Love and baggage in a TV reunion for the ages
Finding love later in life can be complicated. In a reunion 40 years in the making, Heather Mitchell and Hugo Weaving bring an inimitable chemistry to a new series that tackles it head-on.
In a sunny conservatory at a swanky hotel on the Bellarine Peninsula, Heather Mitchell is bantering with Hugo Weaving. There’s a warmth and casual intimacy between the pair as you would expect between old friends who have performed together and watched each other’s kids grow up. The characters they portray are also relaxing with each other and that’s what we’re here to watch; the unexpected blaze of attraction and sexual desire between two strangers in their 60s.
They’re between takes in Love Me, a new six-part comedy romance from streaming service Binge, and Mitchell is playing feisty and mischievous writer Anita, whose all-expenses paid vacation is the prize for a poem she entered in a competition. Weaving is Glen, a retiring and straight-laced solicitor whose wife has just died but who decides to take the luxury trip he had bought them both before her unexpected demise. (Yes, this is a spoiler but it happens early in episode one and is the series’ springboard for the drama that unfolds.)
We’re encountering two individuals who’ve both suffered loss and neither of whom are looking for love.
Yet, as the series’ title teasingly signals, they’re likely to find it and, as all aficionados of love stories know, the pathways of romance are always strewn with obstacles.
Mitchell and Weaving are instantly recognisable to Australian audiences of stage and screen. Mitchell’s TV resume reads like a roll-call of some of the best series from the past four decades and includes Spellbinder, The Day of the Roses and most recently The Unusual Suspects. Weaving, like Mitchell, a mesmerising stage actor, has mixed a screen career of art house films such as Little Fish, cult classic The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and international blockbusters including The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix.
Putting them together is TV gold; there’s a symmetry in the fact that it’s 40 years since they met at NIDA (the National Institute of Dramatic Art) and after appearing together at the Sydney Theatre Company, had their first big break in the 1984 TV miniseries Bodyline. A fresh-faced Weaving played cricket legend Douglas Jardine and Mitchell his Egyptologist girlfriend.
Now they’re playing another, very different type of couple, with plenty of baggage and a fair few wrinkles.
The waiter approaches the table and after taking Glen’s order, turns to Anita. “And for your wife?” he asks pleasantly. “I’m his mistress,” she shoots back, with a challenging smile.
Direct, spiky, funny and life-affirming, Love Me is a six-part series exploring the relationships and personal journeys experienced by different family members at three distinct times of life.
Alongside Mitchell and Weaving it features rising star Bojana Novakovic as Glen’s 30-something daughter Clara, a high-achieving anaesthetist who’s prickly and lonely and desperate to find Mr Right; Bob Morley as Peter, who could just be the man she needs; Sarah Peirse as Glen’s formerly dynamic wife, Christine, who has become a paraplegic following a terrible car accident; William Lodder as Aaron, their 23-year-old law student son, who is clever, a bit nerdy and needy; Shalom Brune-Franklin, Aaron’s uber-cool DJ girlfriend Ella; Mitzi Ruhlmann, his best mate Jesse, and Celia Pacquola as Clara’s tell-it-like-it-is colleague and confidante Sacha.
As Glen, Weaving says it’s a challenge to play someone so buttoned up. “He’s definitely not an alpha male,” he laughs. “In fact he’s probably the most timid, mouse-like character I’ve ever played. He’s also sweet and kind but very unadventurous.”
With a clean-shaven face, short haircut and glasses, he said he found the new look hilarious, a version of his father. He had to temper his expressiveness, he says, but in other traits, Glen is not that different from Hugo.
“In many other ways, Glen is like me, there’s a certain kind of meticulous order, a need for neatness that I weirdly do have in my life, so I made that a part of Glen, too.”
Glen’s been a caregiver to his wife, a supportive father and a solid professional man, but he’s repressed and chronically undemonstrative. Weaving says the most challenging moments of the role were where his character had to let go of control.
“For Glen the hardest scene was the first expression of sexuality and sexual love because he’s revealing something that hasn’t even been revealed to himself,” he says. “He’s a conservative man who we tend to judge straight away but what’s so interesting is exploring his relationship with Anita and love at that age and in that particular man.”
He says he knew immediately who he wanted to play opposite. “I read it and thought Heather has got to play this role, she was born to play it,” Weaving says.
Mitchell felt the same about Weaving and called him to ask, “are you going to do this?” When he said yes, she was delighted.
“It was the greatest thrill, there’s so much trust between us and he’s got the fiercest intelligence and such an open heart,” Mitchell says.
Her character is everything Glen isn’t: spontaneous, uninhibited and a risk-taker.
“What I love about Anita is that she’s complex but uncomplicated,” Mitchell says. “She has a history but she’s not burdened by that history.”
There aren’t that many roles of this calibre for older women, Mitchell says, but Anita chimes truthfully with her life and with the lives of her female friends.
“I’m in my 60s and want to play women who yearn for life and love and still have passion,” she says. “Anita doesn’t think about her demise but what is left to achieve.”
Love Me is the Foxtel Group’s first commission for streaming service Binge, produced by Warner Bros International Television Production Australia.
It had to be shot in Melbourne, with its laneways and gritty vistas, cafe life and Euro feel, says Binge executive director Alison Hurbert-Burns.
The challenges of working during Covid-19 meant mandatory quarantine for all interstate cast and crew but it gave time to really workshop the characters and build a sense of community before shooting began, she says.
Another challenge was creating the impression of a bustling metropolis with very few extras, but, adds Hurbert-Burns, there were “strategic silver linings”. One was a fantastic shot of Novakovic striding across an almost empty Princess Bridge, without the need to shut off the street. “We could show vistas of the city in a way not usually possible,” she says.
“Melbourne in winter has an almost Parisian feel, adds Hurbert-Burns, “it looks romantic and international.”
Getting that Euro feel isn’t incidental; while it definitely feels very local, Love Me is based on the acclaimed Swedish series Älska Mig written by and starring Josephine Bornebusch, which won top honours at the 2020 Swedish TV Awards as Drama Series of the Year.
Glen was originally Sven and there was a lot more snow.
But, brilliant though the original is, says lead writer Alison Bell, her prerogative, and those of fellow writers Leon Ford, Adele Vuko and Blake Ayshford was to make a very Australian show.
“I love the harshness of the Swedish version but our audience needs to see that the spikiness comes from vulnerability,” she says. “We [Australians] have a conflict-averse quality that means we don’t tend to go for the jugular.”
Clara’s adventures on dating apps needed some cultural tweaking, she says, to make her encounters feel more Melbourne but they were on common, universal ground when it came to the sense of frustration and disappointment her character feels trying to find a partner through an algorithm.
“We wanted to get across the sense that she’s at the end of her tether and exhausted by endless dates with people she has no connection with,” Bell says.
These encounters speak to a bigger cultural issue, what Bell calls the problem of the “man-child”. But the irony, she adds, is that Clara’s also emotionally immature.
Aaron has only just entered adulthood so his immaturity can be excused, but he’s a wildly emotional character, Bell says, who can’t see that beyond the sexual intoxication he feels for his girlfriend, they have little in common.
“He is the lover and the poet, in love with love and I adore that because you don’t often see that on Australian telly.”
Bell, who co-wrote and starred in the parenthood drama comedy The Letdown, says she loves intergenerational dramas and the dynamics of families.
The difficult relationship between Clara and her mother is one of the main pivots of the story, she says, and it’s one that sometimes breaks out in viciousness.
“What I love about the Swedish version and what we tried to hold on to in our version is that people can be at their worst with their families and we rarely depict that on Australian television, we often play families either as harmonious or as deeply dysfunctional and this one sits in the middle, they’re both harmonious and angry,” she says. It’s also genre-bending, she adds, a rom-com with a very serious side. “It’s a wonderful hybrid of grief, love, humour and drama.”
Being able to work during Covid-19 has been a real boon, says Weaving, who was starring in Dürrenmatt’s The Visit at London’s National Theatre when lockdowns began in March 2020.
He hotfooted it back to Australia where he happily spent the next five months at home with his partner Katrina.
In the past year there’s been a play at Sydney Theatre Company and a US TV series – Mr Corman – in New Zealand. He says he knows how lucky he is to be working when so many in his profession are struggling to stay afloat.
The whole experience of Love Me has been a very positive one, he says, largely due to director Emma Freeman. Freeman, who has a string of successes under her belt including Stateless, Secret City, and Glitch, steered everyone through a difficult few months and brought out some great performances.
“I credit her with almost everything that was good about that experience,” Weaving says. “She was so much at the centre of what and how we were doing it and her approach to it was immaculate.
“It’s a comedy, but she wanted us to be truthful and real. She’s very experienced and warm and buoyant and creates a fabulous set and I can’t speak highly enough of her.”
Mitchell agrees and says the combination of fresh writing and Freeman’s directing gives Love Me a totally Australian and very contemporary feel.
It’s a story that seems particularly apt for the Covid-19 era, she adds, and for large swathes of the population emerging from months of lockdown. It’s a time of reconnecting and personal growth, she says, themes that also dominate the series.
Coming out of lockdown is about excitement and exuberance and the thrill of doing things again and so is Love Me. “It’s about renewal,” she says, “the renewal of the human heart.”
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