‘I was in tears’: The show that brought Brendan Cowell and Asher Keddie back together

It’s a drizzly February morning in Cronulla and Brendan Cowell is standing knee-deep in water. He’s been there for hours, surrounded by a film crew, as they shoot a scene for Cowell’s TV series Plum.

Later, a man will kayak past and shout, “Oi, Plum, ya f---wit!” He’s Ben Coady, an old schoolfriend of Cowell’s who has been given a cameo in the show, and his mum Carol is sitting with me under a cabana on the sand watching filming. Cowell had invited her down for a stickybeak.

After a few more takes, where Cowell has to dive into the water, he walks up the beach, wrapped in a towel, shivering with puckered fingers and the look of someone who has been in the water too long.

“This is an incredibly emotional, personal piece,” he says. “As I said on the first day of principal photography, I said to the crew, I put my hand up to be in the drama class when I was 16 in Cronulla, in a town that was pretty brave to say you wanted to do drama and to get up at assembly and do a show.

Brendan Cowell as former Cronulla Sharks great Peter “the Plum” Lum and Vincent Miller who plays his son Gavin Plum.

“And, you know, I got bullied. And now I’m bringing the story back to my home town and I’m really proud of that because this town gave me a lot and there’s a lot of love and a lot of family here.”

Plum tells the story of former Cronulla Sharks rugby league star Peter “the Plum” Lum, who is grappling with the old habits of the past – drinking, gambling, drugs – and the effects these are having on his future. Peter is also struggling with blurred vision and memory loss, symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy – otherwise known as CTE, a disorder linked to repeated trauma to the head. It has been diagnosed in former footy players, such as rugby league Immortal Wally Lewis, AFL player Shane Tuck and AFLW player Heather Anderson.

In denial about what is happening to him, Peter starts to have visions of literary greats Charles Bukowski and Sylvia Plath, who help him face his problems through poetry. It is, as producer John Edwards calls it, “a wacky one, but Brendan has a great way with words”.

“Primarily, he’s a good bloke,” says Cowell about Peter. “And drama is good people being f---ed over by fate, you know? And that’s what’s happening to him. He’s a good guy, but the past is coming to get him. And the past is the way he behaved on the field – he went so hard – and he went so hard off the field.

Brendan Cowell with Asher Keddie in the ABC series Plum. It’s the first time they have worked together since Love My Way.

“He’s got a 16-year-old son who’s about to shine in the same light and he’s always been able to solve things by just keeping on going, never taking a backward step and, suddenly, he’s been stopped in his tracks by something that’s bigger than him, and he’s scared shitless.”

Surrounded by friends and filming where he grew up in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, Plum isn’t just another job for Cowell, it’s incredibly personal. It’s adapted from the 2021 book of the same name that he wrote in London during lockdown. Filming had stalled on the Avatar sequels he was working on, and he was unable to fly back to Australia.

Plum (Brendan Cowell) and Renee (Asher Keddie) at Leichhardt Oval in a scene from Plum.

“I thought, God, I’m going to be in this – I’d had a break-up – I thought I’m going to be in this flat on my own for five, six months,” he says. “And I’d stopped drinking, so I didn’t have that to lean on and it was just very emotional, very confronting, very lonely.

“That’s when I thought I’ve got to do something, or I’m going to go downhill. And I was trying to, I guess, do something else with my life. I was trying to change a bit and change a few patterns and this story had been lingering about a footy player that got into poetry.

“And I was talking about it to [screenwriter] Fiona Seres and I told her I was thinking about writing a TV show about it, and she goes, ‘What if you write a book? You can maybe go a bit deeper, and maybe one day it will be a TV show.’”

So Cowell wrote every day, from 8am to 6pm (after a morning online boxing class), and found his way back to Cronulla.

Asher Keddie as Renee and Brendan Cowell as Peter Lum in Plum. Credit: ABC

“It’s a cliche but as Peter Lum was trying to change, so was I,” he says. “And it was like we had each other’s back. And that’s why the experience of reading the book is so emotional and the show, hopefully, will be the same. It’s because I lived what he lived, in my own way.

“We were brothers, you know. And I was like, ‘Come on, Pete, you can bloody do this, son.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know either but, come on, if you do, I will.’ And that was the journey. It was incredible.”

Plum also brought Cowell home in another way – reuniting him with his Love My Way co-star Asher Keddie for the first time in more than 20 years, as well as producer John Edwards and Fiona Seres, who ended up co-writing the TV series with Cowell.

“It’s joyous, it’s a treat,” says Keddie. “To be working together, we’ve been excited about it, but the joy of coming back into each other’s space as actors, as grown-ups – because, I promise you, we weren’t grown up when we were shooting Love My Way, we were kids – that’s the lovely part.”

The cast of Love My Way (from left): Brendan Cowell, Ben Mendelsohn, Claudia Karvan, Asher Keddie and Dan Wyllie.

Keddie stars as Plum’s former wife Renee. She is still invested in his life, whether he likes it or not, and doesn’t want their talented league-playing son Gavin to “end up like one of those meatheads at 34, fat and bloated”.

“She does care,” says Keddie. “They call her a ball-breaker and she is, in some ways. Even though she can be very hard-lined, I’m liking finding the heart and the moments of softness in her as a mum and a partner, and as a friend of someone – she’s known Plum for 25 years.”

Keddie is having a late lunch after filming a scene in Brick’s Gym – to watch her nail take after take is something else, and makes me realise how much we’ve taken her for granted on screen over the years – and remembering how she cried when she first read Plum.

All grown up - Asher Keddie and Brendan Cowell.

“I just could not put it down,” she says. “I literally drowned him in praise on the phone when he was walking around Centennial Park one day two years ago. I was in tears. He was in tears because of my reaction.”

The pair were in their 20s when they worked on Love My Way, the groundbreaking Foxtel drama, and Keddie pauses when I ask her how she sees Cowell now compared to who he was 20-plus years ago.

“The boy that I knew in the early 2000s was full of heart and passion and drive and all the things that he still has but in a different way, in a very messy way,” says Keddie. “Same with me but that’s how we knew each other like that, just because we were kids in our 20s.

Charles Bukowski (Matthew Sunderland), Slyvia Plath (Charlotte Friels) and Plum (Brendan Cowell) in Plum.

“And certainly, when I look at Brendo, I think, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so proud of him.’ His growth as a person is remarkable, actually. And I’ve seen him work really hard to grow and to achieve what he knows he can but also acknowledge that he’s really good at what he does. He’s a really, really fine writer, and he has an amazing imagination, so it’s really joyful to watch him focusing it, and sitting inside himself really comfortably now.”

Growing up in Cronulla, Cowell was an avid rugby league fan (it’s hard to avoid). And the opening of Plum plays like a boy’s own fantasy reel – there’s Cowell in the Cronulla jersey on the cover of a rugby league magazine, there he is with tape around his head, (fake) blood streaming from a cut. Later, he’s in the green and gold Kangaroos jacket, while rugby league greats Andrew Johns, Mark “Spudd” Carroll and Paul Gallen all make appearances.

“Merrick Watts was in the other day,” says Cowell. “He’s a good mate and he read two drafts of the book, and he said, ‘You’ve just written your own bloody personal fantasy mate, haven’t you? You’ve just basically written what you could never do because you weren’t good enough.’ I’m like, ‘Exactly. Now I’m the greatest football player the Sharks have ever seen, that’s me.’

“And about a month before the shoot, I actually said to my therapist, ‘I’m not a footy player. I was in the Bs. I was the drama kid, you know, but I got these muscles now, and how do I get into that [football player mindset]?’

“And I worked with someone to go, ‘Well, you know, this is what actors do.’ And I’ve hung out with footy players – Andrew Johns is one of my good mates – and I talked to footy players. And I thought, ‘Just believe it.’ You know, write what you know, or write what you wish you knew!”

Brendan Cowell hopes by including CTE in the plot of Plum that it will raise awareness of the neurodegenerative brain disease.

Including CTE in Plum’s story wasn’t initially part of Cowell’s plan, he just wanted to write about how poetry “took me from a dark place to a beautiful place” when he was a teenager. But, “Brendan Cowell writing a poem wasn’t a book,” so he started to think of who the least likely person to write a poem would be.

“A brute, a guy that can’t communicate,” he says. “Then I thought, well, why? How? Then I thought, ‘What if something happened to his brain and it being blasted apart and all the corridors were open?’ and that’s when the ghosts come in, and that’s when poetry came in.

“And I thought, well, what about concussion? What about a concussed boxer? What about a concussed rugby league player? And then suddenly I thought of plum the fruit, like the beautiful flesh and the hard stone is like the brain. And I thought, plum, Peter Lum, and then I went, ‘Oh my God,’ and then it wrote itself. ”

Cowell says many on the crew related their family’s experiences of CTE to him – dads and grandfathers who had been footballers, boxers or policemen – who had all dealt with the moods, insomnia and memory loss.

“There isn’t enough attention being put on it. The [Australian Sports] Brain Bank needs more of the codes to get involved and turn up at the events and go, ‘Come on, [CTE] is going to be a part of sport, so let’s put it in sport.’ The same with alcohol and drugs and therapy, all this stuff should be just as normal as going to the gym in sport.

“Let’s put these things in their lives, in the culture, so that brains are being bloody looked after, so maybe the game can go on forever, but in a protected way, if possible. I’m always about information, awareness and conversation. I don’t have a result but I think that’s what art is. You know, stir the pot, create discussion and then let’s go somewhere positive with it.”

Plum premieres at 8.30pm on Sunday, October 20, on the ABC.

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