🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
In 2009, 16-year-old Australian sailor Jessica Watson made headlines for attempting to become the youngest person to complete a solo trip around the world — but not without overcoming a wave of obstacles in and out of the water, including intense media scrutiny. The press initially questioned both her abilities and her parents’ judgment to allow her to chase her dream, but after 210 days at sea, she was greeted back home by thousands of her countrymen in Sydney Harbor. She was eventually named Young Australian of the Year and awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia. Watson, who was inspired at the age of 12 by fellow Australian Jesse Martin’s account of his own circumnavigation of the world at just 18, wasted little time turning her onboard journals and vlogs into a memoir entitled True Spirit. It was published just two months after her return. Now, some 13 years later, her story is getting the movie treatment in director Sarah Spillane’s film of the same name out on Netflix on Feb. 3.
Despite lofty ambitions that once held her entire country in thrall, Watson was always a reluctant public figure, much preferring a life at sea to a sea of prying cameras. And after completing her voyage, she mostly slipped back into normal life, happily anonymous again. So being back in the spotlight with a movie based on her life is a strange kind of déjà vu for the now 28-year-old — and for her parents, brother and sister who are also depicted in the film. “Don’t get me wrong, they’re excited and proud,” says Watson, “but my brother still hasn’t seen the movie, and he’s trying to say that he doesn’t want to watch it because it’s just so weird to see yourself like that.”
When it came to viewing a version of herself as a teen — played by Australian actor Teagan Croft — the scenes of her combatting surging seas were the easiest part of the experience. (And she hopes that they inspire other kids to seek out similar adventures.) The cringeworthy moments for her came when she watched actors portraying her family. Anna Paquin plays her mother, who feels helpless back on dry land trying to contact her daughter during some of the most harrowing moments of her trip.
“I think people expect me to be a bit ruffled by the storm scenes,” says Watson. “But for some reason, I almost find that stuff a bit amusing. The flip side to that, seeing how my family experienced that, is a little intense. Getting to experience the emotion of what that would’ve been like is pretty full-on. I was out there dealing with it and caught up in that, not thinking about how horrible it was, what I put them through in those particularly bad days.”
Watson says that she was floored by how well True Spirit’s production team reproduced her yacht, Ella’s Pink Lady, which now rests in the Queensland Maritime Museum. “It’s so uncanny how some things are just so accurate, how they got the exact same instruments from 13 years ago and all my stuffed toys and things like that down perfectly. It’s so weird that some things have been replicated so accurately.”
So does reliving her hero’s welcome as she sailed into Sydney Harbor make her yearn to tackle other feats? Not really. “I pursued performance sailing and racing for a little while, but that’s really not me,” she says. “Over a few years, I realized that I wanted to challenge myself in different ways. So I went back to study, and these days I actually have a very sensible desk job, which I really love. Sailing is a lifelong passion and it’s actually something that has become more important to me than ever, but it’s also very much a hobby.”
