ACTOR ADDS PRAWN FARM TO EXOTIC SETS

US actor Katrina Bowden has spent the past decade filming in exotic locations for films and iconic TV series Bold and the Beautiful.

She can now add Gold Coast prawn farm to that list.

Bowden, 31, touched down in Australia in midNovember to play the lead character in southeast Queensland-filmed thriller Great White.

She spent seven weeks filming at Scarborough, Peel Island and a Gold Coast prawn farm.

“It was very interesting,” she said. “I didn’t know what to expect. I was like ‘I don’t want to be here with a bunch of prawns swimming around’.

“They pumped in ocean water and cleaned it out. It was a safer place to shoot there than the ocean. The whole movie is shot in water.

“We also shot in aviation tanks at the Brisbane Airport and it was hard. Everything was just a blur of light and colour.

“It was challenging and time consuming but it was so much fun too. Such a cool experience.

“The crew were phenomenal. They were so much fun. It was a great collaborative environment.

“Most of the time in movies you don’t hang out with the crew on weekends, it doesn’t happen that much. But on

(Great White) we got to hang out and it was very fun. I really loved getting to know everyone.”

Bowden said her favourite stop on her Australian tour was Byron Bay.

“The beaches are the most beautiful I have ever seen,” she said.

Great White is from the producer duo Michael Robertson and Neal Kingston, who filmed crocodile thriller Black Water: Abyss in southeast Queensland this year. In

Great White, Bowden plays a seaplane operator who becomes abandoned on the fictional Hell’s Reef in Northern Australia. Two great white sharks hunt her as she tries to make it to shore.

Script writer Michael Boughen (Tomorrow, When The War Began) was inspired by an incident off the north coast of NSW in 2017, during which a 2.7m, 200kg great white jumped into a fisherman’s boat.