Born in tropical Cairns, in Queensland, and growing up as a self-described “small town Australian girl”, Primrose is already an established talent on the worldwide stage, joining the renowned Paris Opera Ballet in 2019, and more recently dancing for the Boston Ballet. But despite Prim’s mother also being a ballet dancer, her first foray into the ballet world wasn’t motivated by a desire to follow in those footsteps, “I was actually born a little pigeon toed.” Prim recalls with a laugh, “So my mum, having a dance background, knew that would correct my alignment because ballet is all turned out. So I just started baby ballet for fun, hoping that would fix it, and it did.” And as it happened, Primrose had an awful lot of range of motion in her turnout, “What started off as a negative in my mind turned out to be a positive”. After that Prim was hooked. A social butterfly who blossomed in class, she fell in love with not just ballet, but all the glitter, the tiaras, and “all that amazing stuff!”. Her training began under Julie McAlpine and Sarah Thorn at the Julie McAlpine Dance Studio, where she studied the RAD syllabus all the way from pre-primary to advanced 2. By 2018 she was competing in the prestigious Prix De Lausanne (notably the same year that her future co-star, Joel Burke would compete), and then the following year, the Genée International Ballet Competition, where she distinguished herself as a finalist and promptly landed a place at the Paris Opera Ballet at just seventeen years old. For someone drawn to the glitter and beauty of the ballet world this must have been a real-life Cinderella moment, as surely no other company in the world better embodies the opulence and glamour of ballet like the Paris Opera. So when in 2021, Directors Jesse Ahern and Joanne Samuel were on the hunt for a striking and talented dancer who could pull off the nuances of an ambitious, strong-willed yet loveable ‘villain’ for their Australian dance film, Primrose ticked all the boxes. It was the film’s choreographer, former Australian Ballet principal, Daniel Gaudiello that set up the match. “[Daniel] is one of my old teachers. And he came to me and said, ‘Hey Prim, there’s this movie role that I think you would be really good for’. And I said to Daniel, ‘oh, okay!’. I didn’t really think anything of it,”. In fact Prim was such a perfect fit for the part that she ended up being offered the role without so much as an audition, which is a huge leap of faith for casting a lead role, let alone someone who has never acted on screen before. Looking back Prim recalls how it all played out: “I think they may have auditioned some other people and they didn’t work out. And then I kind of just had a Zoom meeting with the director, Jesse, and he was like, ‘Yeah, she’s definitely Gracie’. I think Daniel was right in saying I was the right person for this role. Because I have such a strong personality, and Gracie needs that. And then it just went from there. They were like, ‘Here’s your lines’. Here we go!”
