Fire in the belly
ELIZA SCANLEN STARS IN A RAW AND INTENSE SERIES ABOUT BLACK SUMMER
Eliza Scanlen watched the devastating Black Summer bushfires unfold from the other side of the world with a combination of horror, helplessness and homesickness.
The former Home And Away actor, riding high on the success of her appearances in the acclaimed HBO drama Sharp Objects and the Oscarnominated adaptation of Little Women, was appearing opposite Ed Harris in a Broadway production of To Kill A Mockingbird when she saw large swathes of her homeland razed by the worst infernos in decades.
“I was in New York working and I was very homesick,” she recalls from Atlanta, where she is now filming historical anthology series, The First Lady. “I was sent photos and videos and watched the news from afar. It was very hard to watch the devastation from the other side of the world.”
She sprang into action, enlisting the help of her theatre community.
“We had all become quite close and as soon as we started getting news about the fires, people were putting in donations and I started a fundraiser within the company,” she says. “One of the performers in the company started making socks for koalas and shipped them over to Australia.”
As it turned out, the pandemic shut the play down early last year and she returned to her hometown of Sydney. Like countless other actors and creatives around the world, she didn’t work for months, but she says she used the break to “recalibrate” and have a good think about the kind of projects she wanted to work on. Her first postpandemic gig was M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, and while she was filming the thriller in the Dominican Republic from last September, she received the script for the six-part ABC drama Fires, which was inspired by the stories of the people on the frontline of the 2019-20 bushfires.
She knew right away it was exactly the kind of project she wanted to be associated with. Not only was her role of young volunteer firefighter Tash one of two characters who ties together the six separate stories of desperation, resilience and survival, she felt it would also give her a chance to contribute – even if only in a small way – to an issue and a cause she had missed while working overseas.
“Even though I wasn’t directly affected by the fires, everyone had a very emotional response to it,” she says. “We have all seen Australia really suffer as a result of it and it was really frightening to watch what happened. That feeling of helplessness was horrible, not being able to do anything about it and this felt like in, some small fraction of a way we were (able to).”
Scanlen acknowledges that the series might be too raw and intense for people adversely affected, but she hopes it will once again bring to the fore the role that climate change played in the extreme conditions that fuelled the fires, a conversation she says was sidelined as the pandemic took hold.
“It was very clear for us that our role was to represent the young people of Australia who are very concerned about the future and how climate change might affect their future,” she says. “To me, Tash and Mott (played by Hunter
Page-Lochard) symbolise a stolen youth. Young people are trying to use their voice to raise awareness, for the most part because it’s going to be their lives … disadvantaged by climate change.”
To prepare for her role, Scanlen talked to firefighters “from captains to volunteers” about why they do the work, as well as taking part in a boot camp to teach her the basics.
“Some people were more open than others because it still is very traumatic to talk about and it was difficult trying to gauge that without triggering anybody,” she says. “Everyone was so generous with what they shared and I was very interested in the community aspect of the brigade and why people keep coming back.”
Scanlen says an added bonus of filming in Victoria earlier this year was working with the who’s who of the Australian acting community that signed on for Fires,
including Richard Roxburgh, Miranda Otto, Anna Torv and Sam Worthington.
“Hunter and I really enjoyed being able to meet everybody because we weave in and out of every episode and it was so cool to meet all these people I had grown up watching,” she says.