Hollywood comes to Sydney as hit TV show starts shooting in Lilyfield

After 15 years behind the camera as a director, Jeremy Sims is returning to the other side.

“I’m terrified,” he said. “I’m literally terrified because there’s a whole bunch of different sets of skills, so I’ve got great anxiety about learning my lines and all of that stuff. But I’ll get there.”

Jeremy Sims, Luke Bracey and Zac Burgess will star in season two of The Artful Dodger.

Sims, who has spent the last few years directing Seven’s RFDS, has been cast in season two of Disney’s The Artful Dodger, along with fellow Australian stars Luke Bracey, who has carved a solid career in Hollywood, and Zac Burgess, who played the older Eli Bell in Netflix’s hit series Boy Swallows Universe.

Sims plays the Duke of Shrewsbury, the brother of Port Victory’s governor, while Bracey is Inspector Henry Boxer, who arrives in Australia looking for a new life.

“We have such beautiful old buildings here in Sydney and it’s nice to be around the old sandstone,” said Bracey, who has starred in Elvis, Hacksaw Ridge and the remake of Point Break. “I grew up in a house with a sandstone foundation, so it feels like home.”

The multimillion-dollar series, which is set in the 1850s and reimagines the life of Charles Dickens’ infamous pickpocket, begins filming in Sydney next week, in the heritage-listed precinct of Callan Park in Lilyfield.

A Hollywood-style backlot has been created with new sets, meaning the majority of the show will now be shot in one place. All costumes, props and production offices will also be located at the park.

Filming on the Callan Park set of The Artful Dodger in season one.

Some exteriors will still be filmed at the Darling Point mansion Swifts and on the harbour, but Port Victory hospital, which had previously been situated in a shed in Parramatta, has been rebuilt at Callan Park. A walk around the site on Thursday showed new locations, including a market square and the ramshackle port, nicknamed Devil’s Elbow.

“What’s unique about this project for filmmakers is that they’re getting to practice parts of their craft that on other series shot in Australia you just don’t,” said Jo Porter, the show’s executive producer and managing director of Curio Pictures.

“Having sets, exterior and interior, like this, the depth of the costume, the livestock, the size of the extra scenes [it’s really unusual]. Disney has given us the ability to really tell a story at scale, and never to be taken for granted.”

The Artful Dodger, however, is not the most expensive series shot in Australia. That honour goes to the $300 million series Nautlius, which Disney dumped in 2023 as part of aggressive cost-cutting. The series then resurfaced on Stan* late last year.

The new trio of leading men join returning lead Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who plays Dr Jack Dawkins, who has reinvented himself as surgeon in Port Victory in Australia. His nemesis, Fagin, played by David Thewlis, is now his sidekick of sorts, while Australian actor Maia Mitchell plays Lady Belle Fox, an aspiring surgeon and Dawkins’ love interest.

Thomas Brody-Sangster (left) as Dr Jack Dawkins and David Thewlis as Fagin in The Artful Dodger.

The Artful Dodger is the fourth high-profile shoot to take place at Callan Park, with Paramount+ series Playing Gracie Darling and Amazon Prime Video’s adaption of Richard Flanagan’s 2014 Booker Prize winner The Narrow Road to the Deep North also calling the site home.

Before that, the park was home to The Deb, Rebel Wilson’s directorial feature debut, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, but does not yet have a release date.

Season one of The Artful Dodger is Disney’s top local original, and has been nominated for seven AACTA awards, including best drama series, best casting in television and best production design in television.

According to Screen Australia’s annual Drama Report, released at the end of last year, Hollywood’s 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes had a delayed impact locally, pushing screen production in Australia to its lowest level since the beginning of COVID.

The sector recorded expenditure of $1.697 billion in 2023-24, which was down 29 per cent on the previous year, when $2.385 billion was spent making film and television drama and comedy in this country, including both local content and offshore (primarily Hollywood) productions.

*Both Stan and this masthead are owned by Nine.

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