Don Hany returns to Australian television and Nine’s Bad Mothers
Learning how to work with animals and dealing with the mega egos of the US industry were lessons learned by Don Hany, who returns to our screens in the new Nine drama, Bad Mothers.
There can be a lot of lessons from failure but perhaps none more surprising as Don Hany’s now defunct stint on US medical drama, Heartbeat.
Going into the 2016 project, Hany was in hot demand after his sizzling appearance as Dr Chris Havel on Ten’s hospital rom-com, Offspring; following that breakthrough role with critical acclaim for Foxtel’s award-winning drama, Devil’s Playground, a moving role in Healing and the sinister ABC miniseries, Broken Shore — adding to a catalogue of credits that made him more than ready for a move to Hollywood.
While his first attempt — a lead role on military medical drama, Warriors — proved short-lived, Heartbeat looked like a recipe for success: a stellar cast, including fellow Aussie co-star Melissa George, and a story based on the real-life heroics of pioneering female cardiac surgeon, Kathy Magliato.
Hany recently relived some of those memories with George on the set of Nine’s new drama series, Bad Mothers — where they play husband and wife, Kyle and Charlotte Evan, whose marriage is all but dead.
“(Heartbeat) was really trying to pick up where a Grey’s (Anatomy) or E.R left off. There was buoyancy there but it was a little ill-conceived,” he explained.
“There were episodes on monkeys, then episodes on flashmobs and Melissa, I take my hat off to her every time I think about it, she was pregnant for half of it.”
The monkey episode boggled the brain, Hany said, recounting the storyline.
“This boy is dying and he’s got HIV. Now, you can take an infected HIV heart out of a person in a vegetative state and put it in a monkey to keep the monkey alive.”
With a wry smile breaking out across his tanned face, he said: “maybe where they went wrong was they were trying to keep the monkey alive and not a boy.”
How the trained chimpanzee was treated also shocked Hany.
“The way you get a monkey to perform, let’s say it’s not sportsmanlike. There was a lot of hitting and just feeding it Red Bull and Gatorade. You’re trying to get a two-year-old to do things, but a two-year-old with a libido of a 25-year-old man. He could smell things, you know,” Hany said, with a knowing nod, “and he couldn’t help himself. I literally spent days rehearsing with this monkey.”
The actors were under instruction about how to treat the prime-time primate — like Tom Cruise, there was to be strictly no eye contact.
“He was so affectionate and such a lovely guy and gravitated to anyone who gave him attention. But the wrangler was very, very specific … ‘don’t look at him, don’t look at him!”
Hany admits “we didn’t take it all that seriously and it really backfired when it came to shooting scenes, because he was all over Melissa.”
Animal antics aside, the moral of the story for him was this: “I guess I learned we do it better here. I prefer the ethic and the environment around making (TV) here.”
Filming Bad Mothers in his home city of Melbourne was a pleasure, setting up unit base in the beachside suburb of Brighton.
His character, Kyle, was born working class but finds himself into richer social circles because of his interest in and work on yachts.
“Then he falls in love with Melissa George’s character, they get married and have kids straight away and she is very much from an upper class background. That relationship never really satisfied her. She was quite promiscuous and he accepted that because he felt he owed her dad a favour for including him in their life. He’s a very quiet and reserved guy, who doesn’t feel like he fits into her circle and actually doesn’t have many friends. He just looks after his father-in-law who has just become quite ill.”
When tragedy strikes, Kyle forms a bond with Tess Haubrich’s character, Sarah Pooley, who discovers her husband Anton (Daniel McPherson) has been having an affair with her best friend (George).
Hany found it fascinating to examine how men like Kyle confront their emotions, or in his case, don’t and shut down.
“He’s been initiated into this harsh world where you’re dealt these cards and you just play them,” Hany said.
“Then the grief catches up with you in different ways … but the western approach, a very masculine approach is to toughen up. That’s what’s interesting with this character in that he does that so much that he loses his son.”
He explains: “there’s a moment where his son really comes off the rails. He cuts school and goes to the cemetery and gets drunk. The police find him and it’s bad. But instead of trying to take the opportunity to understand how his son is processing all of it, he’s hurt that his son doesn’t come to him. That’s because he’s learned from his father how to bottle things up and just continues on as if nothing has gone on.”
For Hany, whose father was born in Iraq and his mother in Hungary, he drew on Australian caucasian culture which he said often struggled to process loss and grief.
“We have been so fixated with a sense of progress and the way that manifests is making ourselves more and more comfortable with ourselves. But that fixation with progress means that a lot of natural cycles in life, because they don’t fit with that, we just ignore them. You just have to look at mental health and how we treat the elderly … we just try to pretend it’s not happening. We try to push it away, to the point where older people want to hide as well … want not to be the problem. There’s plenty of other cultures where you just wouldn’t do that.”
* Bad Mothers, 9pm, Monday February 18, Nine.
Originally published as Don Hany returns to Australian television and Nine’s Bad Mothers
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