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EXCLUSIVE: Emma Lung on coming full circle and the importance of family

"Love is everything."

Ten years after she thought she would never work again, renaissance woman, Emma Lung, is ready to have it all – love, creativity and family.

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Emma Lung was raised to believe life was a wild adventure to be lived wholeheartedly, which she has, taking love and despair – and there’s been some of each – in her stride.

At 15, all chutzpa and dreams, she left home for drama school in New York, and has since spent much of her life abroad. But now, at 43, the actress (currently riding high in roles alongside Asher Keddie in the Binge hit Strife and with Isla Fisher in Wolf Like Me) has found new challenges and all the joy she could wish for back beneath Australia’s big skies, where her story began.

The adventurous upbringing and creative roots of Emma Lung

For generations, Emma’s forebears have taken the road less travelled. Her paternal grandfather was born in Canton, China, left home after school to see the world and opened stores in Papua New Guinea and Sydney. Her maternal grandfather was an engineer on the Snowy Hydro who then travelled for work, and her mother grew up in towns as diverse as Cooma, Cabramurra and Tokyo. She still speaks fluent Japanese.

Emma also lived for a time in Cooma and Tokyo as a kid, but the family settled in Sydney, where, for as long as she can remember, she dreamed of a life in the theatre and films. Emma’s childhood memories are lit up with movies.

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“My dad’s a complete cinephile,” she explains, “as is my brother. We were brought up on Woody Allen movies and pretty much anything from the ‘70s and the ‘50s. And then all of the iconic ‘80s – you know, The Goonies, Stand by Me. We had such an eclectic cinematic education.”

And a musical education, too. Her parents both taught in intensive English schools but moonlighted as “a daggy little duo that used to play at everything from the Paddo RSL to weddings. Dad played the drum machine and sang, and Mum played the keyboards. It was quite hysterical. They were called Futari [Japanese for ‘two people’], but then they became Sway Duo – both such daggy names. They’re real kooks.”

From piano prowess to performing arts hopeful

Her mother can sight-read piano music, “and I don’t know whether I inherited that from her,” but she remembers her father playing a game with her as a kid. “He would say, ‘I bet you can’t play whatever song it was on the radio’. And I’d say, ‘I can too’. And I’d sit there figuring it out. What has culminated in is the ability to literally hear music and play it straight away on the piano almost instantly. So it’s a real party trick.”

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Emma studied piano for years, and there was a time when her teacher suggested she might think about a career as a concert pianist. But as soon as it was mentioned, Emma knew, “I just wanted to be an actor, and that’s all I cared about doing.”

“I would’ve been in year four or five,” she remembers, “when I heard about this school, Newtown [High School of the Performing Arts], and I set my sights on that. So, I wanted to audition, and I was already doing jazz, tap, ballet, drama, piano lessons – you know, all the things. I don’t know how my parents got me to them, but I just was so keen on it all.”

Keen and determined. “Even at that young age, I had such a strategy in terms of what I felt like I needed to do,” she adds. “And I was probably quite a show-off. I think I was very confident. So it was good to go to a school like Newtown and have that squashed out of me a bit. Seeing other [talented] kids just brings you down a notch.”

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It didn’t dim Emma’s dreams, however.

Chasing the New York dream

By 13, she had set her sights on drama school in New York. “And somehow,” she smiles, “that dream miraculously found its way to me by virtue of a boyfriend and his mum who are still very dear to my heart.”

The boyfriend’s mother was an actor who had decided to “give life in New York a crack”. Her son was keen to go with her, and Emma asked if she could tag along too.

Her parents, she says, “went from a very adamant, ‘no – there’s absolutely no way we are letting you do that’, to ‘how do we wire the money into your account?’ They were, you know, deeply, horribly criticised for that, as if they were irresponsible parents, which could not have been further from the truth. They knew I was determined and that I had been focused on for such a long time.”

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Early success and career breakthroughs

Emma completed a short Stella Adler course, then was accepted into the Professional Performing Arts School, where she finished high school. It was an immense learning experience, particularly emotional.

“I wasn’t lonely,” she begins thoughtfully, “though I was alone a lot. But, I think that was good for me because I had never really been alone before. I was a very gregarious child, and I’d always had a lot of friends. Then to rock up to this school that Alicia Keys and Britney Spears, and Claire Danes, and all these fancy people went to. I got to be amongst so many incredibly talented people, but I do very much remember feeling like I didn’t want to impose on friendships that had already been made.

“So, as soon as the bell would ring, I would race out of the school to go and sit and do my homework over the lunch break. I just didn’t want to be there awkwardly waiting to make friends. So I did spend a lot of time alone, but alone in a free and sort of self-realising way, which was pretty extraordinary – to be 15, 16, 17 and having these very adult experiences that really confronted you with yourself. It was liberating, actually, and maybe it’s the reason that I’m still slogging away as an actor at 43.”

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After drama school, Emma landed a string of roles with the Sydney Theatre Company and worked solidly, back and forth between Australia and the USA. “I was just so lucky for such a long time,” she says. At home, she’d broken through in the 2004 film Peaches, alongside Jacqueline McKenzie and Hugo Weaving.

Her first American role was in the cult hit, Entourage, in 2007, where she played an early scene, slightly intimidated, with Leonardo DiCaprio watching from the wings.

That same year, she won the Logie for Most Outstanding New Talent for her role in the short film, Stranded, and in 2008 was she was nominated for Best Lead Actress at the AFI Awards for her role in The Jammed.

Finding love with filmmaker Henry Zalapa

It was during this heady time, in a bar on Sydney’s Oxford Street, that Emma met her soulmate, the filmmaker, Henry Zalapa.

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“I remember just feeling these eyes kind of staring me down,” she says with a shy smile, “and I looked up and saw Henry and felt quite literally weak at the knees. My knees dropped because I thought he was so gorgeous.

“He made his way over to me and we talked. We were both in relationships, but we exchanged numbers all the same. I was friends with his older brother, so, you know, that helped. He moved to the UK, and I moved to LA, but we stayed in touch.”

Four years later, unbeknownst to each other, Henry and Emma were briefly back in town.

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“One night,” Emma recalls delightedly, “his older brother said to him, ‘Oh, I’m going to this warehouse party tonight. Do you want to come?’ And Henry had been shooting and was like, ‘Absolutely not. I’m too tired.’ Then the brother goes, ‘Emma Lung will be there’. And he said, ‘I’ll grab my coat.’

“We met again that night and we didn’t even exchange a kiss, but I came home far too late and woke up far too early – I was giddy with excitement – and I said to my mum, ‘I met my husband last night’. I had been in lots of serious relationships, but I’d never said that to her. And she stopped what she was doing and said, ‘Really?’ And then the phone rang and it was Henry. We went on our first date about a week later, and I have never not lived with him since. He ended up coming to America and we lived there together for a long time before we got married.”

Finding balance between Hollywood and home

They started out in Los Angeles. “We had an incredible time living there,” Emma says, “but it reached a point where I just felt starved of anything outside the industry,” so they decided to move to New York.

Within months, Emma was offered a lead on Wonderland, a successful Australian romcom set in an apartment block in Sydney. From 2013, there followed two years of flights back and forth across the Pacific.
“That was a pretty good time,” she says, “because you’re seeing enough of your family to not feel guilty, but you’re also living where you want to live.”

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Becoming Mum: A new chapter begins

Emma and Henry were together for six years before their eldest, Marlowe (now 10), was born on April 5, 2015. “That was how long my parents were together before they had me,” Emma explains, “and they’re still madly in love, so it seemed like a sensible amount of time. Even though I wanted a kid straight away. I’ve always been mad for kids, and I said to Henry on our first date, ‘Just so you know, I want four kids: I want to adopt two and I want to have two.’ Then we had two, and now I don’t know if we’ll adopt two, because two is a lot.”

And Marlowe didn’t come into the world easily.

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“It was an emergency forceps delivery,” Emma tells The Weekly. “He came out and he was flat – he was not breathing at all – and they had to work on him for an hour and then take him to the NICU [Neonatal Intensive Care Unit]. My husband was terrified and had to act as a human incubator with his hands over his little body in the humidicrib. But I had every faith that he’d be fine.”

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Which he was, and today she and Henry also have a four-year-old daughter, Ophelia. Both children have been welcomed and loved, and encouraged beyond measure.

“My son’s name means driftwood,” Emma says, “and it couldn’t be more perfect for him. He’s very calm. He’s unfazed by pretty much everything. He’s a very gentle soul. My daughter – she’s a spicy margarita. She’s pretty much a carbon copy of myself – irreverent, anti-authoritarian. She’s hilarious, but she’s definitely a much bigger handful than my son. And I definitely prefer that my girl’s the spicy one and my boy’s the mellow one. I wouldn’t change either of them for the world.”

Emma Lung on returning home and a career rebirth

Aspects of her own upbringing that she hopes to pass along include “the love and the encouragement and support that I received from my parents, and the open-mindedness. I hope that we can pass that down. I hope that our kids always feel loved and supported by us, because I believe that’s everything.”

There was a time, after Marlowe was born, when Emma worried she would never work again – fears, she insists, that had solid foundations. But they returned to Australia just as COVID struck, and the move felt somehow serendipitous.

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Within months, her old Newtown High School friend, writer/director Abe Forsyth, sent her the script for Wolf Like Me, “and I’ll be forever grateful,” she says, “because I love that show so much. It’s just so cute, such a fabulous, bent mind. And I really feel like it reminded everyone that I was here and set me on a streak of consistent work ever since, which has been such a gift.”

The power of female friendships and family influence

Then came Strife, in which Emma plays alongside Asher Keddie and Matt Day, as the long-suffering friend of a brilliant, if infuriating and far from emotionally stable, digital publishing entrepreneur. It has been eye-opening.

Asher Keddie and Emma Lung on Strife. Credit: Binge, Supplied

“Almost every scene I do is with Asher,” she explains, “and it’s just such a joy to work with her because she’s so fing smart and so hilarious. She always knows exactly what she’s doing. It’s like being in a masterclass, watching her and acting opposite her and sparring with her and feeling comfortable and confident enough to take risks that lead to places you didn’t expect the scene to go.”

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Friendships in Emma’s offscreen life are important too. “Hugely important,” she says. “I have such an incredible collection of women in my life. Maybe my good taste has come from my mum because my mother is as perfect as perfect gets as far as I’m concerned. And I think, when you’ve had a foundation that strong and that wise, it probably leads to good decisions in terms of the women you collect along the way. The women I have in my life hold me up for sure”.

Emma Lung’s new creative chapter

Emma has danced and twirled and laughed and pondered life, dressed in rivers of pink, since breakfast time, exuding nothing but warmth and enthusiasm. A little tussle-haired now, with a mug of steaming tea, sitting at a table in the corner of The Weekly’s studio, she talks about where this peripatetic life of hers might lead next.

Around her neck, she wears a beautiful, translucent lemon-coloured stone on a long gold chain, inherited from her grandmother-in-law. “I never take it off,” she says. Her maternal grandmother, too, had a great love of all that glitters. “She’d been giving me heirlooms from birth until death, literally. And then we were robbed and they took every last heirloom, and it broke my heart.”

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In part, to compensate for that loss, between scenes, Emma has been sketching designs for her own jewellery brand, Atum, which will launch later this year. Almost every one of her fingers is decorated with a ring of her own design – breathtakingly beautiful, dotted with precious and semi-precious stones and crafted in nine-carat gold.

“It’s a fun little pastime,” she giggles, “and it makes sure I don’t get too annoying whilst waiting for the next acting gig”. The waits have not been long of late, and Emma still has “so many dreams” to chase in the acting world. Many women nowadays, she muses, are finding the best roles of their lives after 40 or 50 or even 60.

Why Emma Lung is calling Australia home

If her career could lead her anywhere, she admits, she dreams of “a path to where Olivia Coleman is now, and the types of movies she does. That would be the dream. She just runs the gamut because she’s so fing brilliant. I would love to be half as brilliant as she is at her age.”

And in that dream, will she be living in Australia?

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“If work took me anywhere, I’d go,” she says honestly, “but I don’t want to live anywhere else now. My parents are here, I have good friends here, and work is going well here for both of us. This is home.”

Strife is available to stream on BINGE.

This article originally appeared in the June 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. SUBSCRIBE so you never miss an issue.

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