Neighbours 2023 reboot: Shock wedding no one expected
We go behind the scenes of Neighbours with the cast before the new series returns with a surprise wedding. See the video.
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He’d been the trusted doctor on Ramsay St for 28 years, dispensing advice and prescriptions to Erinsborough, but Alan Fletcher almost needed a dose of Dr Karl’s kind medicine to calm his nerves on his first day back to work on the revived Neighbours.
“The day started normally until I realised there were so many new people to meet and new work practices to get my head around,” he said.
“I was actually quite nervous working in the new environment. It was a bit like being on a new show.”
His on-screen wife Jackie Woodburne had the same butterflies. While it felt like she walked off the sprawling Nunawading set only yesterday, it was also akin to starting a brand, new job where she’d never been before.
“While a good proportion of the old cast and crew came back, there was obviously quite an influx of new people – which is great …,” she said.
“But, there was this sense of having to relearn the language a little bit. When we left, we all knew each other backwards, forwards, up and down and we all had a shorthand and a kind of an intuitive way that we all related to each other.”
While it took a few months, Woodburne is relieved that they have all got their groove back.
“We’ve got those language shortcuts again,” she says.
“We’re not shy around one another. We have that intimacy that’s growing and that just feels amazing.”
It was one of those time-stopped-completely moments for Woodburne when executive producer Jason Herbison casually dropped in to tell her the iconic soap had found its white knight.
“I was very much like ‘I think I know what you mean. But you have to use your words. You can’t play with me like this’,” she shared, adding it was an unequivocal – and immediate – yes to becoming Susan again.
“It was ‘Yes please. When do I come back? What day? Give me a time and I’ll be there’.
“It was a little pre-Christmas miracle.”
But she made the most of her time off – the lengthiest ever in her career. Woodburne caught up with friends – and got back in touch with herself too, going to pilates three times a week and a daily walk.
While Woodburne didn’t make as many life-altering decisions as some of her castmates – such as Rebekah Elmaloglou who famously sold her Melbourne house and relocated north with her family – the 67-year-old did book a month-long European getaway, which fell smack bang in the middle of the rebooted filming. Producers worked around everybody, accommodating all the plans into the notoriously full-on schedule.
Neighbours returns to our screens – and to its original home on Channel 10’s main channel – on Monday. The highly anticipated return to Ramsay St, which was thrown a lifeline by Amazon Freevee and Prime Video after its lengthy farewell, is two years down the track and while many things remain the same there’s a distinctly different feel to the new chapter.
The opening two episodes focus on a wedding - and with some 63 weddings under their belts, the soap’s writers knows how todo a nuptial well - but the bold twist of just who gets married will shock long-time fans. Promos hint it could be anyonefrom the reunited Mike (Guy Pearce) and Jane (Annie Jones), or Paul (Stefan Dennis) who’s seen looking pensive and exclaiming “nothing can go wrong today”.
Elmaloglou - who’s back as Paul’s on-again, off-again on screen love Terese - says if production really wanted tograb attention, they’ve succeeded with the wedding.
“I think viewers will be pretty shocked,” she hints. “They’ll go through a heap of different emotions, but ultimately I thinkthey’ll be excited.”
Mischa Barton and Pearce are guest stars and join the much loved familiar – or as they’re being termed “heritage” faces – including Fletcher, Woodburne, Elmaloglou, Dennis, Jones, Ryan Moloney, Georgie Stone and Tim Kano, alongside new kids onthe block Shiv Palekar, Sara West, Naomi Rukavina and Xavier Molyneux.
West and Rukavina are wives Cara and Remi and with their sons JJ and Dex form the Varga-Murphy family – the newest Erinsborough residents.
West – who was nominated for a Most Outstanding Newcomer Logie for her role as Liza Minnelli in Peter Allen: Not the Boy Next Door – called the first few weeks a “baptism by fire”.
“We jumped right into the deep end. It’s been a great way to learn how the whole show works, it’s an absolute beast of a machine and everyone’s just so on top of it. It’s been really good to be part of something that runs so well,” she said.
Rukavina said they were welcomed with open arms by the stalwarts. Moloney made sure they got the iconic first day pic on set. And gave them some of his own fresh farm laid eggs.
“Alan offered to always talk over anything with me as an actor with a real generosity with his time and rehearsing anything that felt inauthentic or uncomfortable,” she said, before adding how she and West got the giggles the first time they heard Ian Smith be Harold Bishop in “their” house.
West had previously auditioned for a various roles on the Aussie institution but nothing felt right until down-to-earth, apprentice electrician Cara. Neighbours has long been at the forefront of representation on Australian TV – from one of the first same sex kisses to the first same-sex wedding.
“The Varga-Murphy family is another great step forward,” West said.
“I guess I’m most excited about people being able to see our family on screen and maybe see a little piece of themselves in there.
“It’s just so refreshing to be part of a really solid, wholesome, nuclear family with queer parents and just to know that that’s going to be blasted out across Australian televisions,” she added. “It’s so reassuring to know that I’m part of a legacy that will hopefully go into people’s homes and make some people feel a little bit less alone.”
West is thrilled at being able to star in such a major series, representing the LGBTQIA+ community.
“If I had seen queer women on screen when I was in my teenage years or early 20s, they would have been far less confusing and isolating and way less daunting,” she said.
Rukavina also has a deeply personal connection to Neighbours.
“When my mother immigrated to Australia, Neighbours was on and now I’m on the show she practised her English speaking skills with,” she said.
And her role as a stickler-for-the-rules doctor has even more significance. When Rukavina was a young actor just starting out on the audition circuit, she was told she would never be cast in an Aussie TV family.
“It was like I had been punched in the gut,” Rukavina shares. “No matter I had worked my butt off, graduated from a top drama school. It was irrelevant if I was good actor let alone the best person for the job, I wasn’t white. That was it.
“So 10 years later being a face of diversity and inclusion in a loving racially mixed, blended and queer family, in Australia’s longest-running TV institution is quite the accomplishment.
“I’m thrilled the decision makers on Neighbours are choosing to accurately display what Australian families look like.”
Neighbours, Monday, 4.30pm, Ten (encore 6.30pm on 10Peach)
Originally published as Neighbours 2023 reboot: Shock wedding no one expected
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