Australian actress Essie Davis has faced a lot of challenges in an acting career that includes TV shows Game of Thrones and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, films including Girl with a Pearl Earring, Nitram, The Babadook, and her Laurence Olivier award-winning performance in the 2013 West End production of A Streetcar Named Desire, opposite Glenn Close.

But the Tasmanian-based actress was unprepared for one of her biggest challenges when starring in the New Zealand film The Justice of Bunny King – mastering a Kiwi accent.

“I have to say it’s one of the hardest accents I’ve ever had to do because it’s close, but it’s far,” Davis told HFPA journalist Katherine Tulich in her thick Aussie accent during a new episode of the “Golden Globes Around the World” podcast series.

“Also, like the Australian accent, there is a myriad of classes within it, and it was really important to me it wasn’t just a Kiwi accent but a Kiwi accent of a working-class girl who’s grown up in foster care and had multiple relationships and the history of that dialect was so important. I didn’t always get it right,” she confides, “and there were parts of it I had to fix in ADR (Additional Dialogue Replacement) because it was so tricky, I had to work and work and work on it.”

The down-to-earth actress and mother of two, married to her Nitram director, Justin Kurzel, jokes that once she started, it was difficult to stop. “I was the only Australian in this all-Kiwi team, and I often had the crew girls sitting around giving me thumbs up going, ‘Yeah, you sound just like a Kiwi,’ and then I found it almost impossible to get rid of after it was over; it’s a very hard accent to annihilate!”

The film, written and directed by female Kiwi filmmaker Gaysorn Thavat, stars Davis as the titular character, a down-on-her-luck woman who never loses her sense of joy and optimism even while cleaning car windows at traffic lights as she tries to earn back custody of her children in foster care.

Davis talks to Tulich about fighting for that light side of her character after an unexpected script change, her relationship with husband/filmmaker Justin Kurzel (he directed her to an AACTA-award win for Best Supporting Actress in Nitram) and her upcoming role in the eagerly anticipated Guillermo del Toro anthology series, Cabinet of Curiosities, reuniting her with The Babadook director, Jennifer Kent.