125 years, My Brilliant Career’s Sybylla Melvyn has been beloved as an Australian cultural icon.

Stella Miles Franklin created the character when she was still a teenager, living in rural Australia at a time and in a place where being a writer was just not the done thing. For a woman, there was really only one choice – you got married and you had kids.

It’s not just that it was an expectation, it was survival. If your family had no money, there was no other path if you wanted food on the table and a roof over your head.

As a radical act of defiance, Franklin poured her own ambitions into Sybylla, and for the past century and change, generations of Australian women saw in Sybylla their own desires to want more than what others would give you, and to live in service of that fire you can’t – nor should – extinguish.

One of the women for whom Sybylla held a special place was Philippa Northeast’s mother.

“My mother had read the book to me at a really young age, and I joke that I was too young,” the actor who now plays Sybylla in a new streaming adaptation of My Brilliant Career, told The Nightly.

“But I think some things seeped in, and (I knew) this was an important book to my mum, that Sybylla meant a lot to her, and she tried to share that as soon as she could.”

Northeast re-read the book as a teenager, and then again more recently when the opportunity came up to be part of this production. To encounter Sybylla at three different points in Northwood’s life, meant she served a different purpose each time.

As someone who now had creative successes including Home & Away, The Newsreader, Territory and The Family Next Door, Northeast felt she was at a place in her own life to understand Sybylla deeper than when she was younger.

“I met her (again) at a time where I started to understand creative ambition a bit more strongly, and also what it takes, the endurance and determination that it takes, and the longevity that it takes, to get to the path that you want to be on,” she shared.

Northeast saw parallels between the early days in her own career and where Sybylla is at. “Certainly those memories where you’re just metaphorically tap-dancing, and ‘look at me, look at me, I’ll do anything, whatever you need, someone just hire me and then I can be great, just give me a go’.

“I came into telling her story older than the character was, which I think is a blessing because I had been on that journey myself. I could look at it from a different perspective, and have more empathy and compassion for a young Sybylla that’s jumping up and down, trying to live on her own terms.”

That’s the great bait-and-switch of My Brilliant Career. You think you’re reading or watching one story, but this whole time it’s been about something else.

Franklin set Sybylla on a journey that at first seems like a love triangle where the character would choose between two men, Harry Beecham (in this series, played by Christopher Chung, the Melbourne actor best known for playing Roddy Ho on Slow Horses), a wealthy young man acquainted with her grandmother, and Frank (Jake Dunn), an English heir.

Both men have something to offer her, and she and Harry have an undeniable spark. But the real choice has always been between the domestic life that was expected of her, and the pursuit of her artistic ambition to become a writer.

That’s a question that still confronts modern women, who for decades have been told they should work and strive to “have it all”, only to realise that the entrenched systems of patriarchy and capitalism make that challenge exceptionally difficult despite increased education and opportunity.

Screenwriter Liz Doran recognised the continued resonance of Franklin’s story, and when she was asked by executive producer Chloe Rickard to adapt it for 2026 audiences, it was a definite yes.

“There are still all these things that women are still expected to do in this world, and you can’t live up to any of them,” Doran said. “The role models that young women are given now, some of them are amazing, but there are some where you just go, ‘Wow, really?!’.

“Now we’ve got 11-year-olds being told to put on skin cream. The craziness is still within us, and possibly it’s worse than it was in the 1900s in a weird sort of way.”

Women in 2026 are dealing with a complex set of challenges and obstacles, and they’re reflected and distilled in a character from the time of Federation.

Northeast’s Sybylla is young and with that youth and naivety is an irrepressible energy of refusing to play by the rules.

She is active – Sybylla is constantly on the move, whether she’s running to something or away from something, horseriding, swimming, or infecting a stuffy party with her wild dance moves – and she recites barely disguised sexual poetry with clever triple meanings.

She’s an absolute force of passion and curiosity, of being unapologetic, and leading with intention. Northeast’s version is different to Judy Davis’s portrayal in Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 film adaptation – there’s an open-heartedness to her brattiness.

She greets her first taste of an oyster with as much ebullience as she does a later self-intimate moment in a copper bathtub. There is a hunger for all the pleasures to exact from life.

When Northeast was called up to audition for My Brilliant Career, it was originally for a smaller role. She remembered the day clearly – January 16 – and she was with her mum at in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville.

When the winds shifted and she was asked to step up and try out for Sybylla, her mum understood it was a very big deal.

“Then when I landed (the role), I rang mum and she was very emotional,” Northeast recalled. “She hung up on me, had to cry in the car, and then called me back. It was a special job to land.

“It makes me emotional actually, but it meant a lot to the people around me, not just me. Reverence for this project is huge because I’m really stepping into someone who is so beloved.”

The production was filmed in South Australia where two grand homes stood in for the two mansions in Franklin’s story – the home of Mrs Bossier (Anna Chancellor), Sybylla’s grandmother, Caddagat, and the Beecham manse, Five Bob Downs.

The production design for Five Bob Downs, located in Gawler, a half-hour outside of Adelaide, emphasised texture and lushness, especially the atrium adorned with peacock feathers and velvet fabrics against striking wallpaper, the domain of the thoroughly modern Aunt Gussie (Kate Mulvaney), who provokes Sybylla into pursuing her writing.

Next door was Harry’s study, where 140 linear metres of leather books had been hired from antique dealers.

Across the way, past the production trucks, was a fibreglass barn built to look like Federation stone, where the series would stage a raucous New Year’s Eve party in the fourth episode. Spread over the tables were sawdust and period-specific pork pies and Victoria sponge cakes (all real), and demijohns of ale (not real).

The crew had worked to make it all seem like a trip back to 1900, but the heart of the story was modern, and it always was.

“When you read the book, the central story of Sybylla and her choosing what her life was going to be, the looseness of it, was a very modern book,” Doran said.

“There was a really young crew member, about 18 or 19, and we were looking at a really early shot, and she was watching the monitor with me and she just said, ‘This show, I relate to this story so much’. I was thrilled.”

The line that connects Franklin to the team of filmmakers who were retelling her story 125 years later is strong, and generations of women have woven extra threads into it with their own experiences and perspectives.

Doran said the writers room would often wonder what Franklin herself would’ve made of this streaming series.

“She was so uncompromising and adventurous. She said this incredible thing by writing this book and getting it published, and then trying to write more novels, and then going overseas and becoming a union leader, and mixing with all these incredible feminists.

“She’s the one person we were hoping would love what we did, and I think she would. She is a feminist, and she wrote so fiercely about the lives of women.”

Northeast felt that connection to My Brilliant Career’s origins every day on set, and carried the book’s philosophy with her.

“You step off the brink and you know with this character, that as long as you are trying, as long as you are passionate, as long as you’re opinionated, that’s the spirit of Sybylla.”

Isn’t that just tickety-boo.

My Brilliant Career is on Netflix from August 13

The writer travelled to South Australia as a guest of Netflix