Cattlemen, choppers and Country rule the Top End in Netflix’s new epic, Territory
This month’s Territory is a vast, melodramatic series set in the heart of the Outback’s biggest cattle station. Take a look behind the scenes with the all-star cast | WATCH TRAILER
Like a practised gambler in possession of the cards of a lifetime, Territory shows its hand early. In the first 12 minutes of the Netflix series there’s a dead body, a breathtaking muster of 4,000 cattle and enough drone footage of the Northern Territory – all red plains under an impossible sky – to power a tourism board campaign. But the first thing we see is a camera circling actor Anna Torv like a vulture, as a Top End morning, hard and brilliant, breaks over her face.
Torv stars as Emily Lawson, who has married into a family in possession of a cattle station occupying a slice of land bigger than the country of Belgium. “I’m just a cattleman’s wife,” she demurs later in the series, with the poker face she wears like a mask. Emily might be our ride into the domain of this broken dynasty, but beyond ring-fencing power for her daughter, the exact scope of her ambitions is inscrutable. And her past – a cattle-thieving scoundrel of a brother, a lingering first love (he’s a cattle thief too; nobody’s perfect) – isn’t so squeaky clean, either. It’s a question Torv asked herself when crafting her character.
“Who is this person that gives nothing away?” she reflects. “She’s an outsider, whether she’s with her own family or whether she’s with her married family. You have somebody who is a slow burn and doesn’t fit in. And you can hide behind that. That’s what I did, anyway.”
Torv has practically trademarked this tenor of performance. In productions locally and abroad, from The Newsreader and Secret City to The Last of Us and Mindhunter, the actor is both hardened and battle-weary, a steely suit of armour strapped over a shivering, wounded core.
If Torv looks at home in Territory, it’s because she is: her family has cattle stations in Queensland, and she can more than hold her own on a horse. The physical nature of the role became the most rewarding. “That stuff’s fun,” Torv affirms. “They’re the days when you don’t feel like you’re working because everything around you is real. The horses are real, the trees are real, the sunset’s real. And there’s the dust – I love the dust, and the sound of walking on the dirt.”
Torv’s Emily seems happiest when she is doing: whether it’s schooling her nephew on how to rebrand stolen cows or, in the opening minutes of the first episode, chasing down a rampaging bull in a souped-up 4X4. (“Movie magic,” Torv admits. She did the driving herself but the actual wrangling was performed by her stunt double, Liz Cook.) Nolan Brannock, played by Clarence Ryan, an Indigenous cattleman with his own station, watches Emily from the helicopter he is piloting overhead. (In Territory, as in Yellowstone and Succession before it, wealth isn’t really wealth unless it comes with its own fleet of choppers.)
“You’re a one-woman show,” he declares, impressed.
Territory is a little more than a one-woman show. This is a soapy, melodramatic family business story in the vein of The Crown or House of the Dragon, where the business this family deals in is power. At the fictional Marianne station, five generations of wealth and all its adjacent trauma has calcified into tragedy. When son Daniel Lawson turns up dead, combustible patriarch Colin seeks a new successor. Not on his shortlist is his remaining offspring Graham, an addict who is desperately insecure (in Colin’s opinion, the greater crime). Neither is Emily, on account of her being a woman, or his striving granddaughter Susie (as before).
“I hadn’t used my voice in a while, my Australian voice. I felt whole telling this story” – Sam Corlett
Grandson Marshall, Graham’s son from his first marriage, has inherited the genetic Lawson pugnaciousness but hasn’t yet sandpapered away his soul. Sam Corlett plays him with a laconic magnetism. “It’s such a story with antiquity – throughout the ages you’ve got the youth rebellion to tradition,” he reflects. The actor hadn’t even heard of Territory until he helped his sister audition for a role. She didn’t get it, but Corlett was asked to send in his own scenes. He got the job, which proved meaningful for an actor who has spent most of his career overseas, on television series including Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Vikings: Valhalla. “I hadn’t used my voice in a while, my Australian voice,” explains Corlett. “I felt whole telling this story.”
When we meet Marshall, he’s estranged from his family and living a drifter’s life. “I thought of him like the fool in the tarot card deck,” Corlett muses. “He doesn’t know where his foot’s gonna land, but at least he’s trying to find a new way.” He spends his days piloting a stolen helicopter to nick crocodile eggs and sell them on the black market. His accomplice is Sharnie (Kylah Day), an Indigenous woman from Queensland who, Day says, is searching for “something that felt larger than herself”.
She finds it in relationships with both Marshall and Rich (Sam Delich), the roguish ringleader of their musketeering outfit, whose scumbaggery has a seductive depth.
“I am finding myself getting typecast as, apparently, troubled dudes with daddy issues,” says Delich, a grin in his voice, although he points to the flipside of Rich, which is his “deep sadness”. “There were days on set that were really, truly difficult for me, as far as just staying in that headspace all the time,” he adds. “In saying that, there were also days that were the most fun. To be honest, playing nice guys is overrated.”
Because life on a cattle station isn’t exactly nice. Torv, Corlett, Delich and Day all learned this midway through last year when they turned up at Tipperary Station, the working cattle ranch located four hours from Darwin that stood in for Territory’s fictional Marianne. “I think a lot of the guys that worked out there thought, ‘Oh, here we go, a bunch of city slickers working in film,’” Torv remembers, “and I think they were impressed by the time we left – just the hours that we keep.”
Cast and crew lived at the station, cheek by jowl, for a month, sharing accommodation and three meals a day, often with the real cattlemen and bull catchers going about their business. “I would wake up some mornings and there would be mustering right outside my window,” Day remembers. Delich would join the lads most Friday nights for a beer. “The hardest working people I’ve ever met were on that station,” he says, people from “all walks of life” with “no judgement”. He captured both the enormity of the landscape, as well as this collegial atmosphere, on a couple of disposable cameras, sharing his images exclusively with Vogue Australia. “It’s a beautiful keepsake,” he reflects, and has since upgraded his kit to continue taking behind-the-scenes photographs on his next film.
None of the principal cast – Torv, Corlett, Delich and Day – had spent much time in the Northern Territory before this. “I’m a coastie,” admits Corlett, who, along with Torv, is based in Byron Bay. Delich is from Western Australia but now calls Sydney home, and Day lives in Melbourne, with First Nations heritage from Western Australia through her father. For each of them, making Territory in this part of the country was an unforgettable experience. Some filming took place in Kakadu National Park, with the support of the Traditional Owners, the Bunitj clan. “To shoot, it was beautiful, but to also just be out there – [it’s] a really rich Indigenous culture, and you can just see it,” enthuses Torv.
“We did shoot on some really sacred sites,” Day shares. “It felt like a real privilege to be able to explore these areas, and for them to put their trust in us.” Day chokes up remembering her last day of filming: “I had tears streaming down my face, and Sam just looked at me and grabbed my hand … It was really hard to leave.”
Corlett prepared for his role with legendary acting coach Gerry Grennell, the architect of indelible performances from Heath Ledger and Paul Mescal. “Working with him returned me to my ‘why’ of why I pursue acting,” Corlett admits. “Honestly, it’s to communicate stories, so it raises the consciousness of who we are.”
Delich remembers shooting a wrenching scene with Day and Corlett when, in the middle of receiving guidance from director Greg McLean, the filmmaker pointed out their party had a silent observer. “A dingo had come out of the bush and was literally about three metres away, just staring at us,” Delich recalls. “I thought, ‘Holy shit, this is something I will never, ever, ever experience on any job, ever.’”
Territory streams on Netflix from October 24.
This article appears in the October issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now.
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