The Year 12 student from John Curtin College of the Arts in Fremantle, landed a supporting role in the movie The Reckoning, a highly acclaimed thriller crime mystery, which was filmed in Perth last year.
The feature film is based on detective Robbie Green’s (Jonathon LaPaglia) hunt for teenage runaways Rachel and AJ (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence and Alex Williams), who have video footage that is key to identifying his colleague’s (Luke Hemsworth) murderer.
Kelsie plays the youngest daughter of Robbie Green, 12-year-old Sarah Green, a tomboy, who is often emotional on screen.
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READ NOW‘One of the hardest parts was crying on film,’ Kelsie said.
‘I really had to tap into that emotion.’
The ability to display emotion on the spot, as well as having the right look, helped Kelsie to win one of the sought after roles.
‘After the audition the director (John V. Soto) said ‘you’ve got very good emotion, I think you’ll be suitable for the role’,’ she said.
For Kelsie ” who has wanted to be an actress for as long as she can remember ” the opportunity to work on a feature film, with some big names in the acting world was everything she had hoped for and more.
‘I was expecting it to be very tense, but the director just said ‘show me what you got’.
‘One of the favourite parts for me was filming the sports scene. John the director was just watching me and the first piece of advice he gave me was ‘don’t look at the camera’.
‘I was calming down my sister, because she had lost all her races and I put my head down on her shoulder to try to comfort her, and he said ‘that’s good’.
‘I said ‘what did I do?’, he said ‘you put your head down and that’s so natural’. It was amazing all the feedback I got.’
Despite also experiencing the less glamorous side of acting, including working into the early hours of the morning and withstanding many takes to get the perfect scene, Kelsie said the role had given her confidence to pursue a career in acting.
‘It was amazing,’ she said. ‘Seeing it all put together on the big screen was mind-blowing.’
Kelsie attended the cinema openings for The Reckoning this month at Hoyts Carousel and Garden City.
The Reckoning was recently screened at cinemas throughout Australia and is now available on DVD.