High Friction Areas: Chatting Deadloch Season 2 With Kate Box, Madeline Sami & Luke Hemsworth

Star Observer got a chance to sit down with Kate Box, Madeline Sami, and Luke Hemsworth, some of the stars of the subversive queer crime comedy, Deadloch, ahead of the release of its second season.

Season 2 sees no-nonsense detective, Dulcie Collins (Box) and her no-fucks-given partner, Eddie Redcliffe (Sami) take their odd-couple friendship up to Eddie’s hometown of Barra Creek in the Northern Territory, where a new mystery washes up in the mouth of a dead croc.

We talked all things season 2, including the colour of their piss, the charm of rough women, and the delights of working with perimenopausal lesbians.

 

SO: First question is for Luke: was it intimidating to work with two of Australia and New Zealand’s most prominent gay icons?

LH: Yeah, they’re so horrible, dude, they’re so mean to me, they’re so anti-inclusive. That’s a oxymoron, which often describes me… what was the question?

MS: What was it like to work with a couple of middle-aged, perimenopausal lesbian icons?

LH:  I went to drama school guys, come on.

MS: Luke is a lesbian.

LH: It’s a joy. It’s a pure, pure and other blessing, joy to be part of this amazing talent.

KB: It must have been a relief to know we’re not going to come on to you.

LH: Can I turn them? Am I good enough?

KB: Is that why you’ve got those shorts?

LH: The shorts just got shorter every day. Just to see would happen. Nothing happened though, you guys are steadfast. No changing teams.

SO: Staunch, yeah.

KB: We made our choice.

MB: We choosed our choices.

KB: We choosed our choices and we’re stuck here.

SO:  So Season one, it’s winter in Tassie. It’s giving very like, regional seaside, crime noir, European drama. Darwin is just the complete opposite of that. How do you think audiences, especially international audiences, are going to adjust to the change in aesthetic?

KB: You kind of meet Darwin though, right? You meet Darwin because you meet Eddie. And so I think that we know that we’re headed for something different to where we are, and when you arrive there, so much of Eddie makes sense as well, and so I think you get to know the place.

MS: You get it now, guys? Does everyone get Eddie? Do they?

KB: And the community that Eddie is surrounded by up there makes so much sense.

MS: Yeah, she almost seems mellow compared to the locals in Bear Creek and in Darwin.

SO: We spoke to Nina Oyama for our cover feature last month, and she told us about how the second season mirrors the Territory’s Build Up season. Did the heat help bring more intensity to the plot and the characters?  Do you guys have, like, really fantastic, like, sweat resistant tips?

LH: Tell us about the creams.

MS: Everything’s quick-dry. We all went out and bought fishing shirts and quick dry shorts. Everything has to be moisture wicking.

KB: Well see, you don’t want to get the seam of your pants at the bit where your thighs rub. You want to be sure that that is not in a high friction area. So often wearing like a, like a bike pant, yes, to stop rub rub. You know, that’s classic.

LH: Yeah, inner thigh chafe is real, yeah, so you either got to pull them up or pull them down.

MS: We big safety chat before we started shooting. We had this quite intense nurse who worked with us, who just gave us a massive lecture on, like, how we could die if we didn’t hydrate enough and, you know, get into air conditioning as quickly as we can. So we all went out and bought these huge drink bottles. I bought, like a two litre drink bottle, which I will never use again, because you don’t need it in New Zealand.

KB: The piss charts that tell you the colour of- we all had those.

MS: And we’d all talk about our piss a lot. Be like, ooh, you know, I better get a hydrolyte in me. This is not looking good.

KB: Am I dehydrated or is that Berocca? Can’t tell.

SO: Broadchurch and Olivia Coleman get brought up quite a bit when McLennan and McCartney are talking about early inspirations behind the show. Kate, you’ve since worked with Olivia in Jimpa.

KB: Yeah, we played sisters! How unfortunate for me!

SO: Did you guys talk about Deadloch at all?

KB: Yeah, we did talk about Deadloch, yeah yeah, and that she was a bit of an inspo, for that. Man, she’s nice, she’s as nice as you imagine her to be.

MS: Did you make her watch it?

KB: I’m not gonna make Olivia Coleman do anything.

MS: Be like, it’s like funny Broadchurch, it’s like that show Broadchurch.

KB: She was very excited to watch it. To my face, I don’t know- she leads a busy life.

SO: I mean, it’s Olivia Coleman.

KB: Collie, actually.

LH: Yeah, Collie to her friends. O-Dog.

SO: Madeline, you do a really amazing job at portraying a very chaotic subset of regional Australian woman, to the point where I was really surprised that you weren’t from Australia. Were there any particular figures or characters that you were drawing inspiration from?

MS: Well look, we’re cousins really, aren’t we? We’ve got a lot of these same similar archetypes in New Zealand as well. But I think a lot about- I was in Sydney, actually, probably about 15 years ago, and I was out with my sisters. My brother used to live here, so we used to come here a bit, and I remember being at this pub, and there was this woman, you know, smoking a ciggy at the end of the bar. And one of my sisters- she’s often that person that will just start talking to the randoms at the bar- started talking to this woman, and she’d just gotten out of jail for murder. And I often think that Eddie probably came together in my brain as, like, a combination of those kind of people, maybe a bit of my aunties, you know, maybe that sports coach when you’re a kid. There’s a bit of, like, all of this kind of time rough as guts women, who I love and have a lot of time for. We also grew up in New Zealand, with a lot of your great, great comedies. The comedy company was probably one of my first shows that I ever loved. I used to do Kylie Mole impressions for the family, so I’ve been practicing since I was like, eight.

MS: Dulcie and Eddie are in a really different place at the beginning of season two, not just physically, obviously, like, personally and relationally. What was it like getting a chance to flesh out and explore the changing dynamics of that relationship?

MS: What was it like, Box?

KB: It was heaven. It’s great, it’s nice when you meet them and they’re like, they really like each other in a way that you know their kind of love for each other is overrides their discomfort in the way each other deals with certain things in the world. And yes, that will rear its head again at some point, but to see them in this kind of gentle space early on where they’re kind of resting with each other is very it’s beautiful.

MS: I love it. Yeah, I think they really respect each other after season one, like they need each other for the job. And then, obviously, once they get into it, you get the friction. But yeah, they’re so nice.

 

Deadloch Season 2 is available on Prime Video now.