Michelle Keegan on Ten Pound Poms season 2 and whether she'd pursue Hollywood
The Ten Pound Poms star spoke to Radio Times magazine about returning for season 2.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
Michelle Keegan is having technical issues. She is at her home in Essex but her laptop is in Manchester. Instead, she’s having to use her husband’s — TV personality Mark Wright — and it’s not going well. “I’m the worst when it comes to tech and Mark’s out and I don’t have his password,” says Keegan.
Eventually, we give up on a video call and resort to a phone call so that I can record our chat about her return to Australia in the guise of Kate, her character in Ten Pound Poms.
However, her memory of the show is a little hazy at first. “You know what it is?” she says. “I wrapped on this a year ago, so it’s really hard to rack my brain about what happened. I don’t even know what I did yesterday. It’s the same every single day — once I finish the day, it’s like a new day and I can’t remember the day before.”
So basically, she’s the ghost of Christmas present? “Exactly!”
In the first season, it was revealed that Keegan’s character Kate was in fact in Australia to retrieve her son, Michael, who had been shipped halfway around the world to be adopted by a childless Australian couple, while she was suffering from postnatal depression. At the end of the series, she took Michael and went on the run.
“That did actually happen with children in orphanages — even with mothers and fathers who didn’t give them up, who were trying to get their life sorted, or going through postnatal depression at the time. The children got taken off them,” Keegan explains.
Signing up to the show not having heard of the original Ten-pound Poms, this was another layer of the onion she had to peel.
But back to modern day; did she get to see much of Australia while she was there filming? “We did. Mark was with me the whole time and we really enjoyed it,” says the 37-year-old actor who is now expecting her first child. “I soaked up as much as I could; we went to Palm Beach where they film Home and Away, Hunter Valley, which is the wine country and to the Sydney Opera House.”
A self-confessed “homebird”, can she ever see herself moving to sunnier climes? After all, her recent Netflix hit Fool Me Once — one of the streamer’s most viewed shows of 2024 — must have got her some Hollywood attention? “I would love to live in the sun one day, I’m such a baby in the cold. Mark was out there for two and a half years and I did go over for a few months at a time. I love the way of life.”
But for now Keegan is taking it one day at a time. With exciting new adventures ahead she still appears grounded, despite the showbiz whirlwind… laptop issues tend to keep a person humble, after all.
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Ten Pound Poms season 2 will air on Sunday 9th March at 8pm on BBC One and iPlayer. Episodes will continue weekly
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