Claudia Greenstone still remembers the exact misconception she ran into after landing a role on Neighbours: the assumption that a spot on Australia’s most famous soap opera was a one-way ticket to Hollywood. In this episode of Showtime, recorded ahead of the release of her new comedy series The Sonny Disposition, she’s refreshingly blunt about the reality behind that assumption, and about what a career as a working Australian actor actually looks like day to day.
Performing, Claudia says, has never really felt like a choice so much as a compulsion. She describes it as almost addictive, the pull of stepping into someone else’s headspace and giving voice to an experience that isn’t her own. It’s a trait that runs through her entire family: her husband acts, both of her daughters act, and her sister acts too, turning family ad jobs into what she cheerfully describes as organised chaos, complete with what could pass for a dedicated Greenstone self-tape studio at home.
Less obviously, Claudia’s other career has quietly shaped her acting for years. Alongside performing, she works as a speech pathologist, helping international clients, often doctors, nurses and other professionals, retrain the physical mechanics of English pronunciation to build their confidence. That deep, practical understanding of how accents are physically formed (where the tongue sits, how the lips move) has fed directly into her screen work, where she’s played characters from South American, Arabic and Russian backgrounds over the years.
That overlap led naturally into one of the episode’s more thoughtful threads: the ongoing debate over who gets to play whom. Claudia is careful and considered on the subject, acknowledging the importance of giving actors from underrepresented backgrounds the chance to tell their own stories, while also pointing out the genuine tension it creates around opportunity and privilege, particularly for recent migrants who may not have had access to the years of training and connections that shape casting decisions in Australia. She doesn’t pretend to have found the perfect answer, but she’s clearly spent real time sitting with the question.
Claudia’s own path into acting wasn’t linear. A naturally confident performer from childhood (her parents remember her “dancing on tables” at restaurants by the age of six), she initially chose the more practical route of speech pathology, only returning to acting seriously years later once she realised how much she genuinely missed it. She’s candid that the performance instinct was always there, just not always given room to breathe.
Some of the most striking material in the episode comes from Claudia’s work in heavier, research-intensive roles. She describes playing a woman from Afghanistan in Selling Kabul at Red Stitch Actors Theatre, a role written and performed not long after the Taliban’s return to power, whose storyline includes the loss of a child and a husband’s murder. Preparing for it meant genuine research: interviews, testimony and video accounts from people who had actually lived through similar experiences. She speaks about the responsibility of that kind of work with real seriousness, describing herself as fortunate to be able to leave the character’s grief behind at the end of each night, unlike the real people whose experiences inspired it.
That intensity sits, somewhat improbably, alongside the very different energy of The Sonny Disposition, the workplace satire in which Claudia plays Angie, an experienced producer trying to manage a chaotic podcast operation and its ego-driven host. The show’s origin story amuses her: co-creators Simon Taylor and Josh Samuels stumbled into an abandoned, fully furnished office space in Coburg and simply started filming, using whatever props and furniture happened to be left behind. Claudia joined early, drawn in by Josh, and recalls the first rehearsal taking place in that same makeshift office before the project eventually grew into a full series for Stan and Channel 9.
Playing Angie, she says, tapped into something familiar: the constant problem-solving and damage control required of both producers and parents. With two teenage daughters at home, she jokes that managing Sonny’s latest self-inflicted crisis on screen isn’t so different from the “organised chaos” of her actual household.
The conversation also turns to something Claudia describes feeling genuinely conflicted about: social media, and the pressure on performers to constantly present a version of themselves to build an audience. She’s candid about resisting it for years, and about deliberately pulling back from posting more personal content once it started to feel, in her words, insignificant against the weight of what’s actually happening in the world. Her approach now is simple: promote the work itself, stay as authentic as the medium allows, and resist chasing likes for their own sake, a principle she’s applied just as firmly to her speech pathology practice, despite knowing she could likely build a much larger platform there too.
As a mother to two daughters who are also drawn to performing, Claudia is thoughtful about what she hopes to pass on. She’s deliberately avoided using the word “career” with her kids, focused instead on a simpler rule: if you love it, do it, and the moment you don’t, stop. She’s just as proud of how her daughter treats a runner or a director on set as she is of her acting ability, and openly describes herself as something like an “anti-stage mum,” more concerned with her children having a genuinely balanced life than with any particular milestone.
The episode closes on an unexpectedly moving note. Claudia recalls a recent, ordinary morning at school drop-off, watching parents rushing in every direction, and being struck by a sudden wave of empathy: the simple realisation that everyone around her, whatever chaos they were navigating, was simply doing the best they could with what they had. It’s a philosophy, she says, that guides her just as much as any role she’s ever played.
Claudia Greenstone stars in The Sonny Disposition, premiering on Stan and Channel 9.
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