Claude Scott-Mitchell’s sweet escape to the set of Hotel Portofino
When Australian up-and-coming actress Claude Scott-Mitchell was offered the chance to escape London’s bleak lockdown, she couldn’t have guessed the world she was going to step into.
Escapist TV is having a moment, and viewers of Foxtel’s period hit Hotel Portofino have been treated to dazzling shots of one of the world’s most beautiful destinations. For one of the show’s stars, Claude Scott-Mitchell, decamping to the glorious sunlight of the Adriatic coast for filming was a genuine reprieve at a bleak time.
The 23-year-old Australian actor, who has been living in London for the past five years, was in peak lockdown as Covid cases soared when she was invited to disappear into another world to film the show, which she confeasses was a “welcomed escape”.
Rising star Scott-Mitchell, who starred with Eric Bana in The Dry (2020), had moved from Sydney as Brexit engulfed the UK and then watched as the battle against Covid raged. Now she says she is watching her adopted home “find itself again”, and will be forever grateful for the blissful sojourn to the sumptuous set of Hotel Portofino last year. Set in the roaring 1920s, Hotel Portofino is a delicious costume drama starring Natasha McElhone as a wealthy woman overseeing a quaint hotel on the Italian riviera. Scott-Mitchell, who plays Rose Drummond-Ward, is one of the hotel’s visitors checking in, along with Anna Chancellor (Four Weddings and a Funeral) and Mark Umbers (Home Fires).
Shot in the picturesque Croatian town Opatija during the middle of yet another London lockdown last year, Scott-Mitchell says the stunning location – a stand-in for Italy’s Portofino, now certain to become a coveted destination in its own right – along with the meticulous costumes and set design combined to create an alternate reality.
Croatia notably played home to the Game of Thrones production for a decade, with filming in the UNESCO heritage city of Dubrovnik, in the country’s south, a popular cruise ship destination. The vastly less famous Opatija in the north (pictured, below), about an hour’s drive from the capital Zagreb, was the height of fashion during the 19th century before war and communism took hold.
“It was just a really beautiful job and there really wasn’t much they had to do to that footage. It really was that beautiful,” Scott-Mitchell says.
“You always hear or read about when it comes to period productions that once you’re in the clothing and once you’re there that it just finds itself, and it really was interesting how that really does happen.
“You don’t have to imagine it in a way that you do when you’re just sitting reading a script in your room. You can actually just settle into it and allow the space to do a lot of the work for you. That was really liberating.”
Created and written by Matt Baker (Before We Die) and directed by Adam Wimpenny (Blackwood), Hotel Portofino embraces themes of sexual and social liberation against the rise of fascism in Mussolini’s Italy.
“The hotel is there to try and bring people joy and I think that’s what’s really nice about the show,” Scott-Mitchell says.
“But I also think it’s great that you have the underlying reality of fascism rising. And I mean, a lot of the guests wouldn’t have any idea really, but I think there’s an interesting dichotomy at play between finding joy and not being aware of what’s to come.”
From the outset, moments of joy seem fleeting for Scott-Mitchell’s Rose, cast in the shadow of her domineering mother Julia – who is also orchestrating a possible marriage between Rose and the son of the hotel’s owners, Charlie (Oliver Dench).
“She’s someone who has been bullied by her mother and doesn’t have the tools to pick herself up out of that,” Scott-Mitchell says. “She is a product of her time and it’s quite a suffocating thing for her to deal with.”
Hotel Portofino is streaming on Foxtel now.