Naomi Watts in Home and Away: Nick and Julie at the diner

Naomi Watts is not technically Australian – she grew up in England and Wales before moving to Sydney at the age of 14 – but she’ll always be a citizen of Summer Bay, even though her time there was brief. She played Julie Gibson, who’d been in a car crash that killed her mother and left her paralysed from the waist down. When she became friends with Nick (Bruce Roberts), the local police officer, she started to come out of her shell.  

In this scene, Nick takes Julie to the local diner and she tells him that she rarely goes out, having spent most of her insurance payout remodelling the house so that she could live independently. 'Life’s what you make it,' she shrugs. Nick responds admiringly, but in later episodes he’ll friend-zone Julie, breaking her heart.

The costume designers have styled the 23-year-old Watts to look younger and less worldly in pale colours, clean make-up, a sailor collar and demure pearl earrings. In her first breakout Hollywood role, as Betty/Diane in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), Watts showed her range as she veered between playing the starry-eyed, innocent Betty and the desperate, embittered Diane. She missed out on an Oscar nomination for that powerful performance, but would later bag two of them, as well as lead roles in 21 Grams (2003), Eastern Promises (2007) and The Friend (2024). She returned to work with Lynch on Inland Empire (2006) and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017).  

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