It is the day after the Oscars and Madeleine Madden has been shaken, but not stirred.

“There was an earthquake that happened just after [the Oscars] that woke me up,” she says over Zoom from Los Angeles. “I was like ‘oh, that was an earthquake’ – speaking as someone who hasn’t experienced any earthquakes outside of Canberra’s Questacon earthquake room. So, yeah, it was a bit of an exciting day.”

The 28-year-old Australian actor is one of the central stars in the ambitious high fantasy series The Wheel of Time. It has been pegged as yet another successor to Game of Thrones, the HBO drama that left in a blaze of dragon-fire-fuelled glory in 2019 after an eight-season award-winning run that other streamers have been trying to replicate since.

Three months earlier, Madden and I had met in Sao Paulo in Brazil, where she was with The Wheel of Time’s showrunner Rafe Judkins and Dutch star Josha Stradowski at the pop culture festival CCXP, earlier in the promotional tour for season three. The series is filmed largely in Prague, with pit-stops in the Canary Islands, South Africa, Slovenia, Croatia and Spain.

It is, by any measure, a long way from the earthquake room at Questacon and the suburb where Madden was raised – Redfern in Sydney’s inner city.

“It was definitely a push outside my comfort zone, because I’ve grown up in the very familiar and intimate film and TV scene in Australia where you see so many familiar faces,” says Madden. “Even on [upcoming Stan series] Saccharine, I was like ‘oh, my God, that’s someone I worked with well over 10 years ago’.”

Madden’s ties to the local creative industry run deep: her mum, a proud Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman, is the art curator and writer Hetti Perkins, her aunt is the award-winning filmmaker Rachel Perkins, who directed Madden in the ABC drama Redfern Now, and her grandfather was late Aboriginal civil rights activist Charles Perkins.

Her younger sister, Miah, is also an actor, brother Tyson is a cinematographer who won an AACTA award in 2022 for his work on Mystery Road: Origins, and older sister Thea is an artist who was a finalist in last year’s Archibald and Wynne prizes at the Art Gallery of NSW.

“I’m really lucky to have grown up in a really creative family, where people understand the highs and the lows of the industry,” says Madden. “So to have their support, and them understand these challenges, has been so crucial to me being able to do the work that I want to do. I really fret for them when I’m away for too long, so we’re really close in that aspect, and I feel really lucky to have a family that understands that quite intricately.”

What really keeps the family together? “We’ve got a Signal group chat where it’s mainly just pet-driven,” she says, laughing.

Alongside Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, The Wheel of Time is one of Amazon Prime’s big-budget fantasy tent-poles, with each episode estimated to cost upwards of $US10 million and each season taking about 10 months to film. The story is drawn from US author Robert Jordan’s bestselling 14-book series, which means it comes with a readymade and passionate fan base.

It’s also broadly in the same quest-based storytelling of Rings and Game of Thrones: in this case, it follows a group of five young men and women destined for great power, with one prophesied to be the one – in this case the Dragon Reborn. They are mentored and protected by the powerful Moiraine, played by Rosamund Pike with steely determination.

The series has been a hit for Amazon, with more than 100 million viewers, and critics have largely agreed, especially praising the second season for finding its “groove” after a rough start (The New York Times said it went “nowhere fast”).

For Judkins, who worked on the Marvel series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. before he tackled The Wheel of Time, that awkward first season matches up with the books.

“The books really get stronger as they go on,” says Judkins. “And we’re doing that in the show, too. I feel like season two is much deeper, and you are closer to the characters than you are in season one. And season three is another step up. The actors, they can do anything that we throw at them – so we throw some really wild stuff at them this season – and they pull it off incredibly.”

Madden plays Egwene, an apprentice healer who has slowly built her power over the first two seasons. Egwene enters season three after several traumatic events in season two, particularly where she was dragged by a chain and held captive and collared in scenes that were not just difficult to watch, but had echoes of how many Indigenous people have been treated in Australia.

“That was a really difficult, difficult couple of episodes, not only physically, but emotionally,” says Madden. “So to sort of sit in the passenger seat again [in season three] and have to experience that through Egwene was definitely a challenge.

“But what was really important for me and for the character, and I know for the audience, is to see her try to put the pieces of herself back together. She’s forever changed because of it. But no matter what she faces in life, she keeps moving forward. And that’s something that I’ve really learned from her, and it’s important that we see her lean on people for support and try and heal.”

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Egwene is one of many strong female characters in The Wheel of Time, in which women are firmly in charge from the beginning courtesy of a matriarchal order known as the Aes Sedai who channel a magical force called the One Power. Season three even opens with something still rarely seen on screen: a group of middle-aged women in a thrilling and deadly battle. It’s a scene showrunner Judkins proudly calls “women shredding”.

For Madden, that focus on women is what makes The Wheel of Time a “standout series”. “Fantasy can, traditionally, look a certain type of way, in the people that exist in those worlds,” she says. “And, you know, Robert Jordan was very ahead of his time by having women at the forefront, and women of all walks of life.”

The same goes for the general casting. Fantasy epics used to always fall under the old “pale, male and stale” label, but The Wheel of Time is incredibly diverse. “It is our superpower,” agrees Madden. “The Wheel of Time world, it’s incredibly vast and rich in culture, and that is something that we need to pull from our real world to make this world come to life, and also it is a true reflection of the world that we live in. It’s really exciting to have people come from all corners of the world.”

As an Aboriginal woman, does Madden ever feel that extra pressure to represent not just herself but an entire culture?

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“You want to do a good job,” she says. “With each project, I do just represent myself. You can’t necessarily represent everyone or everyone’s experience. But I feel a lot of support and draw strength from our community and my family and I wouldn’t be able to do all the things that I’m doing, and live the life that I’m living, if it wasn’t for the giants whose shoulders we stand on.”

As for where Madden would like to see her career go – her first film role came when she was eight years old, she starred in the first Australian Indigenous teen drama Ready for This in 2005, and got her international break in Dora and the Lost City of Gold in 2019 – the answer is simple.

“Honestly, just to continue working with exciting filmmakers,” she says. “I know that sounds quite vague, but I just have open expectations for myself. We’ve got such an amazing industry and so many great storytellers in our country that I would love to keep telling Australian stories, but then also, you know, doing international work. So I don’t know. Sorry, that was not the best answer to that!”

Sounds good to me.

The Wheel of Time, season three, streams on Amazon Prime Video from March 13.

The writer travelled to Brazil as a guest of Amazon Prime Video.

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