Rachel Griffiths is one of the more underrated actors working today. Her first film appearance, in Muriel’s Wedding, earned her awards and acclaim, and she’s only followed it up with more great work in movies such as Blow, Hacksaw Ridge, Amy, Me Myself I, and Hilary and Jackie, which earned her an Academy Award nomination.
She’s most famous, however, for her work on the television shows Six Feet Under and Brothers & Sisters, which have earned her several Emmy and Golden Globe Awards nominations (and a win), along with a slew of popular Australian series, from Secrets in 1993 to Total Control in 2021. Now, however, she’s playing someone very different.
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The Ideals and Collateral Damage of Gretchen Klein in The Wilds
She’s garnered a lot of acclaim recently for her role as Gretchen Klein in The Wilds, an exciting and mysterious Prime Video original show about a group of girls who have crash-landed on an island and must learn to survive. Unbeknownst to them, their airplane crash was a staged event and their survival is a social experiment called the Dawn of Eve, orchestrated by Gretchen Klein as a way to prove her theory that women can develop society better than men, and are thus more suitable leaders. This would pave the way for a gynotopia, or a utopian society run by women, a conception that’s been around for a while (such as the 1405 novel by Christine de Pazan, The Book of the City of Ladies).
What makes Gretchen a fascinating character is that, like many great villains, she has noble ideas but very loose morality and ambiguous ethics when it comes to achieving them. These types of characters are generally more thought-provoking than completely selfish or evil antagonists. Thanos is a good example - with his desire to save civilization by eliminating half of it, he actually had good intentions (with the meme ‘Thanos Was Right’ becoming prevalent in recent years, especially as climate catastrophes draw near). Are these intentions noble?
“I probably wouldn’t use the word noble,” Griffiths says, thinking about her character Gretchen. “She has this righteous ideology. She has this fervent idea that she believes will improve humanity.” The difficulty with righteous ideology tends to develop when it is put into action. Gretchen causes a lot of harm and destruction through the Dawn of Eve project because of her fundamentalist attachment to her own idea. In order to put these ideas in motion, she very much has to be ‘above the law,’ playing God in a way with her social experiment. Gretchen’s particularly interesting in a time when certain billionaires and politicians believe that the proverbial ‘greater good’ overrides any moral concerns about accountability, exploitation, and power.
The Wilds Asks if Big Ideas Are Worth Dying (or Killing) For
“I’ve always been curious about how the world throws up the Pol Pots of the world, the Hitlers and the Stalins,” Griffiths says. “They believe in this idea so much that there’s almost an acceleration of collateral in terms of trying to realize that idea. And while there have been a few great ideas that we’ve won from violence, like the French Revolution and the American Revolution, and maybe even the American Civil War, with people who passionately believed that they were righteous, there seems to be more on the other side.” In this sense, Gretchen is in a lineage of history’s many powerful leaders who value ideas and their preservation over the actual people who believe them. Griffiths continues:
Griffiths is a highly politically conscious and socially aware person, whose intelligence comes across in her performances. She’s passionate about different issues facing the world and has been an advocate for several of them. So it’s odd to see her playing someone in such incongruity to her feelings about and relationship with power, but at the same time, Gretchen does represent a kind of idealistic feminism which Griffiths can relate to. Though again, the lofty ideals of this ideology creates collateral damage, so in some ways Gretchen is no different from the billionaires who use their power and wealth to quietly excuse themselves from law and order (and taxes), breaking every rule because they feel above it and beyond good and evil. To some, this kind of lawyer-fueled rule-bending is admirable.
I’ve always been curious about doing something big for humanity and having so little regard for the collateral damage, and the duality of that. And it’s great playing a character like that in a young adult show, in a world full of people either spouting ideology or starting to be unsure of big ideas, whether it be materialism or ‘free speech-ism’ or whatever. There are a lot of battles, and I don’t think there’s a great certainty that we’re creating a better world for young people to inherit. So to play that character in a young adult show, I think I represent that uncertainty of a grown-up who’s morally suspect, ideologically suspect, and certainly increasingly capable of terrible collateral on individuals.
“I’m playing a person who doesn’t play by the rules,” Griffiths says, “and it’s shocking how we still revere people who don’t play by the rules, and then 20 years later they’re revealed as monsters. Somehow we’re so enamored by these clowns, that we couldn’t see the violence that was being inflicted. It’s kind of interesting, I’ve never played anything like that before, I’ve not really played that kind of rule-breaker before, I’ve played the kind of feisty rule-pusher, but it’s very different.”
Rachel Griffiths on a Need For More Female Politics
Of course, many of these “clowns” have been men, something Griffiths is well-aware of and which she relates to in Gretchen. She co-created and starred in a political show, the aforementioned Total Control which, as she says, “is addressing the kind of things that have enraged Gretchen over the past four years.” It’s probably fair to say Griffiths was upset by similar things as her character in The Wilds, commenting on how Theresa May was snidely dismissed throughout her short career and cast aside (“she read her policy papers, she did the dutiful work of government”). Griffiths continues:
Griffiths makes great points here, which adds to the complexity of Gretchen Klein as a character and The Wilds as a kind of post-feminist young adult series. All of Gretchen’s immorality and collateral damage aside, Griffiths ultimately gets her. “That’s really her mission, to prove to the world that women do less damage to the citizens they’re representing, and are more representative than men in leadership. That’s her experiment,” she says, but then brings up a good point. “How do you prove it?” Griffiths asks. How does one test this (or prove it) in a largely male-led society; how do women smash the patriarchy without radical actions? “I’m kind of with her,” Griffiths laughs, “I just wouldn’t ‘fake plane crash’ a bunch of kids onto an island to prove it.”
I was very depressed when Hillary Clinton didn’t get elected, because I’m like, how is a three-times married, philandering, non-tax paying guy who’s bankrupted X amount of companies seen as a better leader than this incredibly competent woman? But somehow Hillary is the evil one. That was a really difficult time. I think there are a lot of women who do believe in female leadership, and as we look around the world right now, I kind of think I get where Gretchen is coming from […] From South America to the Philippines to Russia, there is a paucity of female leadership, and look where the world is right now. Like, we haven’t been closer to a nuclear war since I was born. So I get why Gretchen is crazed about the state of things, and frustrated as to why women are not being elected.
Maybe The Wilds is part of the proof, and with an actor as talented and intelligent as Rachel Griffiths in it, it’s doing a pretty good job. Season two of The Wilds is now streaming on Prime Video.
