At a glance…
- Heather Mitchell and Georgie Parker sit down with The Weekly to discuss the new show and how life doesn’t end at 60.
- Dalliance premieres on Paramount+ on 27 August, 2026
There is a particular kind of story we don’t often see on screen: one in which women in their 60s are not defined by what they have already done, but by what they might still do. They can fall in love, make mistakes and disappoint each other. They can discover new friendships, question old ones and, perhaps most importantly, change their minds.
It is just one of the ideas at the heart of Dalliance, the new Australian drama created by Heather Mitchell, John Edwards, Pip Karmel and Liz Doran, and starring Heather alongside Georgie Parker, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham and Catherine McClements.
But while the series explores relationships of all kinds (from love to friendship and family) and how they grow and change over time, it also opens up a much bigger conversation about what it means to reach your 60s and why that stage of life should not be treated as an ending.
For Heather, the exploration began with a simple question: what does it actually mean to be in your 60s?
“It was more exploring the age of being in your 60s and what that meant to us in the writers’ room,” she tells me on the day of the launch of the much-anticipated Aussie series. “But friendship was a topic. The longevity of those relationships is paramount.”
“From friendships you have when you are children to friends who stay with you through your whole life and others who fall away.”
Those long-term friendships can provide an extraordinary sense of continuity, but they can also become complicated.
“We certainly did and talk about long-term relationships with friends and the support they give or the lack of support you sometimes feel from close friends and whether you can be honest with them or not and how honest you can be but also about new friends and is it possible to have a new friend when you’re getting older,” Heather says.
Sometimes, she says, the freedom of a new friendship can be exactly what someone needs. And yet those new relationships can bring their own uncertainties.
“If that new friend, if there’s betrayal involved or if there’s disappointments and uncertainties, then you question your own instinct and judgment,” Heather says.
In the new series, Heather plays Dani, a restaurateur who meets the charming Billy (her frequent on-screen partner, Hugo Weaving) as he’s trying to evade his brother, played by David Wenham. Afterwards, Billy brings Dani home to meet his wife, Rose, which leads to unexpected consequences as their worlds collide.
For Georgie Parker, who plays Rose, one of the most important things about Dalliance is that her character was never intended to be reduced to her relationship status.
“Rose was never just the wife. She was and is from the very first page a fully fledged beautiful human being,” she says.
It is a distinction Georgie has fought for throughout her career.
The two-time Gold Logie winner recalls playing Lucy in A Country Practice (which just entered the TV WEEK Logie Hall of Fame in 2026) when she was 26, when her character married and was suddenly viewed differently.
“I had to fight for the fact that, well, no, this is still Lucy,” Georgie says. “You’ve created a crazy character who has a chicken under her arm all the time. She’s a nurse.”
That tendency to “domesticate” female characters is something Georgie believes has historically affected how women are represented.
“It’s funny how you domesticate a character quite quickly,” she says.
Instead, Dalliance gives its characters room to be complicated, imperfect and still evolving.
“I think if there have been stories about them, it’s been a bit of a cliché that life’s closing down or they’re sad or dreams aren’t fulfilled, but it’s not a fully fledged full person making mistakes, not being perfect,” Georgie says.
Heather has encountered a similar generational disconnect in the roles offered to women.
“I still read some scripts where I read them, and I go, but this is my mother’s generation you’re writing about, not my generation,” she says.
She points to the language used to describe older female characters as an example.
“I remember being sent scripts playing grandmothers,” Heather says. “And I thought, I started having children in my forties. So I was 45 when I had my second child. So reading them, I couldn’t help but think, well, I have a baby.”
Reinforcing that a single story can’t tell everyone’s story, as everyone’s life can be so different. Even when the age of a character might be technically correct, Heather says the cultural references can be decades out of date.
“Their names are Beryl and Maureen,” she says. “Not that Maureen’s a bad name, but they are generational names that belong to my mother’s generation.” And the scripts she was reading were about her mother’s generation, not her own.
That disconnect reflects how profoundly expectations around women have changed. Here in Australia, women didn’t start getting access to their own credit cards and bank accounts until the 1970s. We’ve come a long way, but there are still ways to go, and the examples we see set the expectations for younger men and women coming up in the world.
“I grew up with a mother who was in the streets burning bras and things so that I didn’t have to be going once a week to the beauty parlour to get my hair set because my husband expected,” Heather shares.
“I think it’s important that we explore those. That we’re women and men and whatever gender one identifies as, we’re not one thing, exactly.”
And the conversation about feminism doesn’t stop with their generation.
After meeting younger women who had watched Dalliance, Heather and Georgie found themselves talking about the very different pressures facing women now. And one thing they both remarked, which surprised them, was the women thanking them.
“They wanted to talk to us about getting older because they’re looking at their future, but they look at us and go, okay great, so it’s not all going to stop?” Heather tells me.
“For them to be looking at us, as 60-year-old women and men, fully embracing their life and loving it, for want of a better word, they seem to get a lot of hope out of it,” Georige adds.
But Georgie also believes feminism itself has become a more complicated space for younger women.
“I think feminism for them now is so different, and they’re ostracised for it,” she says.
“Whereas when we were younger, generally, if you said you were a feminist, it was like, high five.”
She believes many young women are now navigating a particularly difficult set of expectations.
“And I think a lot of these women were feeling pressured, whether it was pressure from themselves or from other women or from society. And I think it’s a very tough environment for them at the moment,” she adds.
One of those pressures is the way women are expected to present themselves. Heather was conscious from the beginning that she did not want Dalliance to create another female character whose story revolved around her appearance.
“I was very conscious that I didn’t want to have a character in this series anyway who was focused on her appearance,” she says. For Heather, that decision speaks to something much bigger about the way women treat one another.
“And that to me is a sad indictment of female relationships at the moment is that, especially on social media, of people’s comments about other women and their appearance,” she says.
“And I find that very, very, very sad that we would criticise each other for how we look.”
The pressure has changed shape over the years, but it has not disappeared.
“When, goodness me, it used to be about weight, and now then it became about face, and now it’s going back to weight,” Heather says. “It’s just such a shame.”
Georgie sees another layer to that pressure among younger women: the increasingly performative nature of social media and identity.
“There’s a real performative nature to these younger women these days,” she laments.
“And it’s not that that’s what they want, but that’s an expectation of the profile that they often create for themselves. And I don’t know if they’re all very happy with that, but that’s part of the job. There’s pressure, true pressure.”
Against that backdrop, Dalliance offers something quietly radical: women who are not trying to prove that they are still young, but simply continuing to live. And that extends to the friendships at the centre of the story.
Georgie describes the cast itself as a rare environment, a “family”. There were actors who have spent decades working in the Australian industry and who were able to bring that history and shorthand to the characters.
“I just think it was a rare environment, actually, knowing that you were working with people who had been working for so long, and we all knew each other,” she says.
“All of that stuff just fed into the actual world of the show, which is these 60-year-old people who have 40-year-long-standing relationships and they’ve been through a lot together,” Georgie adds.
“It’s written so beautifully that those scenes where they’re all just mingling together, it was an absolute joy to play.”
There was also, she says, something important in the humour of those long-standing relationships.
“There was so much cheekiness in there, which would be evident in deep long-term relationships where someone’s just not taking something seriously, even though it’s deadly serious,” she says.
For Heather, that sense of trust extended beyond the cast. She played Dani while also working as a producer on the series, her first time behind the camera and a much different creative challenge for her. Also, Heather’s husband, famed cinematographer Martin McGrath, was the director of photography.
“We’ve been together for nearly 40 years and working together was just so wonderful,” she says of working with her husband.
The experience taught Heather something that seems fitting for a series so interested in uncertainty and reinvention: sometimes the most useful thing you can do is admit you don’t have the answer.
“I learned to say, “I don’t know” pretty quickly,” she says, but there was power in that. Plus, it helped things move along.
“It taught me a lot about just moving on, move on. You haven’t got time to dwell. No time to dwell, move on, as long as people are okay.”
And having a great guide in a new challenge always helps to succeed.
“John Edwards is extraordinary because he knew I had no experience and he didn’t stand there teaching me,” Heather shares. “He threw me in, and went ‘off you go’. Which is the greatest way to learn. But that requires him to have trust in me and have faith in me. And you don’t always get that; certainly you don’t always get that from a male. So full, full gratitude to him for that.”
“As an actor, having Heather be there not only as your colleague but also as a producer was very reassuring. I felt very supported,” Georgie said of her co-star and producer.
“And there is that saying, ‘you’re only as good as the people you work with’, and certainly, when you’re working with Georgie and Hugo and Carol and everyone, you just sort of relax because they carry me,” Heather ends.
As Heather starts a new creative chapter, so does her character in Dalliance. One of the most compelling ideas to emerge from the series is that starting again or starting something new does not necessarily mean abandoning everything that came before. The friendships, relationships, mistakes and lessons of the past can come with you, but they don’t have to dictate what happens next.
And if the reaction of the younger women Heather and Georgie met is anything to go by, that may be one of the show’s most important messages.
As Georgie puts it, seeing people in their 60s “fully embracing their life and loving it” offered them hope. Because getting older, Dalliance suggests, isn’t about life becoming smaller. It can mean having the freedom to make it your own.
Dalliance is a bold drama exploring the messy, complicated and deeply human lives of 60-somethings who refuse to be defined by their age, starring Heather Mitchell, Georgie Parker and Hugo Weaving. Now streaming only on Paramount+.
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