Caitlin Stasey has a very honest endorsement for her latest project, the new eight-part survival comedy Class Of ’07: “I love the cast – and I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t, because I’m not very good at pretending to like people.”
Stasey has starred in Australian favourites Neighbours and Please Like Me, as well as Hollywood box office hits like the horror flick Smile. But not every TV show or movie works out as well as Class of ’07.
“There are so many times you might make a project that’s really dear to you and then in the process of shooting and editing, things get lost in translation,” she says. “But this is one of the rare times in my career that everything has fallen into place perfectly.”
As well her on-screen roles, Stasey is known for her outspoken social media posts (though she now prefers to use her Instagram more for photos of her dog and girlfriend). Here, Stasey shares the tool she uses to rein in her screen time, and the reason she hopes her girlfriend doesn’t read this interview.
What I’d save from my house in a fire
I have this big, beautiful oil painting of what I think is a family of afghan dogs in my living room. It’s huge – the size of my body. I got it at the Rose Bowl Flea Market in LA and it’s my favourite piece of art I’ve ever seen in a home. I’ve tried to find out who the artist is without any luck – I’ve done a reverse Google image search with it and it doesn’t come up anywhere. So I don’t know what it is, who made it or why they did it, but I really love it. It’s such a haunting image.
There are three adults and five pups in the painting. My girlfriend and I are always making up different stories about them – like, two of the dogs are a couple and there’s this Succession-type rivalry between the puppies. During Covid we kind of lost our minds, obviously. We spent a lot of time looking at that painting.
My most useful object
A little cylindrical Perspex box that I shut my phone into when I have overdone it on Instagram. Because, you know, I’m very millennial in that way. I get quite sucked into social media and can lose so much time on it. So I use the box to try to curb my screen time, which is currently unacceptable.
You can set the amount of time that you want to lock your phone up for. Then you shut the thing and it doesn’t open until the time is up, unless you actually destroy the item, which I am not quite addicted enough to do. You’d really have to commit to getting your phone out of there. But I accidentally set it in there for 10 hours once and that was pretty stressful.
The item I most regret losing
Well, I don’t know for sure that it was my fault, but I have a horrible feeling that I lost a beautiful Versace bomber jacket that belonged to my girlfriend, which she’s had since she was about 12.
It went missing from our house one day, and the only person who could have lost it is me or her. And considering that she’s had it since she was a kid, it’s highly unlikely that it was her. We’ve never talked about it. This will be the first time I’ve admitted to maybe losing it – the first time she will hear me admitting to maybe losing it – so we’re gonna try to keep this interview as far away from her as possible. But it was gorgeous and I feel immense guilt. I keep looking to find a replacement and I haven’t yet been lucky.
Like I said, I don’t know for sure that I lost it because I don’t remember taking it. But I have a really bad memory, so odds are it was me. I’ve been absent-minded my whole life – I went to Girl Guide camp when I was eight and the lost property box was just filled with my stuff. At the end of the camp, they just handed me the entire box.
