The Twelve’s multicultural cast step forward but Logie winner says still long way to go

Logie winner says the multicultural cast of the legal drama The Twelve is a true representation of what Australia looks like.

While Palestinian-Australian actor Hazem Shammas was filming the New Australian legal drama The Twelve in Sydney, his son was born at the hospital right next door.

Conveniently, the baby was born on one of the Logie-winning actor’s days off on the hectic shoot, but when Shammas visited the hospital, he was stuck by what a microcosm of multicultural Australia it was.

“Every professional working in the hospital was either Asian of some descent, Indian, South Asian, Arab, mostly people that look like me,” he says during a break in filming on the set in the former ABC studios in Artarmon, in Sydney’s north. “That’s from the specialist obstetrician right down to the person bringing the food in. So, if you did a hospital drama tomorrow, I’m hoping that’s what the cast would look like. That would be great.”

Shammas, who won the 2018 Most Outstanding Supporting Actor for his role as an asylum-seeker in the SBS drama Safe Harbour, says he got a similar feeling on The Twelve, which examines a complex and ambiguous murder case through the eyes of the jury.

The cast of the Foxtel legal drama The Twelve.

The cast is led by Sam Neill as lead defence lawyer, Marta Dusseldorp, the prosecution lawyer, and Kate Mulvany as the artist accused of killing her niece, and the multicultural actors playing the members of the public chosen to decide her fate include Pallavi Sharda, Nicolas Kassim, Brooke Satchwell, Ngali Shaw and Catherine Van Davies.

After years of rarely seeing anything other than white faces on Australian TV, Hammas says that strides towards more casting diversity and representation have been made in recent years – but the road is still long.

“We’re getting there,” he says. “Every job and every year it seems like things are getting a little bit better. But there’s still a long way to go. I feel like the jury has been cast beautifully in this and, as an industry, we can maybe take this as a little example and keep working at a true representation of what Australia looks like.”

But diversity aside, Shammas says he was initially daunted by the “freaking talent” of the powerhouse cast, who formed a tight-knight bond during the sometimes-tricky shoot disrupted by both Covid protocols and unseasonably bad weather in Sydney.

“I said at the start, ‘Haz, there’s big guns playing here, just don’t f--- it up’,” he says with a laugh. “Not only such amazing, beautiful human beings, and wonderful friends – some are new friends and some I had worked with in the past – but very talented. It’s been an amazing quality of work and it’s been a pleasure.”

Actor Hazem Shammas in a scene from the Foxtel legal drama The Twelve.

Shammas describes The Twelve as “an exploration of the justice system, in the hands of the wonderfully flawed and colourful and contradictory and complex people that we are”.

He plays Farrad, an Iraqi asylum-seeker, who was a lawyer in his own country, where his wife and daughter still live, but lacks the qualifications and means to practise law in Australia and, instead, is working as a ride share driver to make ends meet. Shammas says he was attracted to Farrad’s quiet confidence and dignity, and a sense of justice that stems from fairness, equality and human rights, shaped by his own experiences of fleeing his homeland and trying to fit in somewhere new. Although he’s “not necessarily the loudest voice in the room”, he may well be wisest, and takes his duties as a juror seriously at a time when some of his fellow jurors are doing their best to worm out of them.

“He gains confidence as the series goes, so you don’t really get that from the start,” he says of the 10-part drama that premieres next week. “When he’s not driving rideshare, which is his outside life now, finds himself on a jury in a court in familiar surroundings, in a system that he has given his life to, so he’s probably the most positive on the outset. Like, ‘hey, I’m on the jury, I love this, this is great’.”

Likewise, Shammas took his researching duties seriously – reading up on juror obligations (coincidentally, with four weeks of shooting left, he was called up to jury duty at Parramatta Court, where The Twelve is set), digging into the maze of immigration laws in the country that might or might now allow Farrad to be reunited with his family, and downloading a rideshare app to figure out what makes Uber drivers tick.

While he didn’t always like what he discovered, particularly in researching the mess of Iraq that led to the flood of asylum seekers from that country, and the complex process by which its citizens attempt to come to Australia, he came away with a grudging respect for the legal profession and its many shades of grey that have to be negotiated.

“I can get a sense of how actually difficult it is,” he says. “The narratives that win, or the narratives that convince us, a jury, aren’t necessarily born of truth and fact, so there’s that kind of ambiguity. I speak ignorantly, really, because I’m not going to pretend to be a criminal justice expert but I kind of appreciate the professionals in that field and the weight of the task that they have.”

The Twelve, Tuesday, 8.30pm, Fox Showcase and On Demand

Originally published as The Twelve’s multicultural cast step forward but Logie winner says still long way to go