Politics & Power Quote by Barbara Hershey

Hershey is doing something actors are rarely allowed to do in public: rank national film cultures without apologizing for it. The line is casual, even offhand, but its bite comes from the assumption underneath it. She is not praising "Australia" as a tourist brand; she's praising a production ecosystem that, in her experience, tends to reward risk. "More intriguing" is a strategic word: it sidesteps claims about quality or prestige and goes straight to what performers actually chase - scripts with texture, moral complication, and characters who aren't built like marketing demos.

The subtext is also a quiet critique of the American mainstream. Hershey doesn't say Hollywood is worse; she implies it is more predictable. In the late 20th and early 21st century, American studio filmmaking increasingly optimized for scale, franchise logic, and audience testing. Meanwhile, Australian cinema (especially from the 70s onward) built an international reputation on lean budgets, sharper tonal edges, and stories that feel less sanded down by consensus. Even when Australian films go big, they often carry a local strangeness - landscape, class friction, blunt humor - that reads as novelty in a U.S. market trained on familiar beats.

There's a professional tell here, too: "if someone hands me" frames her as a working actor making fast judgments in a stack of material. It's not nationalism; it's pattern recognition. Hershey is staking a taste identity - aligning herself with the kind of filmmaking where intrigue isn't a garnish, it's the point.