Hal Cumpston, the Aussie star taming TV hit The Walking Dead
How a surprise email at 3am launched 21-year-old Sydney actor Hal Cumpston in to the world of the Walking Dead.
Three years ago, aspiring actor and newly-minted high school graduate Hal Cumpston had just returned from Schoolies week to his inevitably far quieter eastern Sydney home and “a ton of spare time”.
With a casual job that occupied just two days, he had five long days each week to figure out how to do some stand-up comedy that could potentially lead to acting work and an eventual show reel to display his nascent yet believed-in talent. Oh, and plenty of time to watch what he describes with obvious relish as “teen slacker-type films”, of which he was such a fan the inspiration soon came to write one of his own.
In three days Cumpston had 34 pages, and in less than a fortnight those pages turned into a first draft. He called it Bilched, which is urban slang for “a crazy, spontaneous, life-altering adventure that defies logic”.
Which, as it turns out, is a fitting description of Cumpston’s life just now.
“There is so much nothing going on,” the actor recently told Review. But that’s not exactly the truth. Through a serendipitous combination of pluck and luck, Cumpston’s new adventure finds him third-billed in one of the most anticipated American TV series of the year, The Walking Dead: World Beyond. As one of four young people coming of age in the first generation born in the wake of an unexplained zombie apocalypse that has been dominating the TV landscape for the past decade, Cumpston’s troubled teen Silas looms large over the first three hour-long episodes made available for preview.
“You heard what [Silas] did back in Omaha, right?” one girl asks another in the show’s first minutes. “He should be in jail.”
Silas’s fate may still be a mystery, but Cumpston is on the cusp of a stardom. And while his journey is shaping up as life-altering, it certainly doesn’t defy logic — his father Jeremy is a doctor turned actor-director whose work behind and in front of the camera includes the 2011 short film The Last Race and roles in the TV show All Saints, the feature film Last Cab To Darwin and, inevitably, Bilched (which he also directed). His mother, veteran nonfiction producer-director Rachel Lane, heads the creative team at the Sydney-based freelance production company Broken Hill Films, and recently made the moving half-hour documentary Faithfully Me for the ABC’s long-running flagship faith-oriented series Compass.
So, Cumpston says, Bilched happened quickly: “It was less than 12 months after I started writing it that we were filming.”
The by-the-bootstraps initiative that fuelled the micro-budget high school stoner saga about an eventful day in the life of a handful of students plays like a laid-back Australian spin on the seminal 2007 coming-of-age comedy Superbad.
“The biggest thing was that we really didn’t know what we were doing,” Cumpston says. “So, on my first take I went ‘I’ve never acted for the camera before’.”
Cumpston has a relaxed yet distinctive acting style, capable of projecting innocence or menace, dignity or shock, depending on his mood and the angle of the camera. Call it the Toni Collette effect.
On its limited regional Australian release last year, Bilched garnered warm reviews and went on to feature at New York’s independent-minded Chelsea Film Festival, where it won awards for Cumpston’s script, the supporting performance of Frederick Du Rietz (who trained at Sydney’s Academy of Film, Theatre and Television) and best feature-length work. The Cumpston camp is currently in search of a streaming deal.
Meanwhile, in an alternate universe, The Walking Dead had shuffled to a crossroads. Fan favourite lead character Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) had been helicoptered away from the main show early in season nine, the climactic episode of the 10th series was delayed when post-production was impeded by pandemic restrictions, and it has recently been announced the main show will end and spin off into something else after the upcoming 11th season. To make matters worse, the much-hyped spin-off series Fear the Walking Dead started strong but seems to have floated off without direction despite the injection of two main characters from the mothership show.
Seeing that the current, large and unwieldy cast of characters were reaching a logical end point, the producers of The Walking Dead: World Beyond had an idea on how to move forward. To appeal to a new demographic they developed a young adult (or YA) storyline that finds a quartet of plucky teenagers curious about the transformed landscape outside the fortified American Midwest campus in which they’ve been raised. They venture forth on a journey to New York State with goals that are twofold — to rescue one of their own from the sinisterly authoritarian Civic Republic Military (CRM) that, unbeknown to them, whisked Grimes away so many years ago, and to learn more about themselves.
Travelling with sisters Iris (Aliyah Royale) and Hope (Alexa Mansour), along with Elton (Nicolas Cantu), the quiet teen Silas, distinctive in this company for his height and size, is initially docile and happy to carry their backpacks. Yet danger looms: “Silas?,” asks Iris at one key moment, “What are you so afraid of?”
“Me,” he says quietly. “I’m afraid of me.”
In order to enlist such an introspective and sensitive, yet vaguely dangerous, soul to help carry the franchise, the producers did what many before them have done. They looked to Australia.
“There was some Australian writer who heard that there’s some 18, 19-year-old in Sydney that had written, produced and starred in his own low-budget film,” Cumpston says.
“Maybe he got a copy? But I think he just heard about it and heard a few of the names associated and passed it on to [my American managers].”
It turned out that actor Jenni Baird, who had also worked in All Saints, had seen an article in Western Magazine announcing a screening of Bilched at Dubbo Scouts Hall last March and profiling the Cumpstons. Baird and her partner writer-director Michael Petroni knew someone at the American management firm familiar with the show’s casting, and Cumpston apparently embodied the brief.
“I received an email at 3am when we were editing the film, and I thought that it looked like a fake email but checked it out and it was the real deal. Then they sent me the World Beyond piece as an audition to see if they wanted to take me on. And they loved it. With each step closer I was like, ‘wait, is this actually happening?’
“It seems so ridiculous because it was my first American audition and I got it, so it was just so incredibly lucky.”
Filming took place around Richmond, Virginia, and presented a steep learning curve.
“I definitely felt like a bit of an impostor, but the bigger feeling was that I somehow bluffed my way into the situation. I remember the first scene walking over a hill to a fence. That is literally all we had to do, and I thought, ‘what is going on? Let’s just not get in trouble’. But it was funny, by the second day I was comfortable enough, so I just think you rise to the occasion. You only get one life.”
For now, there are 10 episodes in the can, and Cumpston is contracted for a second series. “The bad news is that it isn’t going to five seasons, but the good news is I’ll have two seasons on American television and I’ve never done acting training or anything, so I’ll just shut up and take what I get,” he says. “Like, this is the coolest thing that has ever happened to me.”
The first episode of The Walking Dead: The World Beyond is now available to stream on Amazon Prime, with new hours released each Friday for the 10-episode run of the show.
