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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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I don't even want to say the things that my brain says to me out loud. Would you say a few of them? Oh, you're too fat, you're too old, you're too fat, you're too old. And your chin's too saggy and you're never going to work again. Oh, it's so yuck.
Mina, you are useless.
When will you ever learn? I, for whatever reason, think that my value in the world is tethered tightly to how I look. And so as the way I look changes and goes against a social opinion about youth, It's like somebody's taking money out of my bank account and there's nothing I can do about it. My value is going down. Perceived value going down.
But then I guess what takes its place is your true character.
Nau mai haere mai to grey areas with me, Petra Baggist. You're in for a treat as I sit with smart and sparkly Morgana O'Reilly, star of theatre, TV and film. She's been on Neighbours, Mean Mums, The White Lotus and more. Morgana has written and performed two one-woman plays, one of which has become the incredible film Stories About My Body. Coming to cinemas this winter, 2026. Here's Morgana.
Morgana O'Reilly, thank you for joining me on Grey Areas today. I am deeply appreciative of your response, your heartfelt and enthusiastic response to my just random, we've never met before, I don't know you. I mean, I get a sense that we could have a firecracker of a conversation. Yes. To be honest. Yeah.
I quite feel like people listening ought to just buckle up because you never know where we're going to go. Yeah. And I ran across you in a newspaper article.
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Chapter 2: What does Morgana O'Reilly say about her journey with body image?
Yes, yes, yes. Because as women, we, each of us, have a bloody beautiful body and And we spend, I would suggest, a lot of our time loathing it, disliking it, rejecting it, working on it, like wrestling with it, hating it.
Yeah.
And I'd love us not to do that. I know. Wouldn't that be good? Yeah. Imagine if we were all like... Oh, yummy. Look at my beautiful body that I get to move around the world in today and I get to talk to you. I mean, without this body, I couldn't even be here with you. Yeah. So I don't even know where to start. But can we start with perhaps your name, Morgana? It's very unusual.
Yeah. It's from the King Arthur stories. King Arthur's half-sister, Morgan Le Fay, a.k.a. Morgana Le Fay, a.k.a. Morgaine Le Fay, was, depending on who's telling the story, either a witch or a fairy, which is probably just a wise woman. Yeah. A bit magic. And, yeah, my parents got Morgan out of the phone book. Yeah. And I think they, as the story goes, I think they went to my great aunt.
My mum told her that that's what they were thinking of calling me. And she said, Morgan, like Morgan Le Fay from the King Arthur stories. So they gave me the second name Le Fay.
Yeah, Morgana Le Fay.
Yeah.
Naomi Jane. Naomi is my grandmother's name. They were not afraid. And Jane. And then Jane, my mother's name is Mary Jane. So I guess that's a whakapapa to her. And then O'Reilly, my dad's last name. We did that thing where we got married and I didn't take his last name. We toyed for a little while with the idea of making up a last name. Like Mr. and Ms. Storyteller. Except we're
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Chapter 3: How does Morgana differentiate between conforming and adorning?
I couldn't think of any good ones, but there's enough. Okay. Yeah. And, yeah, because we made it up. We got married very quickly. Oh. Yeah. How long had you – what do you mean by quickly? He won a green card, so I married him.
Oh.
Which was lovely. Great idea. We loved each other. I loved him very much. We weren't sure if marriage was appropriate for us. We were like, why? We already, you know.
We're committed to each other deeply.
Yeah. And I'm allowed to have sex with you and also make my own living. So if I'm going to have sex with you and there's contraception, so I can take care of that. So I don't need you to promise you'll be around. So I don't know. What's the... For our story. And then it turned out that, yeah, then he won a green card. So he asked me to marry him on Google chat. Because he was in New Zealand.
And I was like, yes, but you have to ask me in person as well. And then he saw he asked me at the airport when he booked me up.
At the airport?
Yeah, just at the public pickup spot with a bunch of flowers. Really? And he was directing the Robin Malcolm show, Agent Anna at the time. So he was driving the character car, this beat up little red sedan. He pulled up in that with a bunch of flowers, asked me to marry him. And there was one guy on the platform next to us. And if it was a movie, he would have been like, but it wasn't.
So he just watched while Pete got it on his knees. He got it on his knees. He got it on his knees. This guy's just watching. It's very funny. That's so lovely. And then we got married at the registry office really quick. And then a year and a half later, we had a big wedding. And we had a wedding-themed wedding. Sweet. So everybody came dressed as brides and grooms, priests and bouquets.
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Chapter 4: What role does dopamine play in women's lives according to Morgana?
Yeah. People really had to be like, are you sure? You know, because there is that traditional, oh, shall I wear white?
I can't wear white.
We were like, wear your old wedding dress if you can. Or, so that's nice, you get a chance to do that. Or wear a really... Ugly wedding dress. Wear whatever you like. Just this wedding theme. Some people came as priests. Some people, Pete's cousin came as a bouquet. It was the best. How many people at your wedding? I think there was like 280 people.
No!
We were like, screw it. Because we had the registry office wedding, which was like 20 people, family only. It was very fast and gorge. And we were like, we're just going to go for it. You want to bring a partner? Bring a partner. Bring her. Bring her. And we had it at the Folds Park Irish Society Hall. I know. It was potluck. We asked everybody.
So then we realized the purpose, the real, the major theme of getting married for us was to bring our tribes together and have them meet. So everything at the wedding was designed to have people meet. Everyone, when they got the invitation, were asked to either bring a main dish, a dessert, nibbles or flowers, depending on if they were coming from overseas.
And like there was a little placard that came with the invite so they could write what was in the food and who made it. Again, hoping that somebody might be like, Petra, did you make the potato dish? And that could be a starter conversation. And then when you arrived, you pulled the name from a hat and you had to find that person. You had to marry them by the end of the ceremony.
It's like role play. Yeah, we had like a photo room set up and we asked some of our funniest friends to come dressed as priests and marry people through the... So now we have this coffee table book with pictures of the most ridiculously weird pairings of people who'd never met before getting married. You can make it however you like.
I think you're right in terms of the purpose of... a wedding celebration and a marriage in essence is to invite community in, right? It is about... I think it is. Ideally, not so much Instagram, but maybe more this, gosh, to make it, we're going to be needing you guys and you'll be needing us.
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Chapter 5: How does Morgana describe the cycles of success and disappointment in her career?
Across many lands.
Make babies. Make babies. Did you love it? Did you have the best day? We had the best day. It was so fun. At one point we danced in our undies. We just made it all up as we went and it was great.
It's actually okay to push and pull these ideas around. And I think that's what I love about what you've done with your film, Stories About My Body, is you've looked at how we are as humans with our bodies and you've...
not looked at that in a in a snapshot scenario but you've looked at that in multiple slices of life and different seasons different different moments so you've got this fantastic name morgana that you probably have to spell all the time that comes from this deep you know literary heritage and the phone book yes so it's both ordinary and awesome um
And you grow up, and I know this isn't part of your movie, but you essentially as a 12-year-old... Don't think you're all that crash hot.
I didn't like how I looked at that age. And I probably, not that this is at all a unique story, but I really pained over that for ages. I still go, but I can unpick it way better now. What do you mean? Oh, you know, when you're just like going through, I feel like these things come and go.
Like now as a 40 year old person, I can, I can dislike how I look, but I understand that that will probably pass. The person I see in the mirror is going to look actually really different in a few hours, depending on if I've moved my body or eaten something or talked to a friend or just so I understand how, what's the word, ephemeral it is. These ideas are subjective to the hour.
Yes. Yeah. But how we feel about ourselves. Yeah, totally. Isn't static. It's not like set in concrete. Yes. I mean, I don't know about you, but when I felt good, I thought, oh, fantastic. This is going to last forever. And when I felt terrible. You think you've cracked today. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Brilliant. And when I felt bad, I was like, this is terrible. This is terrible.
I'm going to feel like this forever.
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Chapter 6: What parenting insights does Morgana share in relation to life's challenges?
And look, men are subject to this, what does masculinity look, sound, feel like? So they have a burden to bear. Yeah. The burden that probably we know about is the female burden. Yeah. So this idea that somebody said to me the other day, I can't believe how useful pretty privilege is. Yeah. They were just like, I haven't done anything to earn this face. I didn't make it. Yeah.
But I'm attractive to people and they're nice to me. They help me. They're kind to me.
I think we're so... I'm going to say we, but I think maybe these things vary from person to person, but there is a sort of shared understanding amongst women or the world that, and this is from, I can see now hundreds of years of input and male dominance and things like that. Where when you don't have power in the world, the way you look might make a difference.
And that's... So there's a currency. Yeah. And when you can start to unpick that, then there's some interesting dissonance that gets to happen in here because you get to... you know, sometimes go, I want to, sometimes I want to play up to the conformity of our social, like beauty standards at the moment. That's quite fun.
And then sometimes I want to smash them up, but you need to understand the system so that you can sort of fuck with the system a little bit, I guess. Now as well, I think of all that stuff with I think of it like the consequences of having eaten some food that doesn't agree with you that can make these thoughts come up with more potency.
And now I know what my triggers are to start thinking and worrying about that stuff too much. Because, of course, we all say, oh, they're just so confident. If you're confident, you're gorgeous, which is true. And when I become too caught up in my own shit, because nobody else is thinking about my chin. Nobody else is thinking about the lines on my face.
Nobody else is thinking about my cute little tummy. My thoughts go to these places in negative ways sometimes. When I'm tired, a recent disappointment is a really good trigger for that stuff. Being just too full sometimes can make me think about that stuff. And so understanding what the things that kick off those thoughts are.
If I haven't had a walk for a few days, I need to be walked like a dog. These are good. So now I can deal with that stuff much easier.
Do you have a name for these thoughts? What do they sound like?
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Chapter 7: How does Morgana view aging and beauty standards in the entertainment industry?
You're really not measuring up to your potential. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, yeah, maybe I could.
Yeah. I think that kind of self-talk is fully described as I'm just taking care of you. I'm trying to help you be better.
It's practical, yeah. It's really trying to be practical in the face of things you can't control. And I notice that when life is really chugging along and people are saying lots of yeses to me and things are really going my way, I don't care. I'm like, fuck yeah.
I'm like, out here I'm going to, you know, our social beauty constructs is just a collective opinion and I'm going to add my own opinion. But it's the disappointments that, like, make me go, maybe if we just tighten, just tighten to this level, just a little tuck.
Maybe if we just, maybe if I only ate protein today, only protein, I could drop, maybe if I only drop five kilos, then I'll get all the respect that that I deserve. I know. It's just a way of trying to be practical, probably, isn't it? It's an offshoot of that.
Okay, so how do you deal... Like, you have picked a profession where rejection is just part of the job. You don't get every gig you go for. Yes. Like, some people pick... Jobs where they don't, rejection is not part of the process. Yeah, yeah. You make a great point.
Yes, I didn't really think that went through. I do think possibly this job, much like being an elite athlete. Okay, nice. Requires a level like genuinely of just delusion.
You think elite athletes are a little bit delusional?
You need to. Like I remember hearing this. You need like a healthy spot of delusion.
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Chapter 8: What is the significance of the one-woman show 'Stories About My Body'?
So it saddens me to hear you say that you're useless, whereas that's your ability taking the hit on that one. So, yeah. Maybe you could realign it to some part of your body, like your knees suck. What's a really harmless way to hate your body? Stupid ears. Elbow. Elbow. Stupid elbow. Yeah. Just channel that hatred to us.
Doesn't even feel anything when I pinch it hard. The weiner skin. Yeah.
Yeah.
I'd like to know how we might process disappointment well. Like where would be, how would be, what's a wonderful work in of disappointment? Yeah. And where could we channel our hatred? Hatred. It's so interesting.
Can I tell you what me and my daughter were talking about last night? I think this does relate. And I really haven't stopped thinking about it all day because I think I've really cracked something. Either that or I've totally minimized her stress. But she was saying how she's been feeling stressed at school, which is totally valid. She's in her last year of primary school.
and like trying to find the way as any friend or parent would to acknowledge that you're stressed, try to give some perspective on it. And we were sort of talking about, you know, we were saying, I was saying, As you move through school, there is a chance that when you get to high school, I mean, you're probably going to look back at this time and feel like it's easier.
Again, be like, don't minimize her, it's all right. Every time you feel stressed out, you're like a balloon. You push what you think you're capable of dealing with more and more. until you become a grown-up. Everybody has dealt with stress, especially once you become a parent, that you're like, I just don't know how I could possibly be more stressed out. Oh my God.
And then you get through another day and you're like, oh, bloody did that. So your capacity, this is I'm saying this to her, your capacity for stress will grow and grow. that stress, and then we sort of go, oh, stress is part of the human story. Everybody's stressed out.
And then we got on this really great game where we were thinking about how people who we deemed to be very wealthy, gorgeous, whatever,
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