Where is Nine Perfect Strangers filmed?
Soma’s architecture and surrounds provide the oasis-like backdrop to 2021’s most anticipated TV premiere.
Melissa McCarthy’s wide-eyed character says it all. “Oh, wow. This is … heaven.”
Classical music is playing and Frances Welty — the struggling novelist played by McCarthy in Nine Perfect Strangers, the new Nicole Kidman-starring TV series based on the book by Australian author Liane Moriarty — is being shown through the airy hallways of a wellness treat known as Tranquillum House, where she and eight other ‘strangers’ will spend the next ten days, in search of their own truths.
The space is arresting. Warm sunlight streams in from floor-to-ceiling windows, which frame views of rolling green hills in the distance, and organic landscaping that appears to cocoon itself around amenities like the retreat’s Geodesic dome in the foreground.
Inside, modernist-style artwork and sculptures are interspersed with subtle references to Hinduism, the Indian dharma that the popular mantra-based Vedic meditation technique emanates from.
From the moment McCarthy’s bespectacled Frances take in her heavenly digs, it becomes very clear that the retreat itself will play a pivotal role in the drama. If anything, the property threatens to steal some spotlight from Nine Perfect Strangers’ cast of Hollywood A-listers, which includes Bobby Cannavale (The Irishman) as a washed-up football player, Luke Evans (Fast & Furious) as a highly-strung corporate guy, Australia’s Samara Weaving as a social media influencer looking to repair her relationship with her husband and Asher Keddie, who plays a grief-stricken wife and mother.
Kidman performs the role of the retreat’s Russian guru, Masha Dmitrichenko. But it’s the Byron Bay meditation and wellness retreat, Soma, that plays the starring role of Tranquillum House; the breathtaking setting in which a bizarre and unnerving chain of events will unfold.
“I built it myself, because I didn’t trust anyone else to do it,” admits Gary Gorrow, the co-founder of Soma, with a laugh.
Gorrow, who is known and revered in the meditation community, has an extensive CV. In addition to leading Soma’s retreats, he is a Vedic meditation master teacher, a qualified Ayurvedic health coach, mindfulness expert, a sought-after consultant and high performance coach, motivational speaker and social entrepreneur who’s helped to ‘heal’ celebrities, CEO’s and average Joes (Soma’s website contains testimonials from Australian supermodel Gemma Ward, as well as comedian and TV personality Hamish Blake).
In 2017, Gorrow and client-turned-business partner Peter Ostick, purchased the land on which Soma sits and, with the help of Gorrow’s brother George (the designer turned hotelier behind buzzy Balinese property The Slow), the retreat was built.
It opened its doors in late 2019, only to shut them again a few months later.
“We were sat around one day, and we got a call from a location scout about a TV project that was filling towards the back end of the year,” explains Ostick. That phone call progressed into a conversation with producer Bruna Papandrea, who was behind another wildly successful Kidman-starring series based on a Moriarty book, Big Little Lies.
“We didn’t really know what was going to happen with Covid, but we struck up a conversation with Bruna — it was a bit surreal at first, hearing Nicole was involved,” adds the co-founder, who found Gorrow while at breaking point, having buckled under the stress (and success) of a relentless career in media and tech. “We just got a really good vibe from them. And we were very clear from square one: we’ve built this sanctuary, we stand for these things. They were totally aligned with that. It was the perfect fit, really.”
So the cast and crew moved into Soma, which, conveniently, has 10 guest rooms (the rooms can’t be booked out for hotel-style stays; to stay, you must be a guest of a Soma retreat. Three-day retreats start at approximately $2500 for an individual and $3995 for a couple, and are all inclusive).
Evidently, the producers fell under the spell of the property and its surrounds. Because the series, which premieres on Amazon Prime Video today, presents a little bit like Soma porn.
“They had to modernise the story a little bit to fit what we had here, but they really involved the house and the land as well. They ended up shooting a lot of stuff around the property, they used the dome and the forest,” says Gorrow. With a knowing chuckle, he adds, “It was lucky for them and lucky for us. I think everyone won from the arrangement.”
But Nine Perfect Strangers paints a slightly darker picture of the world of wellness retreats. As part of the ‘healing’ process, for example, Kidman’s Masha prescribes her carefully engineered guest list of ‘strangers’ psychedelics; the scene in which they embark on a group trip is slightly confronting.
“I think we’d be having pretty wild retreats, and we’d be in jail pretty quickly,” says Gorrow, of whether or not LSD is freely prescribed at Soma. “But with TV series the way they are, things need a bit of drama. They need to be a bit gory and sinister to keep us entertained.”
Gorrow and Ostick aren’t worried it will reflect badly on Soma, with Ostick pointing out there’s “actually a lot of research happening on the use of psychedelics to treat mental illness, after it was demonised around the 1960s.” If anything, our minds are more open to the potential of such substances, and forms of culture — fictional or otherwise — that explore it.
“The way we view mindfulness has fundamentally changed too,” Ostick adds. “When I started meditating it was still, ‘oh, you’re meditating? That’s a little bit different. Whereas now, it’s everywhere. People are being taught it workplaces and schools, and there’s so much empirical research out there now to back the benefits of meditation up.”
Unsurprisingly, teaching clients how to find inner peace has been made much harder with Covid lockdowns. But Gorrow is about to launch a new online course called Rise, which aims to equip people with the tools they need to restore a sense of equilibrium in their lives.
“Rise looks to remedy more of the underlying causes of the imbalance, rather than treating the symptoms. Because people manage anxiety, we medicate it. But how do you move beyond that? Because kids aren’t born with anxiety, it’s something that comes with conditioning. And if we don’t address the causes they remain, and we just do our best to alleviate them, rather than find life beyond them,” says Gary. “With Rise, addressing the underlying causes is what we’re hoping to achieve.”
Though Covid safety measures prevented Gorrow from meeting his Nine Perfect Strangers’ equivalent, he was glad to hear that Kidman maintains a daily meditation practise. No doubt, she called upon it when preparing for her role.
Gorrow and Ostick are level-headed when it comes to discussing the impact the series premiere could have on Soma’s profile. “If demand goes up after Nine Perfect Strangers, that would be great,” says Ostick, “especially after the year we’ve had.”
Given the show’s sublime portrayal of the space and its surrounds, we can’t quite picture demand for Soma’s meditation retreats going in any other direction.
Nine Perfect Strangers is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout