Rebecca Gibney shares silver lining to COVID as she returns to small screen in Halifax: Retribution
As New Zealand-based star Rebecca Gibney goes back into lockdown, her TV reboot of Halifax FP is coming to our screens with a few new twists that will put it on the world stage.
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It’s been 20 years since she last donned them, but Rebecca Gibney confesses it was so lovely to slip back into Jane Halifax’s shoes – especially because they are usually a nice pair of Italian leather heels.
Much nicer than the hiking boots, jeans and singlets of perpetually-on-the-run Lola Buckley in
her last TV drama, Wanted.
“I’ve been playing Lola for the last couple of years so to actually be able to put on a Hugo Boss coat and really nice shoes was like ‘Oh this is nice, I forgot about this,’” Gibney tells The BINGE Guide with her infectious laugh.
But much more than just the costuming, Gibney says it was a joy to reunite with the show’s original creator Roger Simpson who developed the forensic psychologist character specifically for Gibney.
The last time she played Jane, she was a consultant with a say over the script.
This time she was even more hands on as an executive producer – involved in the casting, music choice and giving input on all the episodes.
“I’ve loved it – I mean I’m totally exhausted again, but I’ve really, really loved it. When we first talked about bringing her back I went and watched some of the old ones and I was like ‘Oh my God’. I mean they were great but I was only about 30 when I started playing a forensic psychologist. Really, I’ve probably only just qualified now at my age. Well, to be a
proper one. So to be given the opportunity to go back and revisit her as an older woman, and with a bit more experience under my belt, has been fantastic.”
It was a typically freezing winter’s day in Melbourne when we first visit the set of Halifax: Retribution.
We’re huddled together on a hotel rooftop in the centre of the CBD, fingers and everything crossed that it won’t pour with rain.
It’s fascinating watching Gibney at play – smiling or laughing with her castmates – Anthony LaPaglia and Rick Donald – between takes.
But once action is called, the transformation is instantaneous, as she adopts the harder, more serious face of Jane the investigator.
In this telemovie [to be followed by six more episodes], Gibney’s alter ego Jane Halifax hasn’t worked in the frontline for years; bearing the psychological scars of her previous cases.
But when a sniper begins terrorising Melbourne and leaving no trace to their apparently random killings, the task force set to stop the murders turn to her in desperation.
Commander Tom Saracen (LaPaglia) comes calling at her new workplace, the University of Melbourne, where she is mentoring a new class of forensic psychiatrists.
She baulks at the offer, content with her celebrated academic career and a long-term relationship with Ben Sailor (A Place To Call Home’s Craig Hall), and his daughter Zoe (Neighbours Mavournee Hazel).
It’s a stellar ensemble cast, with Gibney relishing the opportunity to reunite with ALP (as LaPaglia is affectionately known) – even if he wouldn’t join in with her singing and dancing antics on social media.
“He such a lovely man,” she says. “He’s got the biggest heart and he brings such a gravitas to
whatever he does. I’m very grateful he came to play again.”
There are plenty of well-known faces in Retribution including Claudia Karvan, Jacqueline McKenzie, and Michala Banas; but also a conscious decision to cast new talent including Ming-Zhu Hii, Mark Coles Smith, and Hannah Monson.
It was an intense shoot for Gibney, she explains.
“I had forgotten about revisiting what the actual drama itself was about and the fact that it is depressing and it’s a crime thriller and not very nice things happen to people.”
By comparison, “Wanted was an adventure thriller but it had that undertone of humour about
it. And we never took ourselves too seriously, so to go from that now to a very serious drama with very sad and dramatic things happening was quite exhausting from an emotional perspective. Coming home at the end of the day and having to shake it off, which I haven’t had to do for a while.”
Fortunately husband Richard Bell and son Zac were back and forth from their home base across the ditch in New Zealand.
“I’d come home to a home-cooked meal and they were very aware of my schedule and incredibly understanding,” Gibney says.
“They’d take one look at my face and my husband would hand me a glass of wine and say ‘sit on the couch, darling and here’s your dinner and why don’t you pop up to bed? You have to get up at 5am’. It was lovely – even if I only sat with them for half-an-hour – just to
have them there.”
Until the last few years, the tight-knit trio was like the Travelling Wilburys, Gibney says – wherever she or Bell worked, Zac came too.
He started his life in Tasmania, before the family packed up and moved to Sydney and Brisbane, then Queenstown and Dunedin in NZ.
It was actually Zac who suggested he needed to stay put to concentrate on high school.
“I said to him ‘you realise I have to work?’ and he said ‘totally’,’ Gibney says. “He misses me when I’m gone though.”
For all her career glory, including winning four Logies, and the coveted Gold, none of that matters when she returns home to her 30-acre property on New Zealand’s South Island.
The first thing 16-year-old son Zac says is ‘can you make my bed?’
“It seems I’m the only one in the house that can make his bed the proper way – so it’s ‘can you make my bed?’ and ‘can you make me a ham and cheese toasted sandwich?’”
By the time she’s wrapped the three-month Halifax shoot and we speak again, the coronavirus has brought the family even closer together as NZ shut off from the rest of the world.
They already live a hermit-like existence when Gibney’s not working, but the country’s stringent COVID-19 restrictions back in March locked them down further.
“My family and I had about eight weeks at home together. I quite enjoyed it because I was forced to go back to basics. I started baking, we played board games and spent quality time together.”
Before the COVID-19 closures, the 55-year-old’s dance card was expected to be pretty full for the next 18 months.
There’s the Packed to the Rafters reboot – with Erik Thomson and Hugh Sheridan – which Gibney was in the throes of filming in Sydney earlier this year before the pandemic shut it down.
Meanwhile, her husband is developing a “creepy noir thriller’ in the vein of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks; and Gibney’s developing another series in Australia; hoping Halifax scores a second season too.
When we return to set, it’s a blustery, unseasonably hot October’s afternoon. It’s one of the final days of the production.
We’re at Docklands as filming of the thrilling climax is underway, and Gibney tells me the day before they had shut down a five-lane highway and had 16 stunt drivers.
“The good thing is now in Australia, we want to tell Australian stories internationally. We want to make it global, hence the budgets are increasing,” she says.
“I’m really hoping it’s a trend – the budget on Halifax was fantastic. It was like we were shooting a big movie. And the thing is we are capable. Our technicians are equal to the best in the world, and that’s why the Americans keep coming to Australia and New Zealand.
“I’m just hoping it will stop the steady stream (of actors) who keep heading back to America. I just want to go ‘Stop, stay. Let’s make it here. You don’t have to go there.’ Unfortunately they keep paying the big dollars. Maybe once we start making more of this international drama and recognising that it’s just as good as the Americans and the British, we can keep our actors here.”
* Halifax: Retribution, 8.45pm, Tuesday, August 25, on Nine