How ‘80s Brisbane was brought to life for Boy Swallows Universe
Bad guys, boyhood, Brisbane and Simon Baker. It’s all here in the extended trailer for Trent Dalton’s acclaimed novel turned Netflix series, Boy Swallows Universe. | WATCH NOW
You’ve never seen a wig department like the one on Boy Swallows Universe. Every mullet under the sun – or at the very least, all the ones located in greater metropolitan Brisbane – are here at City Hall on the 82nd day of shooting Netflix’s sprawling and sensational adaptation of Trent Dalton’s best-selling novel.
The year is 2022, the date is December 13, the temperature is Brisbane summer (humid), and it’s the biggest day on the set of the entire seven episode production. There are 40 hair and makeup artists back-combing and Elnett-ing a swarm of extras and main cast including Simon Baker, Phoebe Tonkin, Anthony LaPaglia and newcomer Zac Burgess, as the tenacious cub journalist Eli Bell, storming into the 1989 Queensland Champions to right a grievous wrong. Alongside this consortium of Australian acting luminaries are 506 Brisbane locals decked out in their ’80s finest. There are more extras on set today than in any one scene in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis.
I head for the mezzanine, seeking a better view of the action: Frankie (Tonkin) and Robert (Baker), Eli’s mum and dad and two characters based on Dalton’s parents, arriving at the Queensland Champions where All Is Most Definitely Not Well. But the door is locked. I peer through the glass pane. A silhouette ripples into focus. And there he is, the author himself, come to save the day.
“Hi,” he says, grinning like a schoolboy. “I’m Trent.”
The year is 2023, the date is June 16, the temperature is Brisbane winter (humid) and Trent Dalton is waiting outside City Hall. All week, he says, he has been thinking about what to do for this interview, the second – and longest – of three conversations we will have about Netflix’s lavish adaptation of the book that started it all.
Option one: I come to his house in Brisbane’s western suburbs, where he lives with his wife Fiona and their two daughters. “Which is nice, because that’s its own story. But it’s also home,” Dalton muses. Option two: Boggo Road Gaol. Where the real-life Slim Halliday, friend of the Dalton family, was really imprisoned, and where the Netflix Slim Halliday – played with XXXX-pickled gravitas by Bryan Brown – also did time. “But you can’t really get in there,” jokes Dalton. So he has settled on this: we’ll meet at City Hall, we’ll walk across the Victoria Bridge and we’ll face the river that snakes through the city that he loves and where he has lived all his life, and talk for a while. (Isn’t it nice to interview a journalist? Dalton promises that he isn’t trying to write the story for me and I almost believe him.)
You know Dalton as a two time Walkley Award-winning journalist. You also know him as a novelist, the author of Boy Swallows Universe, the tale of a big-hearted teen barrelling through a life of drug deals, crime syndicates, imprisoned mothers and alcoholic fathers on his way to becoming a writer. You’ve read it, in all probability. Since its release in 2018, Boy Swallows Universe has sold more than a million copies, won the 2019 ABIA Book of the Year and was longlisted for the Miles Franklin award. It is based on Dalton’s own childhood, written every night after the kids were asleep, while working full-time. It’s how he processed what he calls his “head shit” about what happened to him and his three brothers as kids, when their mother fell in love with one of Queensland’s most dangerous heroin dealers, and when they lived with their father in his house full of books after she was sent to prison.
A million people buying a copy of the book is one thing. Netflix sending out his story to 247 million subscribers around the world is something else entirely. “I’ve never seen anything like that for Brisbane,” Dalton agrees. “There’s a light at 5pm in this city, I call it the lemon light. And they have really captured that. I can’t wait for the world to see that.” He hopes that people “flick on and go, ‘Oh, that’s a version of our city that never gets shown.’ And we show people the beautiful side of Brisbane too,” Dalton adds. “But I find the ugly side quite beautiful as well, you know?”
He has said that if any of the family said they never wanted the novel to see the light of day, he would have stashed it in some forgotten corner of the house and honoured their wish. But they didn’t. “Joel, my oldest brother, was like, ‘It’s so funny you saw it that way.’ And what he means by that is if Joel wrote that story, it would feel like a Cormac McCarthy book. But through my eyes it came out in pinks and purples.” And then it became the fastest selling Australian debut novel of all time.
“I was scared of telling those stories,” Dalton admits. “There’s still stuff to unpack. But the great lesson of doing the thing you’re most terrified of, is that it will be the thing that, maybe, I’m here for.”
Dalton really talks like this, but he comes by it honestly, and you believe him when he says it. He spent so long before the book was released worrying about what his mum, or his brothers, or his wife, or his daughters, would think of him splaying out the guts of their family in print. (His father died in 2014, before the book was released.) But what he didn’t consider were the messages that would stream in from people halfway around the world who had never heard of Brisbane, let alone the suburb of Bracken Ridge, who found something in this tale of hope that might get them through their own darkest days. “I’m telling you, that has happened countless times. And that only came about because I went, ‘Alright, it’s time to face this stuff that I wasn’t talking about for so long.’” Dalton responds to every message, by the way. Later, he opens his Instagram to read the screed of gratitude he sent Travis Fimmel, the Vikings star who emits 500 watts of pure charisma in Boy Swallows Universe as Lyle, the character based on Dalton’s rogue of a stepfather. His DMs folder is a mess. I’ve seen celebrities with less DMs than Dalton.
Joel Edgerton read the book when it was released and called Dalton to ask if he might be interested in a coffee to talk about the rights. It was late 2018 and Edgerton was in Sydney for the GQ Men of the Year awards; Dalton recalls sitting on the plane next to someone reading a copy of the magazine with Edgerton on the cover. The author says he had been sternly warned by his agents to be “poker-faced” with the A-lister but, Dalton shrugs, Edgerton is just “so freaking charismatic”. He told Dalton that when he was young he barracked for the Parramatta Eels and drove a sky blue Holden Kingswood, just like Eli did. Edgerton gave Dalton a lift to the airport and by the time they reached the drop-off zone, Dalton had signed over the rights. “I was just that enamoured by the guy,” admits Dalton, cheerfully.
When Troy Lum, the celebrated producer behind the series, first read the book, he was struck by how it was “Australian in all the best ways”. One way is the language. In the series, Robert – Baker with “an extreme glow down,” as Dalton puts it, “poor bugger, you can’t wash the handsome off that guy” – describes restoring the family’s maroon sedan until it is “humming like a tuna patty”.
The first episode is a symphony of “fuckwits”, “dropkicks” and “rack offs”. Boy Swallows Universe arrives on the heels of Netflix’s award-winning Australian original Heartbreak High and into an era of increased local content on streaming platforms. Between 2021 and 2022, Netflix, Stan, Prime Video, Disney+ and Paramount+ spent $668.5 million between them on Australian productions; by mid 2024, local content quotas on streaming will be regulated.
What everyone identifies in Boy Swallows Universe is its emotional core. As director Bharat Nalluri puts it: “It’s a book about drugs. And it could quite easily be bleak and dark and despairing, and Trent has filled it with hope and joy.” The magic trick of both novel and series is how its sentimentality is a feature, not a bug. The story is buoyed along by its swoony, swooping heart, by the way this family’s love is both a tender, fragile thing and a deep well of strength. “It makes you joyous, that book, and when you meet Trent it’s really obvious where that comes from,” says Nalluri. His pitch was simple: “If we can capture 50 per cent of the energy that Trent has, we’ll have a great show.”
During production, Lum says the mantra was, “What would Trent do?” When changes were made, producers tried to make them delicately, and in the spirit of the text. “Every time we deviated from the plot in some way, he’d always make a point in telling us how great it was. That’s such a rare thing for an author to do,” jokes Lum. “It’s usually the other way around.” Dalton heaps praise upon a key difference in the series: greater space given to the relationship between Frankie and Robert. “They kind of lived my dreams,” Dalton sighs. “Simon and Phoebe having beautiful moments that almost happened in real life but never quite got to happen.” (Nalluri says he asked Dalton’s wife if he was really this upbeat all the time. “I don’t believe anyone could be so positive. And she said, ‘That’s him!’”)
The producers considered South Australia, but in truth, production could only have taken place in Queensland. Doors were literally opened; Dalton is the state’s treasured golden son. “You can feel the fact that it was shot in the places where it was set,” says Lum. A pivotal party scene at a Vietnamese eatery in episode two was filmed at the actual Que Huong restaurant in Darra that inspired the same scene in the novel. Lyle And Robert’s homes, Queenslanders fringed by frangipani trees, are real houses in the suburbs of Beenleigh and Wavell Heights. (So beloved were the cast and crew that they were invited to the street Christmas party.) The result is a setting that feels like a whole world, shimmering with life and expanding far beyond the edge of the screen.
The book also proved to be the best advertisement during casting. “Often you’re chasing around after people trying to make them read things, but people ran towards it,” shares casting director Nikki Barrett. She was looking for “inner qualities” within actors that spoke to something elemental about their characters. For Baker, it was a chance to “challenge himself” as Robert, whose agoraphobia has given way to alcohol dependence. (Of Baker, Dalton has this to say: “My old man’s dead and I just wish he could see it. Simon Baker made my old man live for eight hours.”) For Fimmel, the first person cast, it was his combination of nuclear charm and endearing innocence. Tonkin has a blend of fragility and strength that worked perfectly for Frankie. And for Sophie Wilde, as the dogged reporter Caitlyn Spies, the object of Eli’s every affection, it was her “inner light”. “You could just see that a kid would be dreaming about her,” says Barrett.
All that was left was finding Eli, the heart and soul and curly-haired face of the series. “It wasn’t until we were really deep into production, I realised, ‘Wow. If we’d got that wrong, we would have been in trouble,” admits Lum, the producer. But he needn’t have worried. “I think the world’s going to fall in love with that boy.”
Felix Cameron logs on to his mother Sharni’s Zoom on a Friday afternoon in September – “After school!”, a Netflix publicist sweetly explains – with a smile. He’s 14 years old without an ounce of self-consciousness, just pure, voluble energy and an earnest curiosity about the world. “He’s mini Trent,” affirms Nalluri.
Having previously starred alongside Naomi Watts in Penguin Bloom, the teenager stood out in a sea of more than a hundred serious child actors auditioning for young Eli. “As soon as we saw Felix, it was pretty obvious,” says Nalluri.
He’s also very funny. “All these kids, they had notebooks and they were writing down all the key things about the show,” Cameron recalls of the lengthy months of auditions. “And I’m going, I’m absolutely stuffed!” While preparing for the role, his mother gave him carte blanche to swear around the house, even in front of his younger siblings. “At the start… we would be in a separate room and we’d make sure to keep it pretty quiet so the others didn’t hear,” Cameron grins. “By the end, we were in the living room screaming at each other, going, ‘F you! You little!’ I got pretty good at it.” Does he miss it? Cameron looks sheepish. “They might have crept in a little bit.”
His worst day on set was on episode one, when he ends up trapped in the family outhouse. “When I was in the poo,” Cameron says, without hesitation. “It was just gross.” His proudest moment was filming the knockout monologue at the end of that same episode, when Eli (who Cameron describes as “cheeky” and “courageous” – “if he was at my school, I’d be best friends with him”) confronts his stepfather Lyle about dealing heroin, all his tears on the outside. “It’s the pivotal emotional scene in the series,” says Nalluri, who had a sense, he adds, “that it was gonna come quickly”. His instinct was correct; Cameron shot just a single take. “I remember Travis came up to me after and said, “That is really unfair.’”
When the novel came out, Dalton used to protest that Eli was only “partly inspired by my life”. “But he’s totally me,” affirms Dalton. Of course he is: the boy who tells brilliant stories, who cries all the time – not because he’s “a pussy” but because he “gives a shit”, as Lyle puts it in episode one of Boy Swallows Universe – and loves his family. As such, Dalton feels “really protective” of Cameron. Watching the series for the first time, Dalton cried every time Cameron teared up on screen. “We’re a part of each other now,” Dalton reflects. “I just hope [the story is] not too much of a weight for him.”
There was one day on set when Cameron’s mother couldn’t accompany him, and because Cameron is a minor, a guardian was required, so she asked if Dalton would mind stepping in. Driving to set, Cameron would occasionally pipe up with the kind of guileless, wrenching question from a child that can casually break a man’s heart, such as: “‘Trent, did you really feel like that when your mum went to prison?’”
“I’m like, ‘Yeah man, I did’,” says Dalton, a little teary. “I wrote whole frigging books because I missed my mum on Christmas Day.”
Cameron loves Dalton. “He worked so hard to get from where he was as a kid,” the teenager says. “It kind of makes you go, like, geez. I’ve got a good life. I’ve got absolutely no excuse if I’m a shitty bloke, you know?” Cameron grins. (Eli’s vocabulary hasn’t quite left him yet.) “When I get older, I wanna be like him.”
In truth, the past five years have beenstrange for Dalton. He’s dealing with all the Boy Swallows Universe “head shit” in real time: the highs – celebrating each casting rumour with his wife in the kitchen – and the lows. More highs than lows, to be fair, absolutely a lot more, but the lows come at you fast. The week Boy Swallows Universe won the ABIA was the same week Dalton turned 40, and also when his youngest daughter, then 10, told him her fear that they weren’t as close as they had once been. “Total dad failure,” Dalton remembers.
“The weirdness of some of this stuff is that it can very easily take you away from what you are meant to be here for,” says Dalton.
“Here’s the truth about my old man,” he continues. “That guy had so many demons, but he was a better dad than I’ve probably been in the past five years. My old man, he was terrible. Maybe two nights a week, the worst. But the other five, the greatest human being you could ever be around – so present in myself and my brother’s lives, so much love, so interested in us, wanted to make us better, wanted us to not follow in his footsteps… He puts me to shame sometimes. That’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot. And I don’t wanna be too hard on myself. I am there. I’m always there.”
Because what was it all for if not for them? Dalton’s daughters have a cameo in Boy Swallows Universe. It’s an unassuming scene: teens milling around the tuck shop, presided over by Frankie. When Dalton was a kid, and his mum was in prison, his classmates demanded to know why she was never helping out at school. “I’d make up stories,” he shares, “because I didn’t have what I have at 44, which is immense pride for that woman who spent two years of her life, this very small period, doing time. And it absolutely doesn’t define her one bit. If anything, it just adds to her freaking amazing character that she could go through that, come back, be this really, really great mum and now an incredible grandma to my two daughters.”
The scene comes after Frankie has gotten clean, a harrowing sequence in which Lyle locks her inside while Tonkin – giving an astonishingly exposing performance – rages at the wall, a version of which really happened. When Dalton first watched those scenes with his family, everybody wept. “I hadn’t expected how much it would mean to my daughters to show them,” he reflects. He told them: “Don’t ever be embarrassed by this stuff about your grandma, the way I feared telling that story as a kid.”
I’ve seen the series. In every episode, there are indelible sequences: Slim Halliday teaching young Eli to drive, a breakout at the children’s hospital, a break-in at Boggo Road Gaol, the final pursuit at the Queensland Champions – “whizzbang” and thrilling televisual magic, soundtracked by the finest Australian “bangers”, from INXS to Paul Kelly to Midnight Oil, Dalton’s favourite thing about the series. “But for me, the magic is in the sun shining through the tuck shop windows and seeing Frankie happy, just living this very ordinary life. Which is kind of what my mum always wanted, and which she has now,” says Dalton. “It’ll just pass by people. But that, for me, is the most deeply significant scene, because for mum, that’s the win.”
In late October, I call Dalton on the phone. He has seen the whole show and is more moved than he can say. “They swung for the fence,” he reflects. “I’m just so proud of how powerful and full-hearted it actually is.” He’s also experiencing an overwhelming sense of closure. “I genuinely feel like this is the thing that I was put on the Earth to do, and that it makes all that early stuff make sense,” Dalton begins. “But I am done.” He’s ready to “write about a whole bunch of things I know about as an adult”, leaving his teenage avatar behind.
When we spoke in June, he was desperate to show his mum the series while also concerned for her reaction, especially watching the scenes sketched from real life, easier to absorb on the page than in Netflix technicolour. “She’s sitting there with my daughters, who she just lives for, and she’s crying. She’s crying in the most random places because it’s prompting memories,” he shares. “She’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s true.’ Or, ‘Trent, that’s a bit much.’” Dalton is in awe of his mum. “It’s so amazing to look back at that time for her and go – there hasn’t been a hole in her wall for quite some time, put it that way.” The family binge-watch ended with a group hug, a Dalton trademark the writer mined from his own family for Boy Swallows Universe. “Now, though, it’s my mum, and my wife and daughters. It’s the future version, you know?”
Sometimes, you just need a group hug. “There were no particular words or anything. It was all feeling.” At any rate, the things Dalton would want to say, she already knew. Because they’re written into the novel, stitched right into the fabric of this tale of how, “as cheesy as it sounds, love will always get a family through”. How all the “dark stuff” of his childhood might one day be turned into a book, which would reshape itself in front of his eyes into a television series, not softer than real life exactly, because all the sharp edges are still there, but kinder, somehow, and suffused with lemon light. How that book, and the television show after it, can stand as evidence of hope and survival in ways that continue to surprise the person who dreamt them into existence. How mother and son might, one day, stand at the kitchen table with a beer and talk about that time in their lives, not with the shame of what happened but the pride that they had made it through. How, one day, it’ll get so good you won’t even remember it was bad. b
Boy Swallows Universe streams on Netflix from January 11, 2024
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