‘I was so overwhelmed’: Why Trent Dalton couldn’t stay on set of Boy Swallows Universe

When Trent Dalton pulled up with his wife Fiona outside a small blue weatherboard house in Beenleigh, south of Brisbane, he wasn’t prepared for what was to come. Here they were, on the set of Boy Swallows Universe, the seven-part Netflix adaptation of his award-winning semi-autobiographical novel that took off like a rocket when it was released in 2018 and has barely slowed down since.

The house was a re-creation of his childhood home in Darra, a blue-collar suburb in Brisbane’s south-west. It’s where he grew up with his three brothers, his mum and drug-dealing stepdad, with visits from sometime babysitter Slim Halliday, a convicted murderer known as the “Houdini of Boggo Road Gaol”. It’s where he found a mysterious phone under the house and it’s where violence, trauma and great love happened daily. It was here his life changed for the worse. And it was here the book that changed Dalton’s life would begin.

Trent Dalton, centre, on the set of Boy Swallows Universe with Travis Fimmel, right.

But as Dalton walked through the door of that blue house, he stepped back into his 1980s childhood. There, on the coffee table, was an amber-coloured ashtray, along with several copies of Rugby League Week. On the kitchen bench stood a tin of Quik and a bottle of Tang. And there, in the room, was Eli Bell, played by young actor Felix Cameron.

“He was just a complete avatar for me in that story,” says Dalton over Zoom from his home in Brisbane. “And he’s dressed in the same Bracken Ridge State High sky-blue school shirt and grey shorts, same black shoes, the same size as me and just a bag of bones.

“And then, he’s sitting opposite this kid who looked exactly like my brother, being played by Lee Tiger Halley, and over there was Travis Fimmel, playing [Lyle], that guy that my brothers and I all loved when we’re kids. And there’s Phoebe Tonkin, playing my mum, essentially. And I walked up to Felix, who’s mid-scene, and I was so overwhelmed.

Tiger Lee Halley (left) as Gus Bell, Bryan Brown as Slim Halliday and Felix Cameron as Eli Bell in Boy Swallows Universe.

“And I started crying like a freak and I said: ‘Are you good? Like, are you? Are you good?’ And I don’t know why I said it in that way. But it sounded like I was almost talking to myself. And I felt like I was talking to myself. And he was just like, ‘Yeah, I’m good. I’m good. I’m just doing a scene.’

“And everyone was high-fiving me and stuff, and they’re all going, ‘this must be the most amazing moment of your life’. And it kinda was, but ultimately, it was very unsettling because the kid’s 12, and for the next 10 years for those boys, that’s when it all went south, that’s when all the bad shit actually started to happen.

Trent Dalton (right) on set in Beenleigh with Tiger Lee Halley (left) as Gus Bell, Felix Cameron as Eli Bell, and Travis Fimmel as Lyle Orlik in Boy Swallows Universe.

“So I turned to my wife and I said: ‘I’ve got to go.’ We only stayed there for about 40 minutes in the end. And driving back, I was really shaken and it was because I had genuinely stepped into my memory and it just felt like there’s shit I haven’t unpacked yet properly. And people say, ‘oh, it must be so cathartic to write a book like Boy Swallows Universe’, and it really is, it’s so amazing and healing in some ways, but you just never unpack those rocks.”

From the moment Boy Swallows Universe was published in mid-2018, it took on a life of its own. It became Australia’s fastest-selling debut novel and has since sold more than 850,000 copies worldwide. And while screen rights were talked about almost immediately, it ended up on stage first, at Queensland Theatre in 2021, with Netflix then announcing in 2022 that it had commissioned the series.

The result is a funny, shocking and heartbreaking ride through Dalton’s book. As mum Frankie, Tonkin shares a beautifully tight bond with the two young actors on screen, while Fimmel’s wild-eyed Lyle brings an unsettling comic relief. Much like the book, the series shows a darker side to sunny Brisbane and its outer suburbs.

Phoebe Tonkin as Frankie Bell, Gus and Eli’s mum, in Boy Swallows Universe.

“There’s scenes that really speak to mum’s 1990s, which were really way worse than anything I put in that book,” says Dalton, a journalist for The Weekend Australian Magazine. “It was a really full-on intense domestic abuse situation ... that stuff needs to be seen in all its power and terror. And we need to show Australia and the world, that’s how dark things can get in the suburbs. But also just how beautiful and how wondrous as well, if you hold on to all the beautiful things like love and hope and family.”

And that’s the rub. For all of its success, Boy Swallows Universe is Dalton’s deeply personal story that is now made all the more shocking on screen. It’s one thing to read about his mother’s withdrawal from heroin and another to watch Tonkin writhe around in a vomit-strewn room, while the two young boys listen through the door. It was a scene that concerned Dalton so much, he had his mum over to his house to watch it, so she would be prepared before seeing it at the show’s premiere in Brisbane.

Simon Baker as Robert Bell, Gus and Eli’s father, in Boy Swallows Universe.

“My mum always says: ‘Trent, what about my life makes you think I can’t take eight hours of television?’” he says. “And it’s true. My wife and I were watching that [episode] with my mum, just on the weekend, with my brother Ben and his wife. And we’re all just looking at mum as these horrendous scenes of violence were unfolding.

“And there’s a scene of her getting off the junk, which is really based in truth. And it was incredible to have mum there to pause it and then explain deeper things to us. It was actually a really amazing, profound thing for her to go: ‘OK, here’s why I was feeling this way. Here’s why this happened.’ Things that were just part of my very young memory, I was probably five or six, it became a very powerful thing. It’s so much more than just some sort of Netflix show for us now, it was incredible.”

The book was adapted by Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Collee, who co-wrote Master and Commander and Happy Feet, among others. And far from being worried about another writer taking on his words, Dalton instead spent hours talking with Collee, diving further into the book’s stories.

Dalton’s 2018 debut novel, Boy Swallows Universe, changed everything for him.

“He was always like, ‘Trent, do you want to write one of these episodes?’ And I’m like, ‘John, I will just slow this down,’” recalls Dalton. “I’m too close to it. But what came out of that, was just the most beautiful conversation. He’d read the book and go, ‘OK, where does your dad’s love of the Rolling Stones come from?’ And then I was allowed to go: ‘Oh my, that’s because he wanted to be Mick Jagger. But the role was taken.’ Dad was a rebel at heart for all of his life. He had the words ‘f--- you’ tattooed on the inside of his bottom lip…”

Hang on, what?

“When we’d complain about dinner, he’d always over-boil the bloody McCain vegetables or whatever, and we’d say, ‘Dad, you’ve turned the vegetables to soup again’, and then he’d just drag on his smoke, watching Sale of the Century and just pull his bottom lip down and we’d get the message.”

Felix Cameron as Eli Bell answers the mysterious red phone in Boy Swallows Universe.

The character of Robert Bell, Eli and Gus’ alcoholic father, is played by Simon Baker in a performance that’s a fine balance between tender and terrifying. Dalton describes Robert as the “closest thing in that book” to any real-life person. His dad died in 2015, and the show has given Dalton a second chance at understanding him.

“Simon Baker just captured him so friggin’ exceptionally well, like emotionally correct, you know,” says Dalton. “To the point where I went, ‘holy shit, I reckon, I suspect – I have no proof of this – I just suspect that Simon Baker knows about the darkness’. I just think he channelled that somehow. I don’t know where it comes from for him, but I was so grateful for the way he did it. Because my favourite parts of the show are watching him channel my old man. So that sort of stuff was quite beautiful and almost made me feel like my old man was around again.”

The series has also allowed Dalton to hope for something he never had in real life: a deeper connection between Frankie and Robert Bell.

“That shit just makes me highly emotional,” says Dalton. “Because that’s a dream I didn’t dare put in the book, which is my mum and dad essentially having a lasting chance to make shit better again. And that was something that the TV show did that was just impossible in real life, to the point where mum was watching it, and just goes: ‘Oh no, rack off! As if.’”

Boy Swallows Universe has given Dalton a world beyond anything he ever dreamt of in that little blue house in Darra. He has since published three more books, but that rough start to life also took a lot from him. Does he ever wish he had a childhood that was, for lack of a better word, normal?

“I think about that all the time,” he says. “And would I have anything powerful to say? I don’t know. Because I think all of that stuff made me a better journalist. I was listening really hard to people for 20 years because I was trying to work out human beings. And I was trying to work out why certain things happened in my life. And I think all of that has made me the man I am. I don’t think I’d be as hungry. I don’t think I’d dream as much.

“The thing I’d get smashed for the most is my optimism, but I don’t think I’d have such a level of that [optimism if I didn’t have that childhood], I’d have a very ordinary sense of life. It’s impossible to be glad about any of it happening, but I’m grateful, you know? I’m grateful for the frickin’ ride. No doubt about it.”

Boy Swallows Universe streams on Netflix from January 11.

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