LEAVING a successful US TV series is big call for any actor, but for Isabel Lucas finding a work-life balance was more important than chasing stardom.

The Melbourne-born actor played the spy Samantha Cage in the first two seasons of action-adventure series MacGyver and although she enjoyed the challenge of action and accents, she pulled the pin in 2018, tired of the six-day-week, five-month-stint grind of network television and feeling she had nothing more to give. The reboot of the ’80s classic rolled on without her — the fourth season premiered last month in the US — but Lucas has no regrets about walking away. “It was a good experience and I learned a lot from it, ” she says. “But it was 15-hour days — you’d start at 5am and wrap around 9.30pm — and six days a week. I feel exhausted just talking about it. And then Sunday I was just operating to learn lines for the next week and learning dif­ferent accents.” The decision also enabled Lucas to once again base herself in Australia. Like many homegrown actors before her, including former flame Chris Hemsworth, she’d parlayed her Logie-winning success on Home And Away into a successful Hollywood career, with a breakout role in Michael Bay’s third Transformers film in 2009.

Over the next decade she juggled bigbudget blockbusters including Immortals (alongside Henry Cavill and Luke Evans) and Daybreakers, with more art-house fare such as director Terrence Malick’s Knight Of Cups, but eventually living in the image and career obsessed Los Angeles proved too much. “It’s just like being in a little fishbowl and over a long time it’s not healthy, ” she says. “It’s not a natural, healthy sense of community, we don’t function naturally that way. “It just felt right to be based in Australia and to travel there for work to film and to shoot projects. For me it’s just prioritising lifestyle and what fills you with joy and what is replenishing creatively and for me it’s having shorter visits to LA but more frequent, as opposed to being based over there.” Now she chooses to follow the work — wherever that may take her — and splits her time between her eco-friendly home in Byron Bay and her home town.

Lucas’ tree change also coincided with a shift in her career and life priorities. The longtime activist for environmental and human rights causes including Sea Shepherd and Plan Australia says she not only feels a responsibility to use her platform to support the causes that are meaningful to her, it’s also become increasingly important to her that her films have something to say. It’s with that in mind that she has signed on to play revered scientist Marie Curie in the coming Australian biopic Radiant, scheduled to be filmed this year in France, Poland and Australia. Directed by Polish/Australian filmmaker, Annika Glac, it will follow the life of the trailblazing two-time Nobel prize laureate