In the 1994 Australian gem Muriel’s Wedding, Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths play two 20-something social outcasts who forge a best-friends-forever relationship.

With an ABBA-approved soundtrack, it was the first lead in a major international feature film for both, and a launchpad for successful Hollywood careers for the next three decades.

Against a backdrop of the NSW coastal town of Porpoise Spit, Collette (Muriel Heslop) and Griffiths (Rhonda Epinstalk) deal with complicated issues of acceptance and the idea that marriage is the be-all.

The script is peppered with memorable one-liners such as “you’re terrible, Muriel”, and “party, party, party”.

“No one’s ever going to marry you. You’ve never even had a boyfriend,” a wedding guest says after Muriel catches a bouquet from mean girls’ ringleader Tania (Sophie Lee).

“Stick your drink up your a–e, Tania, I would rather swallow razor blades than drink with you,” Epinstalk, a former school friend, says at an awkward poolside invitation.

“Oh, by the way, I’m not alone. I’m with Muriel.”

Rhonda and Muriel have “a kind of blood-sister friendship, a bond that can’t be broken”, Griffiths said in a recently resurfaced 2020 interview.

That may be the case on screen, magnified by their white-satin performance of Waterloo on stage. But Griffiths was missing from a significant milestone this week.

On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the film’s world premiere at 1994 Toronto International Film Festival (it was released in Australia on September 29), several of the unforgettable cast put together a “Happy Birthday” Instagram post.

Under the Muriel’s Wedding tag of Muriel Heslop, Collette kicked off the video package. It was followed by snippets from a handful of her co-stars, including Lee, Gennie Nevinson, Pippa Grandison, Roz Hammond, Matt Day and Nathan Kaye.

“It’s amazing. It’s beautiful to be involved in something that still says something to people,” said another cast member, Daniel Lapaine.

Although Griffiths didn’t pop up in this melange, she was involved in an early 30th anniversary collaboration of 18 Muriel’s Wedding cast mates in 2022.

Hosted by media expert David Leigh Dodd, it reunited the original cast for the biggest online chat about their memories of the film.

Griffiths said delivering the drink line to Tania in the pool scene, while wearing men’s trunks and a super-tight T-shirt, was “deeply satisfying”.

“I was so cute, with my funny teeth and skinny little hips,” she laughed.

As for the Waterloo moment: “We had one of Australia’s best choreographers, Cha Cha (John O’Connell) … we practised for a month before we did it.”

Toni Collette was 20 when she made Muriel’s Wedding. Photo:Instagram/Muriel’s Wedding

Where are they now?

The film ends with Collette and Griffiths looking knowingly at each other as their taxi drives away and they wave goodbye to Porpoise Spit.

There was no sequel. We never knew what Muriel and Rhonda did with their lives once they moved to Sydney. The cast also went their separate ways.

Collette, who put on 18 kilograms in seven weeks to play Muriel in her breakthrough role in only her second film, told an Oscar panel in 2019 it was “hugely life-changing”.

After winning an AACTA for best actress, Collette, now 51, headed to the US.

She has since received Oscar nominations for supporting roles in The Sixth Sense and Little Miss Sunshine and won Prime Time Emmy awards for The United States of Tara.

The limited series, Unbelievable, in which she plays a detective investigating a rape, earned her a Critics Choice Award.

Most recently, Collette, also a producer and writer, starred in Nightmare Alley and Mafia Mamma.

She is working on TV miniseries Wayward, has three films in pre-production and has wrapped two more, Under the Stars and Mickey 17.

The film was also a breakout role for Rachel Griffiths. Photo: Instagram/Muriel’s Wedding

Griffiths, 55, also a producer and writer, appeared in TV movies before making her mark in 2001 with five series of Six Feet Under and then Total Control.

Her movies included Hacksaw Ridge, Ride Like a Girl and, most recently, Anyone But You.

Lee, 56, bowed out of the spotlight after early success with The Castle and Muriel’s Wedding, while Hammond went on to star in The Dish and the TV series The Librarian and The Heights.

Bill Hunter, who played Muriel’s mean father Bill Heslop, was also filming The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert at the time. He died in 2011 aged 71.

Collette told Huffpost UK that Muriel’s Wedding has endured because “it’s just so honest. It’s so frank, and unafraid. And she’s so authentic, and her journey is so inspirational”.

“There’s something so brave about this girl, who really has no experience, just escaping an abusive past and kind of reshaping her whole family dynamic and history.

“She’s an underdog, but also she just goes for it.”

“But it’s quite dark,” Collette said, adding she got emotional when watching it at a 25th anniversary screening in 2018.

“I was crying so much, I hadn’t seen it in years, and one of my best friends Dan Wyllie, who plays Perry in the film, turned to me and said, ‘that is the saddest funny film ever made’.”