She’s an Australian icon who was scouted underneath a mango tree in Cairns and whisked away to Hollywood to become a star. Following a recent break from the screen, ISABEL LUCAS returns with a brand new project and a greater sense of purpose

The week before my cover interview with Isabel Lucas, I’m chatting to a friend (who happens to be a New York photographer) about the questions I plan to ask. “I once sat behind her in a Yoga class,” he tells me. “And I watched her pick up an insect and carry it outside, which I thought was sweet.” This story doesn’t really surprise me—one of the few things I do know about the Australian actor is that she is a fierce environmentalist and an impassioned advocate for animal rights (which must extend to insects) but I write it down anyway. At some point in the nearly six hours that I spend with her in the days that follow, I remove the question from my list—by now, I know that an act of kindness like this would occur so frequently that it would almost certainly fail to register on her radar.

When we speak, Lucas—whose credits include the TV shows Home & Away and MacGyver, as well as the Transformer films—is on the precipice of releasing her very first film as a producer. Titled Lunacy and shot in the Daintree Rainforest, it’s an allegorical narrative which follows six strangers who are invited to a remote retreat. “It explores the degree of lunacy that we often enact and experience as a result of the separation from the natural world and our true self,” Lucas tells me on the phone from her home in Byron Bay. “For me personally, it’s a real snapshot into the lost connection to spirit and to the unspoken intelligence of nature.”

It’s a theme that feels very on-brand for Lucas. Shortly after leaving the set of Home & Away in 2007, where she rose to fame in Summer Bay as the enigmatic Tasha Andrews, she established herself as an environmental activist, making headlines at a protest against dolphin culling in Japan. Since then, she’s served for charity initiatives across the globe, including a sustainability organisation known as Global Green, and ocean conservation programs like Save the Whales Again and Sea Shepherd. She’s a passionate vegetarian (the story goes she became a vegetarian after watching the documentary Earthlings at Anthony Kiedis’s house) and a proficient beekeeper.

“I started keeping bees when I was living in LA in my 20s,” she explains when I ask her about the latter. “I currently have both native bees and European honeybees. I could go on and on about them…” she warns me. Instead, I ask her to elaborate on what it was like to make the leap to Los Angeles as a shy 20-something woman who had grown up barefoot in Cairns. “I moved there when I was 23 and lived there for about nine years,” she recalls. “It was like an opening—a doorway—and I stepped through.”

Lucas was 19 when she landed her role on Home & Away, which she describes as “one of those serendipitous moments” that completely changed the trajectory of her life. “I met my agent under a mango tree at the Port Douglas markets when I was in high school. She was on holiday, and she invited me for lunch with my parents the next day and offered to represent me. I was doing drama at school, but my focus was really on fine arts and painting. I guess the acting was a natural progression into another creative side of me.”

Serendipitous encounters have followed Lucas throughout her life. Born in Australia, the daughter of a biodynamic farmer and a dance therapist for children with autism, Lucas lived in Melbourne, Cairns and even Kakadu National Park before she moved to Lucerne in Switzerland to live with her aunt. “That’s when I met the kinesiologist,” she explained. “I was 16 when I had my first session. Metaphorically, how I’d describe that experience, was like finding the roots of a plant that you’re trying to remove from the garden. You finally get to the roots of it and then you can pull it out and it doesn’t keep growing back.”

Through kinesiology—an integrative modality which utilises the skills of muscle monitoring to gather information about the body—Lucas was able to make sense of a specific phenomenon that she’d always lived with but never understood. “When I was younger, I was always very sensitive, very perceptive. I had a very active, subtle nervous system, and I could literally feel what other people felt in their body, within my own body,” she explains. She says practising kinesiology helped her to screen out other people’s energy, allowing her to focus on her own. “I’ve learned to embrace it. Trusting my body has allowed it to become my compass—it’s what guides me.”

This experience marked the start of the actor-producer-activist’s spiritual journey, which continued in one of the most unlikely places in the world: Hollywood. “I lived in LA for nine years and I practised this connection,” she says. “It’s that thing of once you know, you can’t unknow. But once we reclaim our sensitivity and our body’s knowing, and we start to align with that, how do we remain sensitive and continue to cultivate that sensitivity in a fast-paced world? Or what needs to change so that we can?”

For Lucas, it meant quietly teaching herself beekeeping, or spending her time away from set undertaking a movement practice known as 5Rhythms. It was during this period that she met one of her best friends, Rosie, and together they started a women’s circle in LA. “It was like an open circle, and the structure formed quite organically. It was really about embracing, feeling, listening and creating a sisterhood that upheld those principles. It became a really safe place.” She still runs a women’s circle today from her home in the northern rivers. “It has been such a support and totem in my life, and something I’m so grateful for,” she acknowledges.

I ask if Hollywood ever felt like a contradiction to her deeply spiritual lifestyle and she pauses to thank me for the question. “If this earth is akin to a spiritual playground, will there not be more growth within the challenge, and within showing up, and cultivating the willingness to show up in those more challenging situations? And if I am placed in an occupation that has me living with a lot of paradoxes, can I practise connection within this environment and am I willing to? Those kinds of questions have allowed me to operate in my truth within the systems of Hollywood.”

Today, the 38-year-old splits her time between Los Angeles and Byron Bay, as she turns her focus to producing. She has a partner and they recently settled on some land in the northern rivers. “Fortunately, I’m spending a lot more time in Australia now. A lot of us, in the last few years, have become more home-based with work, but I made that intentional choice to be based in Australia and work overseas.” For instance, this year, she spent the months of June and July in LA, taking meetings and auditions for work. “But I don’t need to be based there full-time, which is a real gift.”

Once Lunacy is released, her focus will turn to a project she is hoping will film in Mexico, but it’s too early to share any other details. “There’s a lot of unknowns in my job. So often I’m just going with the natural progression of how work unfolds.”

“Producing is a whole ’nother bag of lollies. It’s literally so different to acting or being an actress. It’s such a whirlwind journey. You can get so close and then someone drops out [and it’s cancelled]. Whereas, with acting, you’re like, ‘Okay, I have four weeks to prepare and I’m all ready to go.’ With producing, you might be attached to a film for four years before it actually sees the light of day. That’s how it is. But I am actually really enjoying the process.”

Lucas’s enthusiasm and appreciation for her craft is infectious. Since she also stars in Lunacy (as one of the characters who accepts an invitation to the retreat) I ask her how she prepares for roles and she starts speaking with excitement. “I use PEM and it stands for Perdekamp Emotional Method. Initially it was created for actors as an organic process and it’s this incredible technique, which is essentially based on there being six main emotions which occur within the organs physically. And so, through intricate practices and physical exercises, you learn to access the energetic subtleties that are occurring within your physical body, to then express these emotions through text and in service of the story and character.”

Knowing what I know about Lucas now, it’s as easy to picture her scooping a bug off her Yoga mat to rescue it, as it is shooting an arthouse film in the remote ancient Daintree Rainforest. Regardless of where life takes her, she seems to find a sense of purpose and intention in everything she does. “My character in Lunacy goes on a journey of self-discovery that I guess points to the hope for reconnection to the beautiful mysteries of life.” I can’t help but think it sounds exactly like Lucas’s own journey—and at each juncture she continues to shine.