Great Expectations

Known To Us As One Of The Wild Women On Westside, Life Is About To Change For Antonia Prebble. Erin Fisher Talks To The Actress About Motherhood, Career And How She Nurtures Mind, Body And Soul.

After watching Outrageous Fortune, and then Westside religiously, the idea of sitting down with Loretta or Rita is frankly, a little petrifying. But of course, it’s not Loretta, nor Rita. There’s no black leather jacket, no icy glares, no heavy eyeliner. From the get-go, the room is filled with the sound of Antonia’s contagious laughter, and thanks to the radiant glow of pregnancy, you would never guess that she has still been doing long hours on set every day.

The filming for Season 5 of Westside has just come to an end, and it’s something that has gone surprisingly smoothly, given that she’s had to hide a growing baby bump all the way through. There was initially talk of getting a body double, but handbags, black clothes and a leather jacket have done the trick to keep her expanding belly out of sight. “Now it’s getting hard,” the actress admits. “I have to hide behind things like tables, benches – even a car the other day – but people have embraced the challenge.”

Although she feels she has got away lightly on the pregnancy front, having read up on all the bodily changes and symptoms that can occur, the first trimester wasn’t without discomfort. “I got really bad morning sickness, which was pretty awful. Up until about 14 weeks I felt toxic, but luckily, by the time we started shooting the nausea had left me.”

There are not many people who have faked childbirth on camera before going through the real thing, let alone five times, as Antonia has done throughout her career. I tease that surely, she must be a well-seasoned pro by now and it will be an absolute breeze. “Absolutely not!” she exclaims with a big grin on her face. “I’ll be in for a fully new experience, and I will probably realise I was terrible in all of those scenes and wasn’t being realistic at all.