Fame and success in New Zealand and overseas haven't stopped actress Morgana O'Reilly battling with the way she thinks about her body. She jokes she would like work done to her neck, she weighs herself regularly, and sometimes feels like she is living in a body far bigger than the one she is in.
"I have fluctuated in weight through my life… I could see very simply the way the world related to me each time, so it comes wrapped up in your sense of worth and whether somebody will listen to you, or the way eyes move in a room to somebody else."
Actor Morgana O'Reilly joins Anika in studio for season 2 of It's Personal. Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
"I think as a female presenting person, you inherently and very early on learn that the way you look is part of your currency in the world in a different way than if you're male presenting," O'Reilly tells Anika Moa, in the first episode of the new season of RNZ podcast It's Personal With Anika Moa.
O'Reilly, 39, will soon be on screens in the third season of HBO comedy The White Lotus, joining an all-star cast that includes her new best buds, Parker Posey and Natasha Rothwell.
The show - shot on location in Thailand - was "quite an intimidating situation to go into", she says.
"You go into this luxury hotel, because that's where you're shooting. They always shoot them at Four Seasons, they get rid of everyone.
"It's a film set, but you're all living there so it's kind of like fancy camp with famous people.
"I was absolutely ruined by these hotels, I can't just stay anywhere now.
"Who pays for that stuff? It was just beautiful, the food was outrageous."
Actor Morgana O'Reilly joins Anika in studio for season 2 of It's Personal. Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly
Before The White Lotus call, O'Reilly had a two year run on Aussie soap Neighbours, and parts in Wentworth, Friends Like Her and Mean Mums.
She tells Moa that she isn't sure if this will be her big break into Hollywood, and she doesn't want to uproot her director husband, Peter Salmon, and their children Luna and Ziggy, to relocate to the US.
What she plans to do next is turn her solo show, Stories About My Body, into a movie.
"I'm hustling my little butt off," she says.
The show, which she's performed to sell-out crowds around Australia and New Zealand countless times, is bold.
It unpacks her teenage diaries where she writes "I am a fat and ugly cow", includes her birth video and details her days spent wearing black togs and high heels when working at a New York foot fetish club hidden in "a shitty little bar".
She says the show has "helped me process that stuff, and reminds me of my little personal fight."
"I made the show that I needed to see."
