How a Lord of the Rings star ended up stranded in Tasmania

The Age

2 days ago

When Charlie Vickers steps onto the set of the multimillion-dollar The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power as the evil Sauron, it's usually after he has spent several hours in hair and make-up, where a long blond wig and a pair of pointy ears are attached and he's been kitted out in a black suit of armour. He then stands in front of a green screen, conjuring up Middle-earth or whatever fantasy element is part of that day's story (orcs, elves etc), and utters lines such as, 'Whether or not his repentance in the Second Age was genuine, he chose to do evil again.'
For The Survivors, the six-part Tasmanian murder mystery adapted from Jane Harper's 2020 novel of the same name, it was an altogether different (and much less expensive) story. Think boardies, thongs and a baby mullet.
'I can just rock up to work,' admits a cheery Vickers over Zoom from his home in London. 'I can just drive my own car to the set, get out and walk into the make-up truck. Whereas on Lord of the Rings, you're having to scan a pass, and then someone else scans another pass, and it's a very different experience.'
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Despite being Melbourne born and bred, The Survivors is only the 32-year-old's third production in Australia, after the film Palm Beach and the TV series The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart.
Unlike many Australian actors of his age, he didn't follow the usual path of Neighbours or Home and Away. Instead, he was accepted into London's prestigious Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, which meant he bypassed the local scene and landed, almost instantly, in the big time.
'I watched Neighbours religiously with my mum every night,' he says. 'Like, 6.30 it was The Simpsons on Channel 10 and then Neighbours. That's why I want to work more and more in Australia because you just inherently feel the connection to Australian stories, and because there's so much familiarity in these stories.
'There was a joy coming up in England, but actually, I genuinely wouldn't change that. The fact that I could go and watch Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in the West End on a Wednesday night, that kind of thing you only get in London. But I certainly missed how quintessentially Australian a lot of Australian projects are.'
He made it his mission to seek out Australian projects that he could film between seasons of The Lord of the Rings, and it was while he was on holiday that The Survivors came knocking.
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'I was coming back to Melbourne with my wife and my then, maybe, eight-month-old baby,' he says. 'And I got this meeting for a character returning to his coastal hometown with his four-month-old and his wife. And I was like, 'Well, I can't not throw my hat in the ring for this. This is eerily similar.''
The baby thing, by the way, is why he is so at ease as a young dad in The Survivors. 'Yes,' he says, laughing. 'Lots of bouncing.'
Written and executive produced by Tony Ayres, The Survivors follows Kieran Elliot (Vickers), who returns with his partner and child to his small coastal Tasmanian hometown of Evelyn Bay, 15 years after two young men drowned, and a teenage girl disappeared on the same day.
Kieran's relationship with his parents – and the community – is still fractured, so when a woman's body washes up on the beach, old wounds reopen in a town that is not quite ready to forgive or forget.
'He's a man who has lived with, and is always living with, the grief of his past,' says Vickers of his character. 'He's been through a really traumatic event at a seminal moment of his life, and he has forever lived with the repercussions of it. Not run away from it, but tried to start afresh. And he is then thrust back into a lot of the trauma of his past, and has to deal with a lot of unresolved emotion and a lot of unresolved pain.'
For Ayres, a prolific film and TV writer, director and producer, with credits such as The Slap, Stateless and Nowhere Boys to his name, he knew Vickers had the role as soon as he walked into the audition.
'The director Cherie Nowlan and I were doing auditions in Melbourne, and as soon as Charlie walked into the room, we just looked at each other and we knew,' says Ayres. 'We both knew at exactly the same time.
'[The character] Kieran is not an alpha male. He's actually a good, decent person. And Charlie is such a good, decent human being – I mean, he's a wonderful actor as well – but there was something so essentially Charlie in Kieran and Kieran in Charlie, that it just became like, 'Oh, well, it's a no-brainer. Clearly this is the guy who was meant to play this role.' Charlie is a very fine, nuanced, detailed actor and he has genuine emotional range.'
Although Kieran sits at the centre of the story, Ayers was also drawn to the women in Harper's book.
'There's a monologue that Bronte's mother gives in the book, and it is so powerful and sensational and speaks to an anger that mothers feel at these unconscionable losses,' says Ayers. 'And it reminded me of Women of Troy, something at the scale of Greek tragedy.'
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Ayers was also mindful to not create another murder mystery where women are overwhelmingly both the victim and the source of entertainment.
'If you're going to do it, then you have to do it in a way which respects the woman who died,' he says. 'The last thing we wanted to do was make a piece that was about a dead woman as entertainment. Certainly, that wasn't Jane's intention in the book, and certainly that wasn't our intention in making the TV series.
'We wanted to be part of a bigger conversation, which I think we need to have as a society about gendered roles and the limitations and constrictions of what it might mean to be a man or a woman and how we might look at ways of broadening that so we don't push people to the most extreme and violent situations.'
What also makes The Survivors stand out is that while it features a well-known older cast – Robyn Malcolm, Damien Garvey, Catherine McClements, Martin Sacks and Don Hany – most of the younger cast are relatively unknown or, like Vickers, have worked overseas more than they have in Australia. Yerin Ha, for example, who plays Kieran's partner Mia, has been cast as one of the leads in the next season of Bridgerton, but her local work is limited.
'We had early 30s and late 50s as the two key demographics,' says Ayres. 'So when you're casting those demographics … the famous names that we have in Australia tend to be in their early 50s. And that's the most recognisable talent pool, and we don't have as many names who are younger at the moment.'
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Ayres thinks the reason many younger local actors are struggling to find recognition is the lack of feature films being made in Australia and then, conversely, the sheer amount of TV being made in general.
'The world that we live in is so noisy, there's so many shows,' says Ayres. 'It's harder for a show to break out. And unless a show breaks out, the actors don't become stars. Interestingly, I think we're seeing more stars coming from TV now – happily, Murray Bartlett came out of season one of The White Lotus – but there are relatively few breakout TV shows.'