“You do have to be careful of snakes in this sort of weather,” Pia Miranda says. It’s a warm afternoon in early spring when I meet the actor for a walk around Cherry Lake in Melbourne’s south-west. Miranda’s two-year-old silky terrier, Gizmo, is oblivious to the danger, pausing occasionally to sploot in long grass by the water’s edge.
A discussion about snakes gets us joking about “symbolically phallic” things that can kill you, which leads me to ask about some unsavoury encounters she details in her new memoir, Finding My Bella Vita.
Miranda, who grew up in the south-eastern suburb of Malvern in the 1980s, was an unwilling witness to many an indecent exposure by creeps in the park near her Catholic girls high school. “To say I saw more than my fair share of erect penises lurking in the bushes on my travels home would be a massive understatement,” she writes.
Years later, there was a near miss with another predatory creep. In Taormina, invited to a film festival after the runaway success of Looking for Alibrandi in 2000, Miranda met an acquaintance of Harvey Weinstein’s who invited her to fly to London alone on a private jet with the now-disgraced producer.
Greta Scacchi, Miranda’s on-screen mother and off-screen mentor, saved the day. “I remember her grabbing [the acquaintance’s] business card and going, ‘This isn’t real! This isn’t real! … It’s a front!’ She knew,” Miranda recalls.
“Something bad will happen to you on that plane,” Scacchi had told her. Although it’s possible nothing may have eventuated, Miranda is grateful the elder actor’s discouragement forestalled the chance to find out.
The 3.7km track around Altona’s Cherry Lake is a local haunt for Miranda, both as a “good way to get the kids out” – she has two children with husband Luke Hanigan – and a neat running loop.
“I love watching people fish,” she adds. Right on cue, a teenager appears around a bend with a fishing rod in hand. “It’s just peaceful. I do a lot of good thinking walking around here.”
Writing a memoir the year she turned 50 has offered Miranda a chance to reflect on her early career. “Being laid bare and not having anything to hide behind was [initially] confronting,” she says. “It was a nice way to look back and be really forgiving of the young person that I was … I definitely was filled with a lot of gratitude.”
Immortalised in her 20s on celluloid as the teenaged Josie Alibrandi, Miranda is sanguine about the impact that Looking for Alibrandi has had on her life. “I didn’t know it was going to go on for [nearly] 30 years,” she says – and that decades later, strangers on the street would still shout jokes at her about having “found Alibrandi”.
“Once I knew that it was going to continue … I thought: I can make someone’s day if I’m happy and gracious, and I love it and I’m proud of it. So I made a really conscious decision to have that be my experience.”
The instant fame did not come with financial stability – a reality for many Australian actors, Miranda points out. “Even after I shot Alibrandi, I was working in a shop, a clothes store,” she says. “We don’t very often get hugely financially rewarded for our work – certainly not in that instance.”
The chance to “be known for more than one thing” played on Miranda’s mind when she won the Australian version of Survivor in 2019, but the decision to go on the reality program was driven, she says, by that fact that she is a “nerdy superfan” of the show. Her preparation was impressively rigorous: she hired a high-performance diving coach at the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre to help her overcome her fear of jumping from heights, practised fire-making with flint, and taught herself to tweeze facial hair using seashells combed from Altona beach.
That last skill was initially intended to prevent a moustache developing on screen, but led to her running a makeshift beauty salon for fellow contestants. “It became this really strange, strategic thing,” Miranda laughs. “I was telling everyone that’s what I trained to do, which made them think I was funny.”
In recent years, the actor has appeared in Wentworth, the children’s show Mustangs FC, and the action-thriller series Heat, about two families who holiday in Victoria during bushfire season.
Finding My Bella Vita is partly a grappling with the legacy of Alibrandi; it is also a contemplation of what it means to live a good life. The memoir is rich with fond recollections of her upbringing as a ballet-obsessed child of mixed Italian and Irish heritage. Raised Catholic, her initial back-up plan if she didn’t make it as a dancer was to become a nun. Time with her nonna, her paternal grandmother, imparted “a love of food as well as an obsession with the afterlife”, she writes.
I ask Miranda about this towards the end of our – snake-free – loop around the lake, as a gentle breeze picks up off the water. “I like tradition, but I would describe myself as still spiritually searching,” she says. “The more I try to be a better person, the easier I feel about the end.”
Finding My Bella Vita: A story of family, food, fame and working out who you are is out now (Hachette, $34.99).
