A taste of Tasmania
Utopia actors Celia Pacquola and Luke McGregor wrote and star in new ABC series Rosehaven, which follows their characters, friends Emma and Daniel, as they escape mainland Australia to run a family real estate business in small-town Tasmania. Pacquola tells Danielle McGrane about the creation of this comedy.
Where did the idea for the series come from?
Basically, Luke and I wanted to find something where we could talk rubbish to each other. We met on the stand-up circuit but the turning point for us was the pilot episode of Utopia – that’s when we started hanging out. Our characters did a lot together and we became a duo and hung out between scenes. So one day we just went, ‘Oh we’ve got a very similar stupid sense of humour, do you want to try to write something together?’. The test was going to Tassie for 10 days because we’d never spent more than a day together. So we went there to live with Luke’s parents and drove around together in a hired car, worked together, and by the end we were still OK.
If the idea for the show stemmed from your real-life friendship, does that mean Emma and Daniel are similar to you both?
The characters are close to who we are as people and it made writing so much fun and so much easier because we were playing to our strengths.
Emma is me when I’m in a silly, immature mood, but she’s like that all the time and she doesn’t have the fear of consequences that I do. She’s like what I would like to be in my mind if I didn’t have rent to pay.
And Daniel is Luke if he’d never found stand-up. He’s trying to exist in a corporate world but he’s just not very good at it.
The Tasmanian landscape looks pretty incredible in this show. Was that part of your reason for filming there?
Usually if a show is set in country Australia it’s in a desert, or it’s hot and flat, whereas Tassie has hills and it looks wet, and it looks like it could be Middle Earth. We thought it wasn’t something you would usually see from Australia and we liked the idea that if it went outside of Australia that it would look like a sort of magical landscape. But the town is a fictional town.
Did you visit small towns for inspiration?
Some of the humour comes from stuff I remembered from growing up in a small town in the Yarra Valley, but it’s mainly fictional.
When you were working with Luke’s parents in the real estate business, did anyone recognise you from TV?
Not really. Luke and I had one person each who said, ‘Aren’t you off the TV? What are you doing here?’ and I just said, ‘Comedy’s not working out’.
Well, thankfully, comedy is working out. What would you like to do next?
At this point it’s hard to not imagine what a second season would be like because we’ve spent all this time setting up this world and these characters. It would be a waste to not see what else they could do.