Bloom season 2: Bryan Brown admits a second instalment could’ve ‘easily blown’ the magic

When your first season was award-winning and an audience favourite, going back for another round is a risky endeavour.

It’s the last day on set of Stan original series Bloom season two and everyone is in a good mood.

There will be a seafood buffet for lunch (special treat) and the costume department is selling off pieces for $5 each. Some of those items are never-before-worn shoes (pretty good value) while others are vintage bits bought from Vinnies for $4 (less good value), the tags still attached.

There are shouts of goodbyes as cast and crew wrap up, a sense of accomplishment and wistfulness swirling through the cool air of the old railyards where the production is shooting in Melbourne that day.

“It’s exciting, but it’s a bit sad,” actor Phoebe Tonkin tells news.com.au. “It’s a very strange thing to be with a group of people for however many hours a day and then have to say goodbye at the end. It’s like saying goodbye to family.”

Maybe that sounds trite, but there is an atmosphere of camaraderie on movie and TV sets, when a bunch of people are thrown together for these intense short bursts of time.

Season two of Bloom is streaming now on Stan

Leading man and Australian acting legend Bryan Brown concurs that saying goodbye can be hard, but he’s been doing this for forty years and knows the drill all too well.

“I’m always surprised when you get to the end of things,” he says. “You say goodbye and it was lovely meeting them, but I’m always glad to finish. As an actor, I’m always glad when I’m out of work.”

Glad to be out of work? That’s quite a statement from someone in a profession as fickle and unstable as acting (and made weeks before the coronavirus pandemic effectively shut down the arts and entertainment industries).

But it’s not just that when you’re someone of Brown’s calibre you can be more certain of your next gig, it’s that Brown doesn’t like to be “owned” by the man.

“I started as an actuarial student in an insurance company,” he explains. “And going to work every day, and being owned by someone all day was not my idea of how I wanted to live my life.

“So as an actor, someone gets to own me for six, eight or 10 weeks and then they don’t anymore. I can do what I like.”

Brown rarely plays the same role twice in his long and varied career, but he obviously enjoyed himself enough – and didn’t feel “owned” enough – that he came back for a second act on Bloom.

“Nothing’s over until it’s over,” he says. “But you also knew that it had to be different – it had to be the same show but you’ve got to step up, you’ve got to give the audience something new.

“You can either do that and it’s really good for the audience, or you can just blow it. You can easily blow it.

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Bryan Brown admits the pressure was on for round two

“I really liked Big Little Lies’ first season and I started to watch the second season and they were struggling to try and make it as good as the first. It’s fine but it’s nowhere near as good as the first.”

That’s the challenge for Bloom, a TV production that had all the markings of a one-and-done miniseries, including its prestigious cast which also included Jacki Weaver.

Set in a regional Australian town, the first season started after the community suffered a devastating flood which killed a handful of its citizens. In the spots they died, a mysterious berry started to bloom – anyone who ate it grew youthful again.

The discovery led to some of the town’s older residents to re-embrace their vigour and vitality – but with consequences. Living in the past and feeling compelled give your regrets a do-over don’t tend to work out well.

By the final moments of the episodes released in late 2018, there are resolutions. The stories and character arcs are tied up – but there’s a tease, just a small one, of a possible continuation.

It’s in that tiny promise of another bloom site that the show picks up now.

“You don’t want a repeat, you can’t repeat,” Brown says, adamantly. “So it was different – new characters, and they have a different need for this miracle than the earlier ones did.

“Now (the secret of the life-force giving berries) is out and other people are going ‘hey, that could be good to control’. So the tempo has stepped up in the second series.”

One of these new characters is a woman named Anne, played by Jacqueline McKenzie.

“I was really glad that Jac McKenzie was coming on,” Brown says. “I’ve worked with Jac twice before and I think she’s always incredibly good. And the character that she’s plating in this is a real driver of the story.”

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Jacqueline McKenzie is one of the new cast members in season two

The character of Anne is a high-achieving businesswoman who runs a pharmaceutical company, but she has a very personal reason for going after the magic plant – her own illness, the cure for which she hopes is in the genome of those glistening golden berries.

McKenzie had watched the first series and knew she wanted in on a possible second.

“I chased this down, strangled them and beat them up until they gave it to me,” she says with a wry smile. “It nearly didn’t happen. I loved the first season and I rang my agent and asked if they were doing a second one and he said ‘no, they haven’t announced it yet, see how it goes’.

“A couple of months later, I rang again, and it still hadn’t been announced. And then the Logies happened and Bryan announced it on stage.”

When I tell McKenzie that a few weeks prior to the Logies, Brown had offhandedly told me that they were prepping for a second season of Bloom, while we were on set for another TV show, she exclaims, “I should’ve asked Bryan! I was working with him on Palm Beach at the time too!”

She shakes her head, and then adds, “Even after they announced it, I didn’t know if there was a role for me. They hadn’t even written it. But I kept ringing and eventually, my schedule filled up and it was going to clash with filming on this.”

McKenzie went off to shoot a horror film, Malignant, with James Wan, which was due to be released in August this year but has now been delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic shutting cinemas all over the world.

“But then they changed the schedule in America and it opened up a little bit, the week that clashed with this one.”

McKenzie credits Wan and the producers on Malignant – “they were so kind” – for giving her the flexibility to do both jobs.

Given she was such a huge fan of the first season, does not being able to experience the second instalment as a viewer first give her pause?

“I hadn’t thought about that, but you’re right, now I’m disappointed! You know what, that’s so true, damn it.”

Phoebe Tonkin says she’s a ‘slouchy’ 30-year-old

For all of Bloom’s focus on the possibilities of the magical berry, the strength of the first season is the relationship between the two lead characters, Ray and Gwen, played in their older guises by Brown and Weaver while Tonkin portrays the younger Gwen.

What the ending of the first season really brought home is that Bloom is, above all, a love story.

“This season, Gwen’s main focus is more on her husband and the longevity of her relationship with her husband, as opposed to the first season where was very driven by the idea of being given a second chance to have a child,” Tonkin says.

“The big theme for this season for Gwen is the meaning of true, everlasting love and the things that you would do for that type of love. That’s really beautiful and it’s what grounds a show like this, which can be quite heightened and surreal.”

Tonkin plays a character that is mentally 70-something though physically a 30-year-old, and admits she has to remember to not be “too slouchy” because Gwen grew up at an earlier time.

“I am a particularly tomboyish, slouchy 30-year-old. I don’t think Jacki Weaver was at that age, I think she was probably more poised and proper than I am!”

Tonkin is based in New York, though she was heading to Los Angeles for several weeks the day after Bloom wrapped. She relocated to the US early in her career and booked regular gigs on American TV shows including The Vampire Diaries and its spin-off The Originals.

But she loves working at home, having also recently made SBS series Safe Harbour with McKenzie.

“I really love working here because you get great opportunities. I think the calibre of writing and directing in film and TV in Australia is just so amazing.”

She doesn’t regret movie to the US though. “I think a lot of the opportunities I’ve had here have been because of work I’ve done in the states. You have to go there and come back, but I hope to just keep working between the two countries.”

Bloom season two is streaming now on Stan

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The writer travelled to Melbourne as a guest of Stan