‘It’s a gun, and it’s five centimetres from my face’: Australian star on her terrifying TV moment
Australian actress Mabel Li discusses her role as Aunt Vidala in the series The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. She recounts a frightening scene in which a gun was held five centimetres from her face during filming. Li describes how she secured the part through auditions and notes it is her first overseas production.
- ▪Mabel Li, a Logie‑nominated Australian actor, plays the character Aunt Vidala in The Testaments.
- ▪She describes a particularly terrifying moment on set when a prop gun was positioned five centimetres from her face.
- ▪The role was Li’s first international job, obtained after auditioning and multiple callbacks with the show’s producers.
- ▪Li says the series feels deeply personal despite its authoritarian themes, which attracted the attention of executive producer Mike Barker.
Sydney Morning Herald publishes from Australia and files mainly under world. We currently carry 3,705 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Sydney Morning Herald |
| Canonical URL | https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/it-s-a-gun-and-it-s-five-centimetres-from-my-face-mabel-li-on-the-terror-and-pleasure-of-the-testaments-20260605-p604b8.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed |
| Publication time | Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:01:54 +1000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-15T00:02:33.478Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-15T00:02:33.478Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 4iPNs7q6VS3W |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","dateModified":"2026-06-15T00:01:54Z","datePublished":"2026-06-10T19:30:00Z","description":"The Logie-nominated actor, who plays Aunt Lydia’s chief rival and staffroom agitator, on The Testaments most confronting scene.","headline":"‘It’s a gun, and it’s five centimetres from my face’: Australian star on her terrifying TV moment","keywords":"Streaming, Just in, What to watch, What's on TV","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Louise Rugendyke","jobTitle":"National TV…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Sydney Morning Herald.