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Princess Pictures founder Laura Waters may be responsible for bringing Australian comic Chris Lilley (Summer Heights High, Ja’mie: Private School Girl) to American audiences, but she’s not a local to the country — and in her early days Down Under, that threw her for a loop. She was born in the U.S., graduated from Boston University and began her career producing television news in London and Los Angeles, before shifting into scripted content in Australia. “When I first got there, I was still working in news and current affairs — that part of the industry,” Waters tells me on this week’s episode of Rushfield Lunch. Having been raised in America, she approached news coverage with the goal of saving the world as her “North Star.” “But things were just so good in Australia that it just wasn’t satisfying,” she says. As Waters recalls, it was a story about disability access that pushed her over the edge. In the U.S., perhaps, it would be a tale of gloom and doom. But in Australia? “I called the group that represented people with disabilities, and they said, ‘No, no, it’s really pretty good. We’ve got everything,’” she says. “I was like, ‘I can’t do anything here.’ So then I kind of stumbled into comedy.” 
Waters has produced a wide range of programming since launching Princess in 2003 — documentaries, scripted series and cult animation favorites like Smiling Friends. Most recently, Waters’ company produced Last Days of the Space Age for Disney+ and the breakout Sundance horror hit Together with Dave Franco and Alison Brie (which sold to Neon for one of the biggest deals in the history of the fest in 2025). But comedy is her new North Star — and something she adapted to quickly in Australia despite her American roots. “When you’re a journalist, you’re constantly throwing yourself into a new situation — especially if you’re making news,” she says. “You wake up in the morning, and somebody goes, ‘By six o’clock tonight, you have to have a fully baked story about something you know nothing about.’ So I kind of had the neural pathways and this sort of naivety to go, ‘Yeah, I can throw myself into any world and figure it out.’” Watch our great conversation above, where Waters tells me about Vegemite and how to survive a flight from L.A. to Australia — plus the “tall poppy theory” that explains Australian comedy. |
