Amazon Prime’s crime romp Deadloch brings Kate Box back to the TV screen
The Australian actor plays a buttoned-up cop in a lawless town, in the new Amazon Prime series Deadloch.
When actor Kate Box graduated from NIDA, she remembers being told by peers, “I reckon you’re going to come into your own in your late 30s”.
“I was like, ‘I’m 23, what’s going on?’, but they were kind of right.”
Box was raised in Colonel Light Gardens, a verdant suburb just outside the Adelaide city centre. Growing up, she got her first taste of acting at 13 when she joined grassroots theatre group Unley Youth Centre, crossing paths with other creatives including award-winning filmmakers Sophie Hyde and Matthew Cormack.
As a young adult, she briefly studied psychology at Adelaide University, before deciding she wanted to give acting a crack, and uprooted her life to Sydney.
In the two decades she has been acting, Box has enjoyed a steady career encompassing stage, film, and TV – including a notable tenure on ABC’s Rake. But she has never truly occupied the centre stage. That is, until now.
Box is the lead in the new Amazon Prime original series, Deadloch. A bombastic crime saga created, written and executive produced by comedy duo Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan (The Katering Show).
Set in the fictional Tasmanian town of Deadloch, on the eve of the Winter Festival – a nod to Dark Mofo, no doubt – a dead body is discovered splayed out on the beach. Thrown together to solve the case are two female detectives: scrupulous, deliberate local senior sergeant Dulcie Collins (Box), and rough-as-guts, kebab-wielding senior detective Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami), who has been summoned from Darwin.
Deadloch, directed by Ben Chessell – who worked on the sensational intercontinental thriller Giri/Haji – opens with a brooding shot of the black South Pacific Ocean.
At first, you wonder if you’re in for a languorous Top of the Lake-style drama. That is until chunks of Pepto-Bismol-pink spew are splattered over the corpse. It’s a chaotic show: relentlessly crude in its humour, and shocking in its violence (the bodies pile up rather quickly).
“The bonkers stuff is so magnificent,” says Box. “I found the tone fascinating. I had never read anything like it.
“The crime is incredibly dark and only gets darker as the series goes on. The writers needed to find the balance between a serious drama and this wild ride of cyclonic comedy characters.”
“Cyclonic” is one way to put it. Populating this motley town is a mayor (Susie Youssef), who can’t help herself from talking about her crippling IBS; a dumpy seal named Kevin who may or may not have a taste for human flesh; and a clique of beef-head footy players, who are suspected of running a drug racket under the guise of a protein powder business, to name a few.
In recent years, Box has played what she describes as “big, bolshie characters”: long-suffering secretary Nicole Varga in Rake; a bong-choofing executive in Les Norton; the fierce Lou “Fingers” Kelly in Wentworth. Though boldness was not always in her comfort zone, she previously told SA Daily that it took working with veteran actor Richard Roxburgh to shake her out of the “naturalism trap”.
“I’ve had the joy of playing many characters over the last few years that are driven by instinct and emotion. Guts-out, shits-out characters that have quite infantile instincts,” says Box. “Playing those characters gives you the bravery to respond wildly within any moment.”
That naturalism she tried to unlearn turned out to be a master stroke in Deadloch, where her character, Dulcie, serves as the show’s emotional anchor. Her nuanced touch is an essential palette cleanser among the other outsized performances. “She’s so buttoned up, straight and fastidious, and takes the crimes incredibly seriously among the slapstick stupidity,” says Box.
Deadloch is Amazon’s 25th Australian commission since 2019, and its third locally-made scripted drama. When asked her thoughts on Arts Minister Tony Burke’s announcement that there will be local content obligations for streaming services coming into place next year, Box says prioritising Australian content is critical, but that it’s important to have art that reflects the Australia we live in.
“It’s one thing to have Australian content, but it’s another to make sure that content is representative of who we are. There are a lot of communities under-represented in television.
“It’s crucial for the survival not just of our industry, but for the survival of us to hear and see our stories.”
Deadloch opens with a scene of a middle-aged lesbian couple having morning sex (there are a lot of lesbians in this show, including a Divinyls “I Touch Myself”-harmonising choir).
It’s not lurid or leery. It’s hardly an erotic fantasy – their adopted greyhound interrupts the rumpy-pumpy by jumping on the bed. Rather, it captures the frank fleshiness of a warts-and-all couple completely comfortable with each other. “It’s really, really cool,” Box says.
Box is queer, and has been in a relationship with actor and writer Jada Alberts (who also starred in Wentworth) for 14 years, and they share three young children, “It’s a scheduling nightmare.” In 2020, when promoting Wentworth, she told the Sydney Morning Herald it was rare to be a queer actor playing a queer role in mainstream television.
In the years since that interview, Australian shows such as SBS HIV drama In Our Blood and runaway Netflix success Heartbreak High, embraced fully developed queer characters. “That it is changing at a really beautiful rate is pretty magnificent,” says Box.
“It’s so crucial for queer people to be at the steering wheel driving their stories. Queer actors bring something to queer roles that nobody else can bring, and our stories … I think have been used for drama and profit without our voices in them for a very long time.”
Box is currently filming the upcoming SBS anthology series, Erotic Stories. On set, the production hired three stars, and an intimacy co-ordinator – all of whom were queer. “It just makes such a massive difference,” Box says of the experience. “I just think, ‘let’s keep going down that path and see what stories come up with’.”
In a March interview with The Times, New Zealand actor Melanie Lynskey reflected that there has been a remarkable surge of substantial roles available for women in the entertainment industry. “The world has really opened up for actors in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and there is rich and wonderful work to have,” she said.
Box has her own theory. “What’s happening now is that our writers rooms are being populated by older women.” She starts to mention Deadloch, before stopping herself mid-sentence. “They’re (writers McLennan and McCarthy) not old. They’d kill me if said they’re old.”
She continues: “We’re getting more women in their 40s in that creative core, that first call of story. Of course, the stories they want to tell are also of their experience.
“Finally there’s a shift in who is in those rooms, and we get characters that speak to those people.”
Box is not afraid of ageing. She’s embracing it. “Jesus, I love being older,” she says. “I feel so much more courageous. I feel so much more in the driver’s seat. I care so much less about what people think of me. I’m driven internally rather than from external forces.”
“That comes with age,” she adds. “I know what I want, what stories I want to tell, and what creatives I want to sidle up next to because I think that they’re brilliant and being in their orbit will help me achieve my best. I’m not afraid to fall on my face.”
Box also has no desire to follow in the footsteps of Australian actors who have moved overseas to chase success. “I love it here. Australia is my jam.”
She did a brief stint in Los Angeles, when a US version of Rake was being adapted, but she says it never felt like home.
Though she adds with a wink: “If a gig came up when I had to film on a small Greek Island for six months I’d do it. ”
Deadloch screens on Amazon Prime Video from June 2.
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