Why Anna Torv will never forget the gruelling shoot for Force of Nature: The Dry 2
Anna Torv is talking about one of 2024’s most anticipated films and the conversation soon turns to leeches. As in, hundreds of bloodsucking critters. ‘People had them on their eyeballs’.
Anna Torv is talking about one of 2024’s most anticipated films and the conversation soon turns to leeches. As in, hundreds of bloodsucking critters dropping from trees and getting inside people’s clothing, nostrils and mouths, in a misty, cold and dank rainforest.
No, Torv is not describing her Emmy-nominated turn on the set of HBO’s global hit, The Last of Us, the video game turned dystopian drama about a pandemic that changes law abiding folk into murderous zombies. Rather, the actor is talking about the gruelling conditions she, the crew and other cast members endured as they shot Force of Nature: The Dry 2 – writer-director Robert Connolly’s follow-up to the box office slaying The Dry – in the Victorian bush during a wet winter.
“The leeches, I’ve not experienced that before,’’ Torv says over Zoom from her home in northern NSW, likening the infestation to ants getting inside your shoes while you are distracted.
“People had them on their eyeballs. Every time you would turn around, they’d be stuck in their lip,’’ she says, gesturing to the inside of her mouth and breaking into a wry laugh. “It was full on … I’ve got to be honest, I think anybody who worked on the show will never forget it.’’
An international screen star, Torv is arguably best-known in Australia for her AACTA and Logie award-winning performances in the ABC’s acclaimed period drama, The Newsreader – the broadcaster’s most watched program of 2021. She has been christened the “Torvinator” for her portrayal of mercurial central character Helen Norville, who wrestles with her own demons and 1980s-style sexism – rocking power suits and high-rise hairdos – while working on the ratings-driven program, News at Six.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Torv’s career, like Norville’s, is on a roll. From 2017 to 2019, she played FBI consultant Wendy Carr on Netflix’s psychology focused crime thriller Mindhunter, while her deeply affecting performance as a hardened pandemic survivor in The Last Of Us earned a 2023 Prime-Time Emmy nomination.
Connolly, who adapted Force of Nature from Jane Harper’s novel of the same name, approached Torv to play the key role of Alice Russell in his latest film, “even though I don’t think I’d met Rob before’’, the actor says. She had long wanted to work with The Dry and Balibo director, whose adaptation includes a new storyline that reaches back to a fraught hike that protagonist Aaron Falk undertook as a child.
A Gold Coast-raised NIDA graduate, Torv says that for all the physical challenges the Force of Nature shoot entailed, she enjoyed filming outdoors in the Australian bush. She moved back to northern NSW during the Covid pandemic after a long period of working in the United States, including a five-season stint on JJ Abrams’ Fringe TV series, a mashup of science-fiction and crime. “We don’t do so much studio work in Australia but you definitely do a lot of interiors, and there was something quite beautiful about just being out there the whole time,’’ she says of filming.
In the movie, she performs alongside many of our leading actors including Eric Bana – who reprises his role as Federal agent Aaron Falk – Jacqueline McKenzie, Deborra lee-Furness and Richard Roxburgh. Her character, Alice, is a corporate whistleblower who goes missing during a hiking retreat. Bana says Torv is “ridiculously unbelievable” in the role and “as good an actor as I’ve ever seen”, while Connolly says: “Anna Torv brings something dynamite to a role; I love her work.”
The film is built around a mystery centred on Torv’s character: five female colleagues go on a team-building trek in the fictional Giralang Ranges in foreboding weather, and only four make it out. The party’s fifth member, Torv’s Alice, is nowhere to be seen. Significantly, the women become lost in the same tract of bush once frequented by a serial killer, while Alice has been pressured into secretly helping federal agents, including Bana’s Falk, with their fraud investigation into her boss.
Is the whistleblower lost or has she met with foul play? Before Alice goes missing, tensions between the lost women escalate into physical violence as their veneer of corporate civility crumbles. The hikers contend with the brute forces of nature – driving rains, muddy walking tracks, a swollen river – and also with the darker side of their own natures.
Asked if she thinks filmgoers will be surprised by this descent into physical violence, Torv replies: “Yeah, I do.” She reflects: “It was a funny one to shoot and to talk about going, ‘Oh, this is really how it decays. This is where it just disintegrates’.’’
The film is also a meditation on corporate crime and asks how well we know the people we work with. An office bullying complaint has been made against Alice, and Torv agrees her character can be a bully, “but then (on the hike) you sort of see the bully become the bullied. I don’t believe that anything that she does is unjustified.’’
The Fringe star goes on to defend her character, as if she is talking about a complicated friend, arguing that Alice’s strategy for finding a way out of the bush is correct, but rejected by the other women. “She might not tell them something or she’s tricking them, but ultimately it is for their own good. It’s like, what makes a leader? That’s another complex question. It can’t always be decision by committee, and there has to be somebody in charge.’’
She also believes Alice has been “pushed further than she should have been pushed’’ by the police. Interestingly, she says that when playing an unsympathetic character, an actor needs to “stay true to what you’ve got’’ while finding their points of vulnerability. “There’s a couple of moments that she’s on her own where you have the opportunity to see the fear. As outwardly confident as she may appear, she’s running on empty and she’s living in fear – she’s petrified for her life.’’
Bana says that, during the shoot, he was amazed by Connolly’s resilience, given the Victorian bush’s taxing conditions. The film’s leading man says in the production notes: “I have no idea how he got through the shoot without getting pneumonia or ending up in hospital. There would be days when … he’d be soaking from head to toe and wouldn’t even notice.”
Torv is more matter of fact. She says with a slightly incredulous laugh “that’s the job; that’s the gig, you’d be commenting on it if you didn’t’’. She clearly thinks it’s the norm for directors to subject themselves to the same conditions the actors experience. She adds: “He (Connolly) creates an incredibly calm, gentle, open set environment. He was very happy to let things be a little looser and a little freer and I think that helped because of the nature of the terrain that we were playing in.”
The Dry, the Connolly-helmed film that preceded Force of Nature, was the second highest grossing film in Australia in 2021 – a rare feat for a locally made movie. Did this create added pressure to get the sequel, right? Torv responds: “They’re completely different stories. And that’s certainly not the pressure on me. I get to sit back from that just on my one little cog, and that’s kind of up to them.’’
Through such directness, you can detect echoes of Torv’s plain-speaking alter egos, including Alice, The Newsreader’s Norville, and The Last of Us’s zombie hellscape survivor Tess.
The critical success of the latter show – widely regarded as one of the best TV dramas of 2023 – surprised many, given it was derived from a video game. Torv, who is not a gamer, recalls that when the game was released “it was one of the first shows that really made people feel (for the characters). Before the show came out, it had an incredibly loyal fan base of people who love the game, not just for the playing of it, but for the story. ‘’
The 45-year-old star is full of praise for her Emmy-nominated co-star Pedro Pascal, whose character, Joel, loses his daughter in tragic circumstances. “Then you smash straight into 25 years later; you go from this gorgeous man to meeting this bloke who says nothing – he gives you one-word answers. He never smiles or rarely looks you in the eye, he’s just broken.’’
She also mentions the breakout episode depicting an unlikely gay romance in the middle of the zombie apocalypse, featuring Australian actor Murray Bartlett.
“That stand-alone episode with Murray, it was extraordinary,’’ she says. “ … It’s a zombie show but you’re watching it all with a different view; you have a different gaze.’’
Tess is a smuggler, long-time pandemic survivor and lover of Joel who (spoiler alert) sacrifices herself for the greater good after she is bitten by an “infected’’. The actor sees this as a form of redemption “for all the shitty things” her character has done.
In her final moments, Tess is subjected to a terrifying, close encounter with a zombie with fungus fronds sprouting from his mouth – it’s a gross-out moment known as the “kiss of death” among the show’s devotees. Much of the kiss scene was done in post-production and Torv has joked she had imagined it would “very different to the way it turned out’’.
She says her Emmy nomination for her guest role as Tess was “of course’’ a thrill. “That was like, wow! I was like, ‘really?’ ” she says, still lost for words months later.
The actor and her four-year-old son are now based in northern NSW but her work commitments meant they spent little time there last year.
“The world’s shifted. It used to be that you’d have to go to America and do your pilot season, whereas now everything’s just a little bit more flexible and you can kind of be anywhere,’’ she says of her move back to Australia.
Like Alice, she is a single mum and says moving around for work is “absolutely” a challenge “not just for me, it’s anyone who does shift work – it’s intense’’. Like a lot of parents of young children, she has found there isn’t an off-switch. “That’s the lesson,’’ she says with a knowing grin. You just think, ‘OK, I’ll just get everything all cleaned up’ and you’re like, ‘that’s never gonna happen’.’’
She spoke to Review during her summer holiday, before she headed to Melbourne to start shooting season three of The Newsreader, which will see News at Six’s former “golden couple” Helen and Dale (Sam Reid) become professional rivals, as they compete to cover history-making events including the Tiananmen Square massacre and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I ask Torv whether there are parallels between Alice and Helen. The celebrity newsreader is after all, whip-smart like Alice, yet she has a short fuse, and often alienates those around her. The actor shoots down this idea. “I don’t think they are remotely alike,’’ she says. “I think that you can see the reactions are sometimes the same, but that’s more of the fact they’re both being funnelled through me.’’ She dissolves into a self-deprecating belly laugh.
“But the reasons behind them are very, very different. Helen’s thin-skinned and pretty reactionary and that’s the driver in her. Whereas I think Alice is – if she didn’t have all of this (pressure) on top of her, she would be able to remain calm and collected.’’
Created by Michael Lucas, The Newsreader is up for an astonishing 15 awards at the AACTAs next month, including another potential acting gong for Torv. It has also resonated strongly with UK viewers, partly because of the way its fictional characters revisit real events, ranging from the Chernobyl disaster to the 1987 federal election to Charles and Di’s troubled marriage.
“It feels deeply satisfying to work on the show. The fact that it’s been successful has been great, but the actual process has been a joy. There’s such a freedom within it,’’ Torv says, referring to a “deep creative alignment” between her, Reid, the show’s producer Joanna Werner and director Emma Freeman.
Torv’s recent screen characters, Alice, Helen and Tess, all have a certain edge and toughness about them. “That’s the thing I need to do next. I’m gonna do someone real soft,’’ the actor riffs. She went to a public high school in Queensland before attending NIDA and says that “even when I was in my twenties I was never cast as the ingenue. I think I get good characters. I quite like the challenge of sitting in a skin that you know for sure is not necessarily totally likeable. The thing that happens off-screen that I’m interested in, is how do you justify it?’’
She works hard at finding qualities within her flawed heroines with which people can empathise. “It’s like, why do you want to read fiction? You read fiction because it gives you an understanding, deeply and internally, of how other people work. And if you have empathy for other people, it doesn’t mean you have to like them, it certainly makes your world view more expansive.
“It’s like, (reflecting) the complexity of humans. The complexity ... and also, we’re really simple,’’ she says, wrapping up this interview with another low-pitched, mischievous chuckle.
Force of Nature: The Dry 2 opens on February 8.
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