SCREEN SIRENS
Meet the female stars of the sexy new supernatural series Tidelands, the first Australian-made Netflix production. By Sophie Tedmanson.
Meet the female stars of the sexy new supernatural series Tidelands, the first Australian-made Netflix production.
Elsa Pataky, Charlotte Best and Madeleine Madden lead the diverse international cast of Tidelands, set in the small fishing village of Orphelin Bay, where locals live side by side with a mysterious tribe of outcasts, the dangerous half-siren/ half-human ‘Tidelanders’. The show, which was filmed in Queensland, heralds special milestones for each of the women: the first Australian role for Pataky (who has scores of film and TV credits in Hollywood and her native Spain); the first lead role for Best (who previously starred in Puberty Blues and Home & Away); and it capped off an extraordinary year for Indigenous actress Madden (who starred in Picnic at Hanging Rock and Mystery Road and recently completed filming a part in Dora the Explorer on the Gold Coast).
Here, the women discuss what audiences can expect from the eight-part series, the waterlogged training they endured, and how empowering it was to work on the show.
On Tidelands …
ELSA PATAKY: “The show is a little shocking; it’s totally different than what you think, which is good. I loved it. I think it’s such an interesting theme and it has a bit of action. It’s also out of reality too, like the legend of the sirens. My character [Adrielle, the “darkly enigmatic and intelligent leader” of the Tidelanders] was very fun to play. She is sexy and she dances and [yet] is a really strong and powerful woman. I think the female characters are amazing in that way. They’re true women. They know what they want. They want to do whatever they think is the right thing to do. Nobody can stop them. It’s a good moment for that right now.”
CHARLOTTE BEST: “It’s so different than what you imagine. It’s been a dream. It made me so proud to be a part of such an amazing cast. Everybody brought it and is so fantastic in it. It is very sexy … I think it all looks cool and amazing.”
MADELEINE MADDEN: “It was great. I hadn’t done a supernatural series before, so for me it was really exciting. I don’t think Australian television has seen anything like this before, which was another reason why I decided to sign on to Tidelands.”
On underwater training …
CHARLOTTE: “The cast had a couple weeks of training, which was a super-fun way to get to know each other better and bond. We had this amazing man, Josh, come over from New Zealand. He completely put us through the ringer. We did swimming and diving and breath holds and underwater weight training. By the end of the two weeks we were all doing crazy-fast relays with weights and breath holds for three and a half minutes. And diving off a 10-metre platform, which Elsa completed! Elsa was very, very kind to me all the way through. It was my first lead role, so a couple of times I was getting worked up and stressing too much. But Elsa was really good to bring me back down to earth and encourage me. We were lucky. We all got along really well and had long nights and crazy hours. You get tired. Sometimes I couldn’t hear out of my right ear from being underwater. It’s stressful sometimes. I think I pushed myself further than I had to because I enjoyed it so much.”
ELSA: “The 10-metre dive was really challenging in a way, but I love that. It took me a little while, because we were doing the five-metre first a lot of times – some of them really hurt. But once you do a few [you get used to it] and Josh was like: ‘You have to do it perfect!’ Then it’s just like: ‘Oh no, this is going to hurt if you don’t do it right.’ But it was a lot of fun and we had a great time. Charlotte had the best technique to be under the water and have natural bubbles coming up. It looks so good. I was like: ‘Oh my gosh, how is she doing that? Bubbles coming from your nose!’”
On empowered female roles on screen …
MADELEINE: “I think having these big streaming services that bring so much more content in, there are so many more roles available and stories people want to hear. We’re not just getting a biased, one-sided story, and
that’s what’s cool with Tidelands. It’s a very female-driven show and all of these women, we’re all very, very different, and we’re telling different stories. Definitely after the #MeToo movement, things have changed. If you’re in the industry you can feel the difference; there’s a lot of unity within the film industry, and I think all over the world that has made ripples in every workplace. So it’s a great time to be a woman, but still being an Indigenous woman, the struggle is real. It is particularly hard to get a foot in the door, so for me, when I have these kind of big wins like landing a role on a show like this or in Dora the Explorer, that’s monumental for me. And also we had two female directors, Catriona McKenzie and Emma Freeman, and that makes such a big difference, especially as an actress, to have women leading the charge. You feel your integrity is always safe. There were quite intimate things that we were dealing with on this show, and having a woman there talking it through with you and giving love and tenderness makes a world of difference.”
CHARLOTTE: “The whole show is centred around these really strong women. I like that the show doesn’t have to dumb down the males to make us seem more powerful. We hold our own entirely. We got to do so much with physicality and gave so much support to the actual storyline. It just made us feel really empowered.”
ELSA: “I think it is a combination. Because there are strong women and female characters, but it doesn’t mean that the men are not strong also. That’s the good part about the show that I love – it’s very balanced. They all follow their own story. That makes it great. Because we need both – I also want to watch interesting male characters. I think it’s a good combination and balance between the male and the female stories.”
On diversity on screen …
MADELEINE: “It’s super-important for me to have representation on screen of Indigenous people. I want to be someone that young women can associate themselves with or relate to, so to be an Indigenous woman and to be involved in a project like the first Australian Netflix series is really groundbreaking for me.” ELSA: “The international cast is great for the story. I felt better that I wasn’t the only one who had a strong accent: there was a Latin accent with Marco (Pigossi, who is Brazilian). We all had a good time together, too. We are so different and all have different stories, different lives. I think it gives a lot to the show, to have the accents; it becomes more natural in a way. We’re getting people from everywhere in the world. Off-screen we hung out together, we went to the beach, we had a whole day where we had a cast picnic with all of us and our kids [Pataky lives not far from the Tidelands set in Byron Bay with her husband Chris Hemsworth and their three children]. We bonded a lot. All the actors had a great time together. I think you can see that in the show.”
CHARLOTTE: “That cast bonding made it great for on-screen chemistry. It was nice to just spend some time together getting through the months when you’re away from home, away from your families. That was really special. Anyway, we had to bring in our sexy imports: we needed Elsa and Marco and everybody to make us look better, because we’re not that exotic!”
“We are so different and all have different stories, different lives. I think it gives a lot to the show”