Catherine McClements has hit her era of chill. A time when she can approach work with a little more joy and a little less angst. She recently wrapped up filming on Dalliance – a sexy six-part drama series set in Sydney, centred around a group of friends making sense of their love lives into their 60s.“I’ve really enjoyed the work recently,” she says, adding there were some challenging moments on the show. “I had to do all these sex scenes. When I got on, I asked, ‘Can she do something else other than have sex? Couldn’t she have a job or something?’ But the whole trajectory is that she discovers sex in her 60s, and what it can be.”McClements and scene partner Kirk Torrance worked with an intimacy coordinator – a job that didn’t exist when she started screen acting in the 1980s. “When I look back, it would have been nice to have someone to talk to about that at the time,” she says.The cast of Dalliance are all seasoned Australian performers, including Heather Mitchell, who also co-produced the series, Hugo Weaving, David Wenham and Georgie Parker. It feels like a move back towards the type of television that’s made to watch episodically, not to binge while scrolling through Instagram.“It’s television at its best,” says McClements. “It’s got this beating heart that’s about human beings interacting with each other. It really comes from Heather’s soul, and I think all the female characters, when you look at them, are facets of her personality. In a funny way, it’s like every character that she’s played in her career.”McClements says television has changed over the years, with more actors investing their time in the medium. When she graduated from NIDA in 1985, she says no one wanted to do TV. “It was either theatre or film – TV was the poor cousin.” But things have changed. It’s now a place for experimentation, she says, with a little more room to move in the narrative. “Television’s becoming a great place for creativity. At the moment, there’s just so much content.”What has never changed is the immediacy of the format – where writers and directors can see something happening in real time, react to it and turn it around to be relevant on screen: the kind of short-lead flexibility that movies can never tap into. “I found with television, you could see something on the street, and you could put it in the show,” McClements says.McClements has two children [with husband, actor Jacek Koman] – 19-year-old Quincy and 24-year-old Coco – who she says she’s constantly learning from. Now they’re older and don’t rely on her so much for their daily survival, she’s trying a lighter touch – a broad, but loving scope for failure and success, that allows the pair to make their own way as they see fit. “I try my best to stay out of their lives now,” McClements says, adding there’s not much she can teach her kids that they haven’t taught her already.By Malene Birger coat from Christensen Copenhagen. Bianca