Breakers: profiles


Louise

Louise Crawford…

From the beginning Louise felt it was fate that she would play the role of Lucy. At the time of the auditions, she'd been in hospital for a week, being treated for a wound that had become infected with poison threatening to spread through her entire body. So when she arrived at the audition straight from her hospital bed, she looked pale, wan, and very thin. She looked perfect, in fact, for a fragile character who was still recovering from the effects of anorexia.

"I was sick as a dog at the audition," laughs Louise. "There was so much synchronicity with the part!"

Louise should be a good judge of that too, having had plenty of experience in drama. She was a regular on Echo Point, did a stint on Home And Away, including writing a script for the show, and has appeared many times on stage in plays like The Importance Of Being Earnest, The Norman Conquests and Uncle Vanya, as well as in films such as Time Trax II and Rough Diamonds.

Much of the excitement of working in Breakers, however, is the character of Lucy. "Lucy's a real Spice Girl, and I love being that outrageous," say Louise. "She's just out there, you never know what she's going to do. You think, 'What is this girl on?'"

"Part of me is like Lucy. She's a bit of a lost soul looking for love, and in all the wrong places. I don't have a partner, and I'm out there looking too. I'm not as psychotic as Lucy, however! I do love the range of storylines there are for her, and the humour. All the characters pay out on each other. It's a lot of fun."

…as Lucy Hill

Lucy, 19, was Alex's girlfriend immediately before he went to London and is Jaime's best friend and flatmate. While she has largely recovered from the trauma surrounding Alex's departure, she can still be emotionally fragile, something most of the Breakers family are crucially aware of.

Lucy works for Eve on The Breaker newspaper, mainly on the advertising side but pitching in to help with editorial when they approach their weekly deadline. Working on the paper has brought Lucy out of her shell after a troubled spell, which reached its low point three years ago when she spent some time in hospital being treated for the life-threatening effects of anorexia nervosa.

It's widely accepted that this was brought on largely by her inability to cope with Alex chasing other girls while he was supposed to be with her. Suffering low self-esteem in any case as the result of a troubled childhood, Lucy was always trying to make herself more attractive to Alex, the irony being, of course, the sicker and more neurotic she became, the less interested he was. His return from London is going to be very traumatic for her.