New Aussie drama inspired by real events
The makers of Wentworth wanted to work with Leah Purcell again, so they created a show for her – and finally cast her on the right side of the law. reports.
When you’re filming outside in winter in the Australian alps, a quick take is a good take. “It was minus 2 in one scene, and I said to the crew, ‘I hope you guys are f…ing getting this’,” says Leah Purcell, who stars in High Country, a new eight-part crime mystery series that was shot in a region that, until now, has been best known as the setting for The Man From Snowy River.
On the day we talk on set in Jamieson, the tiny Victorian town that doubles as the fictional Broken Ridge, the rain has set in, turning the football field housing the production’s base camp into a quagmire.
A week down the track, the gorgeous riverside camping ground where a good chunk of the action takes place will be underwater. But right now, Purcell’s mind is focused not just on the weather – chilling as it is – but on the vast range of things she has to get her head around in a show on which she also serves as cultural consultant and executive producer.
She’s in almost every scene in the series; she’s got time to talk today only because this is her first light workload in 36 days of shooting.
“I’m busy. I’m busy,” she says, cheerily. “I have not had a day off, and I won’t. Tomorrow, I have one scene, with one word, so I love tomorrow. But I’ve got to go through my scripts for this block [of episodes] and get on top of it because then I can sleep at night. I know where my character’s going, I know what I’m saying.
“But you know, I’ve been working 30 years in the industry now, and you work for this, and I think I can handle all that because it’s what you’ve got to do.”
In High Country, Purcell plays Detective Andie Whitford, who has moved from the city with her partner, Helen (Kiwi actor Sara Wiseman), and daughter to take charge of a country police station, a shift that’s supposed to bring about a quieter life.
But in the way of crime dramas set in small country towns all over the world
(think Happy Valley from the UK, says Purcell, or Mare of Easttown from the US), an unfeasibly high murder rate soon puts paid to that plan.
It starts with a family murder-suicide, but soon there’s a cold case involving a missing hiker, and then a woman from town goes missing, and what about that strange loner who lives in a caravan and is assumed by many of his neighbours to be a sexual abuser – could they all be connected in some way?
Heightened though it may all seem, the idea for the series came from real events.
“I read a feature article about people who had gone missing in the High Country over a period of about a year in a very small geographic area − about 60 kilometres,” says veteran producer Marcia Gardner, who co-created the show with writer John Ridley. “It was all very mysterious, it had the police and locals baffled.”
“There were four or five other cases going back 10 or 15 years, but then there was a clump of three in a year who had just vanished and never been found,” adds Ridley.
That was the spark for a storyline that would soon enough veer off into fictional territory. The fact Ridley’s family lived in the area, and he had been visiting regularly for 35 years, provided all the kindling they needed.
“I’ve always come up here and said, ‘what a great place to shoot a series’, but three hours out of Melbourne, you go, ‘well, it’s never gonna happen’,” says Ridley. “But it just so happened that this was the perfect place for it really.”
Even before the idea for the show though, Gardner and Ridley had another, more vague but equally compelling, ambition: to create a vehicle for Purcell, with whom they had worked on Wentworth.
“She has an incredible sense of warmth and humanity about her, and I just loved her acting,” says Gardner.
For her part, Wiseman jumped at the chance to do a chemistry test opposite Purcell.
“Leah is a joy to work with – and I had everything crossed waiting for that call to come back to say I had the part.
“It can be quite daunting if you don’t know the person, but I was given a couple of scenes and the directors guided me. Leah tried out with other people for the part, but it comes down to the relatability of each other. I think we had that.”
High Country begins streaming on ThreeNow on Friday, May 3.