Latest news with #CharlieVickers
Man of Many
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Man of Many
Charlie Vickers on ‘The Survivors', Building Character and Coming Home
By Dean Blake - News Published: 6 June 2025 |Last Updated: 4 June 2025 Share Copy Link Readtime: 10 min Every product is carefully selected by our editors and experts. If you buy from a link, we may earn a commission. Learn more. For more information on how we test products, click here. Charlie Vickers is on the rise. After an impressively devilish rendition of Middle-Earth's Sauron in Rings of Power, the Aussie actor is returning home to star in Netflix's The Survivors: an adaptation of Jane Harper's novel of the same name that focuses on the small, coastal town of Evelyn Bay and a series of deaths that echo through the years. In some ways, The Survivors was a particularly personal project for Vickers, who saw his own echoes in the show—a big-town man returning to his small-town roots—and who connected with the inherent Australianness of it all. Since studying acting at the College of Speech and Drama in London, Vickers has been largely living overseas, and the opportunity to return home, especially for a script he felt excited by, was too good to pass up. We caught up with Vickers ahead of The Survivors launch on Netflix on 6 June to talk though what drew him to the project, how he got started in acting, and what it was like coming back to Australia. Charlie Vickers in 'The Survivors' | Image: Netflix To start with, I wanted to get an idea of what it was about The Survivors that got you excited. What sold you on being a part of it? I love shows that adapt novels, really. The Survivors is a novel that I hadn't read, but I'd read a few other books by Jane Harper and this just sounded like a really fun adventure to be able to go on. So when I had the opportunity to potentially do it, I thought, 'It's in Tasmania, I grew up in Melbourne, but I'd somehow never been to Tasmania,' and being able to work with a whole bunch of new, amazing people and having Tony in charge of the whole project got me really excited. Also, just being able to be part of an Australian story. It's quintessentially Australian. I live in the UK now so I want to do as many Australian projects as possible, and this was such an enticing opportunity, really. The character of the town, although it's fictional, its kind of its own character in this story, and being able to film so much of it on location got me really excited. I also thought the story was interesting, and the way the script adapted the novel made me quite interested. It's quite cool seeing small-town Australia highlighted—I wanted to ask about that. Was that part of the charm for you? Is that something that reminds you of your childhood in Australia? In a way, it is . There are a huge amount of similarities between Tasmania and Victoria, and I grew up in a small coastal town exactly like . It's funny, the character of Kieran is still quite far away from who I am but he's also returning from a big city, in his case Sydney, to his childhood town, and there was a bit of familiarity there for me. I live overseas in a big city and often find myself coming back to my small, coastal town, and I think my son was about 6 months old when I was filming this, and he has a 4 month old, so there was a lot of 'world's colliding'. Having the opportunity to tell a story set in a coastal town, and you have all the dynamics . I was watching the show with my brother the other day, and he said 'god, some of these characters feel like they could be from our home town', it's crazy. Charlie Vickers in 'The Survivors' | Image: Netflix I wanted to get an idea of what you look for in a role? There's no shared characteristics of any roles , I often look for something that when I read it I get inspired, or I get excited by the idea of doing it. These roles can be completely different, but the thing they share is that I think I can bring something to the project: it has to ignite my imagination, reading it. Those kinds of jobs are few and far between, that make you excited, and this was one of those jobs. I've played quite a lot of villains in my career so far, but that's just coincidental and because of the material I've been given. How do you find your characters? When you're given a script or a treatment, how do you go about turning those words into action? For me, I try to keep it as simple as possible. I don't properly believe in the idea of 'character'. It's useful to use it in terms of referring to the character of Kieran, for example, but his 'character' is just the sum of a whole bunch of little moments. So I try not to look at things through a wide-angle lens, you know? And sometimes I watch the final product of things and find that 'oh wow, he's an entirely different person to how I had imagined him', because I tend to approach it from a moment to moment basis, and react to the circumstances he's in, and try to play to each moment truthfully, and then that paints a bigger picture of this character's life during the time period on screen. The only thing you have to be mindful of, I guess, is to think of the journey of the character throughout the show, but the specificity of each moment we see creates the 'character', I think. Charlie Vickers in 'The Survivors' | Image: Netflix Beyond being able to come back to Australia, what was the highlight of the filming process for The Survivors? There were so many. I loved being able to be in a really special place, Tasmania, that I'd never been to, with a whole bunch of amazing actors and creatives. To be able to work with these people made it an amazing experience: Actors that I've watched since I was a kid on screen. People like Damien or Robyn or Catherine and then there's this whole other amazing generation of actors like Yerin , Jess , Thom and George , and I think that's what I really love about projects. I've been really fortunate in my career in that you can just kind of go somewhere for six months and work on something and be fully immersed in the world of whatever you're doing, and then you get to move on and some of the relationships endure. That's the lasting memory of working in Tasmania : the combination of the location and the people. It was probably really good to have that filming location be somewhere you'd never been but also being very familiar in a way. Exactly, I don't know why I'd never been to Tasmania, but it really does feel different. There's an atmospheric quality to that place that is inherent, just when you're walking around. The energy there can be heavy, and I'm sure that's what Jane was trying to tap into when she wrote the novel. You mentioned earlier that you've enjoyed doing adaptations of novels, and you've done quite a few of them at this point: is there any book adaptations that you'd love to work on? I love Tim Winton's novels, and I read The Shepherds Hut recently, and also The Riders, and Eyrie, which is about a retired climate worker that lives in Freemantle, and I just think his stories are so evocatively written and I'd love to be a part of an adaptation of one of those novels on screen. I think they're pretty rarely adapted, though, and the adaptation process to take a novel to screen is often a really complex one. Those novels, when I read them, I really connected to a few of the characters and thought it'd be really cool to be a part of. I love imagining the world, that's part of the amazing thing about reading books. Charlie Vickers in 'The Survivors' | Image: Netflix You've worked in a few genres so far – is there anything you'd want to do that you haven't been given the chance to yet? It's quite a boring answer, but I'm lucky that I've been given the chance to work on bigger productions and smaller productions and things that are in pretty wildly contrasting genres that I don't really have that itch to do anything in particular. I just kind of want to work on stories that are exciting, the genre could be anything, really. If it's something that creatively inspires me, I'd be keen to do it, but there's no particular world I want to jump into anymore: which is nice, it's a nice place to be. How did you get started in acting? I did a lot of plays at school. I remember being in year 12, and I was playing Richard the 3rd in our school production of it, and it was the same year it was being done by the Melbourne Theatre Company, and Ewen Leslie was playing Richard the 3rd, and I remember going to see it and just thinking 'wow, that's so much better than what I'm doing', and thinking 'I'd love to be able to do that one day'. I remember that moment of 'wouldn't it be cool to be an actor', but then I never found it to be an accessible path. I think I was afraid. I knew you could go and audition for drama school, it just didn't seem to be a thing that was in my world, it didn't feel possible to me: getting in to a drama school and then going on to be an actor, so I didn't do it for a few years after school finished. In those intervening years I was studying a music/business degree, and while I loved uni and being around my mates and that whole period of my life, but I was really just treading water. I had no idea what I was doing, and throughout Uni I was doing amateur theatre productions. Melbourne Uni has this amazing theatre called the Union Theatre, so I did a lot of work there. Eventually, I drummed up the courage to do it, and that changed my life. I thought, maybe I should just have a go at trying for a drama school because I really didn't know what I was doing. The school I went to, the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, they come and do audition weekends in Sydney, and I decided I was going to go to it. I flew up and didn't tell anyone because I was afraid of telling people I auditioned and I didn't get in, so I did the audition over a weekend and then found out six weeks later that I'd got in, and then had to decide whether I wanted to uproot my life or did I want to wait until the end of the year and maybe try some of the Australian schools. But when you get into a drama school, it's so unlikely in the first place that I just thought I have to take this opportunity – it might not happen again. So yeah, I moved to London, and that was really the moment the direction of my life changed. The Survivors launches exclusively on Netflix on 6 June.
Sydney Morning Herald
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
How a Lord of the Rings star ended up stranded in Tasmania
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.' Loading 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. Loading '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.' Loading 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.' Loading 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.'
The Age
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
How a Lord of the Rings star ended up stranded in Tasmania
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.' Loading 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. Loading '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.' Loading 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.' Loading 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.'
Daily Record
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Netflix's 'thrilling' new murder mystery should be your next binge-watch
Netflix is set to release this thrilling new murder mystery on June 6 and it's a must-see If you're on the hunt for a new murder mystery to dive into, Netflix's upcoming limited series The Survivors should be at the top of your list. Based on the best selling novel of the same name by Jane Harper, this thrilling whodunnit features suspense, emotional depth and haunting secrets that refuse to stay buried. The series is set in the moody seaside town of Evelyn Bay, according to Netflix The Survivors explores: "what happens to families and friends when they're forced to reckon with the kind of traumatic events that have a way of floating up to the surface again and again." The show will be available to stream on Netflix, from June 6 - make sure to add it to your watch list and turn notifications on. The six episode series follows Kieran Elliott (Charlie Vickers) and Mia Chang (Yerin Ha), a young couple who return to the fictional town where they grew up, 15 years after a devastating tragedy. Kieran is haunted by the events of his past, with the drowning of two friends and the mysterious disappearance of a young girl always in the back of his head. Now, back in Evelyn Bay and reuniting with his own family, Kieran finds that the ghosts of the past aren't finished with him yet. The synopsis reads: "When the body of a young woman is found on the beach, the town is once again rocked by tragedy and the investigation of her death threatens to reveal long-held secrets, the truth about the missing girl, and a killer among them." The cast features a compelling mix of new talent and established actors. Charlie Vickers, known for his role in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, portrays a haunted and complexed Kieran. While Yerin Ha, who's about to take a leading role in Bridgerton, plays Kieran's wife Mia. They are joined by Robyn Malcom (Heartbreak High) who plays Verity Elliott, Damien Garvey (The Artful Dodger) as Brain Elliot, Thom Green (Ladies in Black) will play Sean Gilroy and George Mason (Black Snow) will portray Ash Carter. Showrunner Tony Ayres, known for his work on Clickbait and Nowhere Boys, described the show as "a family melodrama disguised as a murder mystery" in an interview with Tudum. He continued: "Because the things that are really at its heart are things like a son wanting his mother's love and the mother who just cannot afford to give it because her whole world might fall apart." Speaking about the show and its themes, Tony says: "I often describe the show as a Trojan horse. It's a family melodrama disguised as a murder mystery. Because the things that are really at its heart are things like a son wanting his mother's love and the mother who just cannot afford to give it because her whole world might fall apart."
Boston Globe
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
This week's TV: Owen Wilson in ‘Stick,' George Clooney's Broadway show, and Cynthia Erivo hosts the Tony Awards
What else clicks this week? 1. ' The Survivors ,' Friday on Netflix: The insatiable appetite for crime thrillers has washed this Australian thriller to our shores. It's set in coastal Evelyn Bay, where the aftermath of a storm 15 years prior haunts those that remain. Survivors' guilt weighs heavily on Kieran (Charlie Vickers) and Mia (Yerin Ha) in the six-episode miniseries. Three died in the tragedy: Two men drowned, and the body of a young girl was found and assumed to have been a storm victim as well. But what if she didn't die from catastrophic weather? Now, when the police discover a murdered young woman, present fear and past trauma merge, uncovering long-buried secrets that may reveal the killer's identity and tear apart the close-knit community. Advertisement 2. ' The Belmont Stakes ,' Saturday on Fox Sports: The Saratoga Racecourse in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., will host the 157th running of the Belmont Stakes, the third jewel in horse racing's triple crown. 2025 Kentucky Derby winner Sovereignty is competing for the $2million purse with the Preakness Stakes winner (and Derby runner-up) Journalism. Advertisement 3. ' Good Night, and Good Luck ,' Saturday at 7 p.m. on CNN: The cable news network livestreams 4. ' 78th Annual Tony Awards ,' Sunday on CBS at 8 p.m. and streaming on Paramount+: Tony Award winner Cynthia Erivo makes for a 'Wicked' host for the Thelma Adams is a cultural critic and the author of the best-selling historical novel ' ,' about Josephine Marcus, the Jewish wife of Wyatt Earp.
