Teresa Palmer and the 10-page letter that changed her life.

The best story Teresa Palmer could ever tell you has yet to make it into any movie script.

The 39-year-old Australian actress has been in the entertainment industry for more than two decades, bringing to life an extensive list of stories and characters in that time.

One of her very first acting credits can be found buried at the end of the Aussie horror classic Wolf Creek. When a then-unknown Teresa stole the show in a series of background scenes, even her character, an unnamed pool party guest, was not exactly supposed to be the focus of the story.

Her real break into the industry came in 2006 when she starred in the low-budget Australian psychological drama 2:37, which was filmed in her hometown of Adelaide. It was a small film that ended up premiering at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, propelling her work onto the international stage.

A series of high-budget Hollywood films followed, including Bedtime Stories with Adam Sandler, Warm Bodies opposite Nicholas Hoult, the Nicholas Sparks book-to-film adaptation The Choice, the lead role in the long-running TV series A Discovery of Witches, and a starring turn in the critically acclaimed Australian movie Ride Like a Girl.

But while these movies and TV shows depict an array of fantastical worlds, unexpected plot twists, and epic tales of love and loss, the story of how Teresa met her husband and father of her five children, filmmaker Mark Webber, is the one tale you'll really want to hear her tell.

Listen to Teresa Palmer on No Filter.

"I had just gone through this really painful breakup," Teresa said on Mamamia's No Filter podcast. "During that breakup, I was actually hanging out with a group of people who were really deep into self-development and spirituality. One of them was Moby, the singer, and he was really instrumental in my early years. I listened to his album on repeat. So I met him and we started connecting.

"He was doing a lot of meditation stuff at his castle. Yes, just a casual castle," she continued. "People would sit in collective meditation; sometimes we'd turn off all the lights so it was like sensory deprivation.

"This was all new to me and I always felt so connected to myself after these sessions. Then I found this idea of the law of attraction, and, because I had just gotten out of this awful relationship, I got very specific about what I wanted in a new relationship. I started calling it in as though I already had it.

"I would say, 'My man has these colour eyes; he's a Cancer; he loves children; he wants to have a big family; he's an animal lover, and he's at least a vegetarian'.

"Everything I wrote down about what I wanted in a partner was very specific. Things like the way he was going to be with my friends; that he would be artistic, creative, and a deep thinker. I wrote this all out.

"I knew I couldn't fixate on it, so I wrote it all down and put the pages away in a drawer. It was 10 pages long. Then three months later, I met my husband randomly online through Twitter."

In 2012, Teresa Palmer's life looked like every one of her childhood wishes had come true. As a young girl growing up in South Australia, Teresa knew she wanted to be an actress from the moment she first watched the classic movie A Little Princess.

But at this particular moment in time, just as her career was really beginning to soar, she had never felt more alone.

"At the time, I was in a really sad place," Teresa explained. "I was staying at the Bowery Hotel in New York with my friend Brooke, and from the outside, people could look in and say, 'Wow, she's living her dream'.

"I had this massive movie that had just come out, I was being put up at this fancy hotel, and we were going to these fancy fashion shows. But at the same time, I was so desperately lonely and sad because of this heartbreak.

"Then I thought, 'I'll just kick myself while I'm down. Who is another actress who is doing better than I am? I'm just going to Google what Amanda Seyfried is up to… Oh look, she's got another movie at Sundance. Good for her'.

"So I watched the trailer for her new movie and I thought 'Oh my God, that is so beautiful'. I was just so moved by this trailer that I tweeted about it, and I put the filmmaker's handle in there.

"What I didn't know was that the filmmaker was [Mark Webber], my now husband — it was his movie, then he started messaging me. He slipped into my DMs and said, 'I'm an admirer of your work'. My friend Brooke said to me, 'Don't you know who that is!?'

"Then she said, 'You've got to hear his story'. He was a homeless kid, and he made his way out of that situation. He's been on Broadway, and he's really revered in the industry. Brooke said, 'You've got to DM him back; this is so hot. You've got to hook up with this guy.'

"Then we just wrote love letters to each other for 40 days — just over email — until we met in the flesh. We had already fallen in love through our writing at that point.

"But he matched everything I had written down that I wanted in a partner on those 10 pages."

Teresa and Mark are now parents to five children: Isaac (Mark's son with actress Frankie Shaw, whom Teresa shares a close bond with), along with Bodhi Rain, Forest Sage, Poet Lake, and Prairie Moon. In March of this year, Teresa announced she was pregnant with a series of family photos shared to her Instagram account.

While the soon-to-be mother of six always knew she wanted to have children, it was the first sentence that came out of her mouth when she signed with a prestigious talent agency in America, and she was initially nervous about how it would affect her career.

"I did have anxiety that I chose to have kids right at the peak of my opportunity," Teresa said. "So Warm Bodies had just come out, and it was such a big break for me internationally.

"So I thought, 'Now it's time to have a baby'. I was 27, and I was really nervous, but then suddenly all my eggs weren't in one basket. I had wanted my whole life to be a mum, but being a mother meant I always worried that if they were picking out of two actors, I would be the less interesting choice. I'm more expensive because I have a big family, and also because of the housing situation I need.

"Instead of just a hotel room for myself, I come with a housing need where I bring my mum who lives with us, my husband, and I've got all these kids. So usually I need at least three bedrooms (four bedrooms is ideal) to make it work."

Mark Webber and Teresa Palmer fell in love after meeting on Twitter. Image: Getty.

The couple married in 2013 and have never shied away from sharing the intimate details of their lives as parents and filmmakers. From their picturesque-looking life in Byron Bay to the hardest days of their long-term relationship, Teresa is one of the few high-profile actresses who never states that a particular topic is off limits.

"We're so imperfect," Teresa said about her marriage to Mark. "We still have fights all the time, but we get through it, and we up-level.

"Each time we have a conflict, there's an up-levelling that happens, but it's been wobbly. There have been times where I thought, 'We're not going to make it', but then we do."

There have been waves of media and tabloid interest in Teresa and Mark's relationship over the years, but for every paparazzi photo that has been sold or blind item that has appeared, the couple has shared their own story tenfold.

From co-parenting to addiction and the beautifully messy moments of family life, the couple has always shared the inner workings of their life, even when they could have skated under the radar.

"There was a moment where we were shooting a movie in the early days of our relationship, and I was 12 weeks pregnant with our first baby, Bodhi," Teresa said, when asked about some paparazzi images that circulated early on in their relationship. "I was financing his new movie, and we had only been together at this point for not very long, maybe not even a year.

"While we were filming, I found out that he was deep in a relapse (Mark has openly shared his history of substance abuse). But part of addictive behaviour is to conceal, manipulate, and lie in order to preserve the thing that you have. Which for him was this relationship. I did not, at that point, understand addiction at all. I only judged it, and I was mortified because I was pregnant. I felt trapped and angry.

"The paparazzi happened to be there on the day when I was screaming at him, crying, and just full of devastation. I thought I was going to be a single mother, and that was not the story I had pictured for us. It was too overwhelming, and that's when they snapped these photos.

"But luckily, because we happened to be shooting that day, there were cameras around, and so when the photos were published, people assumed we were just rehearsing a scene for the movie.

"But I've always felt like if you can tell your own story, then you should," she continued. "It's important to me to humanise us, because I have looked at people in the industry who are on a pedestal, and you just think they have these perfect lives. Then you can't help but be in a state of comparison.

"Mark has always felt a real sense of responsibility to effect positive change, and one of the ways he believes he can do that is by sharing his story.

"And because of this, I think my kids have such a beautiful awareness and mindfulness. We're raising really conscious-minded and spiritually rich kids, which is wonderful."

Teresa Palmer with three of her children at the premiere of The Last Anniversary. Image: Getty.

In her new Binge series The Last Anniversary, which is based on the best-selling Liane Moriarty book of the same name, Teresa plays Sophie, a woman apparaoching 40 who longs for a family and find herself moving to a tiny island off the coast of New South Wales after her ex-boyfriend's grandmother unexpectedly leaves her her house in the will.

The story is a multi-generational mystery that focuses on the interwoven lives of the women who call Scribby Gum Island home, and touches on themes of motherhood, postpartum depression, love, heartbreak, friendship, and rewriting your own story.

"I was very drawn to The Last Anniversary because it's such a multi-generational family drama, so there are access points to everyone, at all ages," she said of the show. "The characters all have this beautiful, imperfect dance with lives and just being women, and what [that means].

"I think Liane Moriarty is a genius. We all know this; we've read her books. She's got this beautiful recipe to how she works, and she knows how to weave her ideas into really meaningful stories,"

The actress — who is also the co-author of the book The Zen Mama Guide to Finding Your Rhythm in Pregnancy, Birth, and Beyond and who hosts The Mother Daze podcast with Sarah Wright Olsen — is no stranger to sharing both beautiful and painful stories of her own. In May of last year, Tereasa shared a video to Instagram announcing that she was pregnant, with snippets of her children and husband celebrating the news. Halfway through the video, Teresa shared images of herself in tears — she had suffered a miscarriage.

"It was really vulnerable and scary," the actress said of sharing her pregnancy loss story. "I couldn't help but think, 'Did I make the right choice'?

"Now this pregnancy announcement keeps being linked back to my pregnancy loss, like they can't be two separate things. Everything in the media is, 'She's had a loss, and now she's pregnant'. So there's a part of me that thinks, 'Oh goodness, did I make the right choice'?

"But I know that I did," she continued. "Because I read the thousands of comments beneath my post. I read all of them and I spent days lovehearting every single one, and trying to write back to as many as I could.

"I also acknowledge that I have four beautiful, biological, healthy children that I was able to get pregnant with and grow and birth, and that can already be triggering for some people.

"I wanted to put out there that I also went through a pregnancy loss, and yes, even though I have these beautiful, healthy children, you still have the right to grieve a loss. No matter how many children you have.

"I thought I was having this baby. It's the breaking up with the dream of who this baby is, when they're going to be born, and what the age gap is going to be. So I wanted to show the high of that, the excitement I had with our kids, and then show the dream dissipating.

"I was so moved by the thousands of people who wrote back to me and shared their stories."

Teresa Palmer is proof that sharing our stories, whether fictional on a screen or pulled from real life in our own words, has the power to change lives.

The Last Anniversary is now streaming on Binge.

Laura Brodnik is Mamamia's Head of Entertainment and host of The Spill podcast. You can follow her on Instagram here for more entertainment news and recommendations.

Feature Image: Getty