For six months, Shortland Street star Anna Jullienne has been living life on the edge. As her character Maia Jefferies descends into madness, Anna's own life has been thrown into turmoil.

Day after day, the 26-year-old has existed in a ‘heightened state' as she copes with Maia's paranoia, anxiety and her descent into complete madness.

‘I find myself dreaming a lot of the time,' Anna, who's played Maia on the hit TV2 soap for the past five years, tells New Idea. ‘I'll have really full-on dreams where I'm upset, something terrible has happened or I've killed someone in a car crash. After all those horrible dreams at night, I go back to work and I've found that really draining.'

For two weeks, Anna spent her days locked away in an old psychiatric hospital in Waitakere and, although she was there to confront Maia's demons, after hours she was going through her own emotional battle.

‘That was the most full-on time because in a lot of the scenes I'm crying or being pinned down. In those scenes, Maia thinks she shouldn't be in a psych ward and it's all a big mistake. This just highlights her delusion,' Anna says of her character who is struggling so much with the guilt of murdering Ethan Pierce that she has been driven insane and is about to hit rock bottom.

‘When you are busy and doing a lot of emotional scenes, you get home and even though your brain knows it's not real, your body is still emoting. That definitely plays a big part in your home life.'

When Anna found out that Maia was the murderer, she sat down with her fiance James Kermode to have a talk about the effect the intense storylines might have on their relationship.

She jokes that it's lucky they have been together for five years and have a strong partnership because otherwise James, who works in commercial property, may think she was a ‘lunatic'.

‘It really affects us. If I've had an emotional scene and I've been crying all day, when I come home I feel like I've been crying because I have. So I was never going to come home and be a box of birds,' Anna reveals.

She says James, 26, often runs lines with her in the evening so he has a good idea what plot lines are in store for Maia. ‘I've been on Shortland Street for all of our relationship so we do have our coping mechanisms in place.'

But Anna admits if it wasn't for James' understanding, love and support, she may have struggled to cope with the demands of her heavily emotional scenes.

‘Maia's resisting everything. In a lot of the scenes, she's being medicated and she doesn't think she needs to be. She is fighting totally so those sorts of scenes were really difficult to play,' Anna explains. She says she researched Angelina Jolie's Oscar-winning performance in Girl, Interrupted in preparation for Maia's breakdown.

‘I've never been in a situation like this, where three people are injecting something in me against my will. I didn't have to worry about the emotion coming - I just cried because it's so horrible. It's about having that choice removed and I couldn't help but get upset because, in a way, it was still happening to me.'

Working from 7am to 6pm at the ‘horrible' psychiatric ward left Anna exhausted at the end of each day. She says sticking to her after-work routine helped alleviate the pressure.

‘I try to keep life as normal as possible when I'm busy like that. I still make time to go for a run but I also knew that for the fortnight this psych ward stuff was going on, it was going to be really intense and I'd prepared myself for that. That's the thing with Shortie, there's always light at the end of the tunnel.'

The clinical, depressing and confining environment also helped to invoke feelings of fear and paranoia in Anna. The only outdoor area was caged, and in her room there were two layers of glass between the window and blinds, which could only be opened by controls on the other side of the room's locked door.

‘It was a really creepy place and that was brilliant because it was so horrible it put me in the mood. The room that was once a real patient's room was so depressing. It's not really a place that you could foresee anyone getting better because it was so dismal,' Anna explains. ‘I think it's great to experience what I would probably have had to go through if that actually happened to me in real life.'

Biggest challenge yet

It's the burden of Maia's guilt that eventually erodes her sanity and state of mind. And although Anna's character has had many controversial storylines in the past five years, the talented actress says these were her most unique and demanding.

‘Maia never went to visit Ethan intending to kill him. It was just something that happened, so dealing with it was going to be really difficult,' she says. ‘Of course, killing someone is the worst thing you could do. Maia can never forget she's done this, and that guilt is with her all the time so she ends up pushing everyone she loves away. It makes sense that she goes crazy.'

By Kylie Bailey

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