How Kate Box juggled family and a sweary script filming mystery-comedy Deadloch in Tasmania

Aussie actor Kate Box has opened up about the challenges she experienced on the set of the new Aussie show that will screen worldwide on Amazon Prime.

Kate Box stars in the new Amazon Prime Video comedy mystery Deadloch.

It’s the last few days of filming on the noir crime comedy Deadloch and Kate Box is feeling bittersweet about the shoot wrapping.

It’s a sunny, but typically frosty late Autumn day in Tasmania, Box’s magnificent mane is pulled away from her face, as she sits with the rest of the cast eating lunch.

It was full-on, five-month shoot in stunning locations for the Amazon Prime Video Australian original and while she’s sad about leaving the now tight-knit cast and crew and the beautiful island, Box is ready for a rest.

“Nobody wants the job to be over – it’s just been a total joy. But I think we could all happily knock off for a couple of weeks and have a lie down,” she says.

“Have a gin, see our families and then probably we could get straight back into it.

“As a cast we just continue to be delighted by the material.”

Box did bring her wife Jada Alberts and their three children. The family has largely enjoyed a fairly transient life before they started school – with stints in Melbourne, Broome and Box’s hometown of Adelaide, before settling in Sydney.

When it was clear that she just had to take the role after falling “wildly in love” with the script, they just packed up and headed south to make it work. When we chat on Zoom ahead of the eight-part series dropping this week, Box says her family truly loved it.

Kate Box and Madeleine Sami as mismatched cops in the comedy mystery Deadloch.

“They had a great time, they were only saying yesterday about how much they want to go back,” she shares. “They thoroughly loved the island. Everybody keeps saying ‘don’t move until you’ve experienced a winter’, but there’s something very enticing about the island.”

But it wasn’t all waterfall walks and surfing, it was a juggle to balance the long hours on set with family duties.

“You know, when you kind of creep in at night and you realise that you haven’t seen them all day and that’s right in front of you, that can be really confronting,’ Box explains.

“But the thought of being away from them for that amount of time is not one I could stomach. They’re just too little.”

Although it occasionally made the task of learning lines difficult.

“Trying to learn lines while cooking dinner, while changing a nappy … you know, it’s tricky,” Box says with a laugh.

“And sometimes the lines you are learning are not the lines that you want to say out loud in front of children. So there had to be a little bit of compartmentalising.”

Box is fastidious Senior Sergeant Dulcie Collins in the highly anticipated show, which will drop its first three episodes today. The eight-episode series is set in the fictional Tasmanian town of Deadloch, a once-sleepy seaside hamlet where residents are left reeling when a local man turns up dead on the beach. Two female detectives are thrown together to solve the case, Box’s Collins and a rough-as-guts blow-in from Darwin, Senior Investigator Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami).

Box laughs as she confesses she’s more reminiscent of her character Dulcie than the renegade Eddie.

“I do like following rules – I like ticking things off,” she says.
“I don’t like getting in trouble. I really don’t like that. I have that in common with Dulcie. Getting in troubles makes both of us feel incredibly tiny.”

Longtime friends Kate McClennan and Kate McCartney dreamt up Deadloch together.

But the AACTA-award winner wishes she had a streak of the Eddie character.

“I’d find that a really joyful way to walk through the world,” she says.

“So maybe I can be Eddie at the pub and Dulcie at work.”

It’s a slight change of pace for Deadloch creators, the two Kates – McLennan and McCartney. The Melbourne-based friends and comedians had already had huge success with food parody YouTube/ABC TV series The Katering Show in 2015 and again with breakfast television satire series Get Krack!n in 2017.

They somewhat stumbled on to the crime genre when they were both new mums, breastfeeding ”their “perfect little unspoilt humans” through the night.

“So we just started watching stuff, and for some reason – and I don’t know what this says about our mental state – we started watching crime dramas, European, Scandi noir-type crime dramas,” McCartney explains.

“And then also (British crime drama) Broadchurch, things like that. Although because Olivia Colman was in it, I jumped to the conclusion that it was a comedy, so I got a rude shock.

“But there was something about that character where she was still funny in that show.

“And we thought, ‘Well, what if you just dialled up the comedy a bit more?’”

And they’ve done it to perfection, balancing the dark and gruesome murders, with their quirky characters and humour interwoven throughout.

It’s an amazing cast filled with a blend of familiar and new faces throughout.

Box had worked with Pamela Rabe during her time on prison drama Wentworths, but not many of the rest of the large ensemble, which also includes Nina Oyama, Tom Ballard, Alicia Gardiner, Katie Robertson, Susie Youssef, Kris McQuade, Duncan Fellows, as well as Holly Austin, Kartanya Maynard and Naarah.

Kate Box and Nina Oyama shooting Deadloch in Tasmania.

Deadloch will be available to 200 million Prime Video subscribers in 240 countries and territories across the globe. So it’s an exciting time for all the Kates.

“The level of support that we’ve had from an international company to tell this very specific story with specific cultural references and themes has been really fantastic,” McLennan says.

McCartney adds: “We all exist in a world now where it doesn’t really matter what country something comes from to a consumer. The specificities are what make it exciting and good.

“But there are human, universal truths – no matter where a show comes from, so the fact that they got that was fantastic.”

Box won her AACTA for her portrayal of gay rights activist Marg McCann in the telemovie Riot and has spoken about how it was refreshing to be a queer actor playing a queer role on Wentworth for two seasons with her on-screen love Zoe Terakes.

“It never happens that you get two queer actors playing queer roles in mainstream TV; it’s a pretty rare thing. You feel that responsibility, but also it’s really exciting and really freeing.”

In Deadloch, she again gets to flesh out a similar (although way less tragic) love story, married to Cath (Gardner).

Box is excited for the continued direction of Australian productions on international streaming giants.

“We’ve just got to make sure we are not just telling Australian content – but that we are telling a broad range of Australian content,” she says.

“There are a lot of communities who have been sidelined within our film and television landscape. I think that having content on screen that is representative of who we are is crucial.

“The more opportunities to bring our stories to the screen, the more responsibility we have to bring a wide, range of stories. And that’s really exciting to see.”

Deadloch, Friday, Amazon Prime Video

Originally published as How Kate Box juggled family and a sweary script filming mystery-comedy Deadloch in Tasmania