Do we like Isla Fisher?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Years of charity work for children and no harmful words or company turned up, though the public record on her politics is thin.
Isla Fisher was born in Muscat, Oman, to Scottish parents, and her family moved to Perth when she was six. She grew up with four brothers, did TV ads from age nine, and trained in clowning and mime at a Paris theatre school. Then came Home and Away in 1994, which made her a household name here.
Hollywood came calling with Wedding Crashers in 2005, and she picked up an MTV Movie Award for the breakthrough. She also wrote a couple of teen novels along the way. It's a long, steady career built on being the funniest person in the room, with no tantrums-and-lawsuits subplot.
On the harm check, we went looking and came up empty. Searches on LGBTQ+ people, women, climate, vaccines and migrants turned up nothing she's said or done that hurts anyone, and no run of films with dodgy collaborators. To be fair, she isn't a political commentator, so that's partly a quiet record rather than a loud good one.
The real good stuff is her work for Save the Children. In late 2023 she went back to Scotland, where her family roots are, to meet parents struggling with the cost-of-living crisis. She said she was “incredibly touched” that the women there shared their stories. In 2015 she and her then-husband Sacha Baron Cohen also gave a reported US$1 million to help Syrian refugees, split between Save the Children and the International Rescue Committee.
The recent news is a movie. She plays Mel, a Perth-raised mess, in Spa Weekend, and says she drew on people from her childhood. She reckons Aussie women are tough and play dirty, which is fair enough.