It is not an easy topic to talk about: Sarah Snook’s Secret River journey
AUSSIE Sarah Snook stars alongside Oliver Jackson-Cohen in new miniseries The Secret River which gave her a brutal history lesson in racial conflict filming.
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LIKE his convict character in The Secret River, British actor Oliver Jackson-Cohen’s first encounter with a spear-wielding Aboriginal man was in thick scrub in the dead of night.
For Jackson-Cohen it was a night shoot in the You Yangs last year and the Aboriginal actor’s name was Billy Black, from Ramingining in Arnhem Land.
For his character, Will Thornhill, it was his first night in the bush near Sydney Cove more than two centuries earlier.
But the experience of first contact gave the 28-year-old actor (Mr Selfridge) a graphic insight into how the settlers’ mortal fear of the “other” contributed to tragedy.
“It was terrifying (for them) because it was so alien and I remember in that moment going: I kind of understand how you would just push away, you would just go: ‘I don’t want anything to do with that, that is too scary.’ And the consequences are that people react in terrible ways,” he says.
Jackson-Cohen stars alongside Aussie Sarah Snook (Predestination) in new ABC miniseries The Secret River, based on Kate Grenville’s acclaimed novel.
It tells the story of Thornhill who loses everything in England and is sentenced to life in New South Wales.
Thanks to his tenacious wife Sal (Snook) who helps secure a pardon, Thornhill is able to start rebuilding his wealth as a free settler along the Hawkesbury River.
But there the settlers come into conflict with the original owners, the Darug people.
Snook is currently one of Australia’s most sought after actors, with upcoming roles in Hollywood biopic Steve Jobs, Kate Winslet’s Aussie film The Dressmaker and comedy Oddball with Shane Jacobson.
But she made time for The Secret River because it’s such an important story that needs to be told.
For Snook, the aspect that stood out was how the race issue is framed around two families, the Thornhills and their “mirror image”: elder Grey Beard (Trevor Jamieson) and his tribe.
“It’s bringing it back down to a human level where it is about people who happen to be of a different colour and race trying to make their families and loved ones survive in conflict and hardship,” she says.
While some of Snook’s friends criticised the novel as ‘too sentimental’ for focusing on Will and Sal’s love story, she says: “You need that accessibility and that love story to find your way into the subject of race relations in Australia. It is not an easy topic to talk about.”
The story plays out like a Shakespearean tragedy, where a noble but flawed character comes under intense pressure that inexorably leads to a fatal conclusion. Greed plays a part too, of course.
“I think Will definitely gets put into the position where he ends up being forced into a corner in which, to get what he wants for his life, he has to make bad decisions that affect other people’s lives,” Snook says. “The guilt of that follows him for the rest of his life.”
Originally planned as a feature film with Fred Schepisi, The Secret River ended up as a miniseries, shot mid last year.
The pristine and remote Lake Tyers in far-east Gippsland stands in for Hawkesbury River of the time.
One major acting challenge: pretending it’s summer in freezing conditions. “Every time (you say) a line about ‘the bleedin’ heat’ there’s fog coming out of your mouth because its freezing cold with no sun,” Snook laughs.
They’re filming some pretty intense scenes when TV Guide visits, with violent racist Smasher (comedian Tim Minchin) completely nude at one point; later he shoots at a defenceless Aboriginal man stating: “It’s no different to shooting a dog”.
In the afternoon there’s a closed set to film a scene where Thornhill discovers Smasher has an Aboriginal sex slave, who he keeps chained up and beats.
“Reading the script, usually as an actor you can find the humanity in any kind of evil person, but I could not in Smasher,” Snook says.
“He’s just a repulsive, repulsive character. I didn’t like him and I never will.
But Tim managed to find a humanity in him and a reason for doing what he does, which is not justifiable in a social context, but in his (character’s) head it could be. I think he’s done a really cool job with a difficult character.”
Minchin, in his first major dramatic role, says there was no point playing the brutalised Smasher as just pure evil. “The audience will be horrified by him however you play it,” he says.
“But my job is to (get into his headspace). The more you make him human up until the point where he does those things, the stronger the story is.”
THE SECRET RIVER
SUNDAY, 8.30PM, ABC
Originally published as It is not an easy topic to talk about: Sarah Snook’s Secret River journey