At 51, Asher Keddie is at a point in life many women quietly aspire to reach: creatively fulfilled, personally grounded, and deeply comfortable in her own skin.
After decades as one of Australia’s most respected actors, she’s expanding into producing, earning fresh award recognition and speaking publicly, for the first time, about living with lupus.
In February 2026, Asher was nominated for two AACTA Awards: Best Lead Actress for Strife and Best Narrative Comedy Series for Strife, as she is a producer on the show.
“It’s just such a great feeling to be recognised for that hard work,” she shares. “That commitment and the investment that you’ve made over a number of years.”
“That people have enjoyed it, and want to congratulate you for it. It’s fantastic.”
Asher has made the shift into producing in recent years.
“I just love it,” she gleams, but credits the shift to friend and founder of production company, Made Up Stories, Bruna Papandrea.
“I worked first with [Bruna] on Nine Perfect Strangers, [she] really gave me a bit of tough love and said: “You’ve got to produce. You have to start. Stop talking and just start. Let’s do it together.”
And they did.
“It felt like a natural, organic way of getting into producing and wanting to build something, projects from the ground up. There’s nothing more creative and satisfying than doing that.”
But for many years, Asher didn’t have the self-confidence that she could produce.
“It took me a number of years to put myself out there and be seen in a different way than being an actor. The way I’d always been seen and recognised. It just took a bit of courage.”
And she’s taken it in her stride. “Now I’m in, I can’t believe I took so long to do it because it just feels like such a great fit. And challenges me in ways that I really wanted to be and needed to be challenged creatively.”
However, this doesn’t mean that acting is off the table for Asher.
“I want my cake and eat it too,” she laughs. “I’m so right-brained, and that really helps with the producing. I like finding solutions and solving problems all day. That’s just who I am. But I also love to express myself emotionally and be in that vulnerable place that an actor needs to be in, and that’s very sort of left-brained, so I get to flex both, and it’s really rewarding.”
Opening up about Lupus
On an episode of Bruna Papandrea’s podcast, Invisible Roadmaps, Asher opened up about her autoimmune disease, lupus. It’s not a very well-known or understood disease.
“It is a really difficult disease to diagnose, and it was for me as well… I did have a significant collapse. And my brain was so swollen that I just couldn’t function. And it took, I think, over a week in the hospital for them to diagnose lupus.”
Once diagnosed, long-standing symptoms finally made sense.
“Particularly in my working life, there was unusual, unexplained inflammation and fatigue usually around 2 and 4 o’clock in the afternoon.”
At the time, she assumed this was just the usual “afternoon slump” or was caused by her working “15 and 17 hours a day” during her 30s.
Today, she manages the condition through medication, diet and, most importantly, rest.
“Sleep is my religion completely. I just have a very disciplined sleep schedule at night, and I nap in the afternoon because that’s what I need to do with the lupus.”
Her approach to self-care is now non-negotiable.
“I now just give myself what I need… I really used to not understand self-care very well. And I have a really good understanding of it now.”
In some ways, she says, the diagnosis changed her life for the better.
“Actually, being diagnosed with a chronic autoimmune disease helped me to begin to self-care in a way that I hadn’t before. So it’s kind of, I feel like it’s been really positive in some ways, finding out that I had lupus.”
“I’m lucky,” she says. “Occasionally, my knuckles can get split and cut, and I’ve got to do a little bit more to look after myself. I’m lucky.”
Embracing authenticity in a new beauty campaign
Wanting to express her authentic self is part of the impetus for agreeing to be the new face of L’Oréal Paris.
“It felt like a natural, very easy yes for me at this point in my life,” Asher shares. “Their messaging feels very aligned with who I have become.”
Specifically for L’Oréal Paris, Asher appreciates that the beauty company celebrates natural beauty and being your authentic self. And has since it first launched.
“They started in 1909, and the message that they were sending out to women then is the same message as it is right now, today, she says. “We want women to feel empowered and to feel their worth and to find their voices and to challenge stereotypes.”
“What an exceptional message to send to women and to encourage women to embrace their self-worth. That’s why it felt like a really, a no-brainer for me.”
Appreciating her own self-worth was a hard-learned lesson, especially growing up in the limelight.
“When you’re younger, and I hope this is changing now for younger women in the 20s, 30s and 40s, there’s a performative element in the way we put ourselves out there to the people in our lives, people we want to work with, to the world. I think there certainly was for me as a younger woman.”
“But it takes us so many years to embrace [ourselves]. It certainly took me a long time to believe it. It’s just such a relief now to not feel like that, and life has opened up in so many ways.”
How did she come to accept her self-worth? “Inner work.”
“I mean, for me, there’s a public and a private self, there always has been as long as I can remember.” That led to an internal “conflict” for the award-winning actor.
“But there came a point, I suppose, around my late 40s, and I’m 51 now, where I thought, I don’t know if I’m really living my best authentic self. So I just had to really start to think about that. And then enjoyed the process of thinking about that. And then enjoyed the process of sitting in it and feeling really uncomfortable at times too. Like, who the hell am I? Like, what do I want to say? What do I want to? And that led me to producing as well and wanting to create different versions of women on screen and explore all the multifaceted complexities that we have.”
Asher Keddie’s skincare routine
“Religiously, like every morning, I use a facial contour [massage] because it makes me feel better, and certainly as my skin has matured.”
She does this after she has cleaned her face but before she puts on moisturiser. But, there’s one product she “can’t live without:
“I can’t live without a serum,” she laughs. “I can’t put moisturiser on before I put on serum.”
Her serum of choice is the Retivalif Laser serum.
“I thought this was a great sign, before [L’Oréal Paris] approached me, that I was using the Revitalif creams, the day and the night cream, but I hadn’t used the serum before.”
However, when they learned she couldn’t live without a good serum, they sent one her way. And now they have her full endorsement.
“They’re so protective. That’s what I like about them,” and protecting her skin is of paramount importance.”They have the things that my skin needs now. There’s hyaluronic acid, the pro-retinol, the peptides, all the good stuff that I know helps and enhances what I have. I don’t need to be putting on creams that a 30-year-old is putting on. I mean, that’s just fruitless, really. The things I need are skin protection more than anything, so that I can keep what I have and look good for years to come.
“I can’t go back in time, I don’t want to, actually, I have looked after my skin quite well, probably only in the last five to 10 years, maybe 10 years. Before that, I got far too much sun. As a 1970s baby, we didn’t really think about all that sort of stuff. So sunscreen is important too, obviously, every day, whether it’s winter or summer.”
“Now I just want to protect my skin.”
