When Hollywood actor Toby Leonard Moore was offered a meeting with Marta Dusseldorp and Andrew Knight, co-creators of new TV series Bay Of Fires, he assumed it was because of his Tasmanian connections.

However, it wasn’t until the online meeting was well under way, and Dusseldorp and Knight were explaining the concept to Moore and outlining how the project would be filmed in Tasmania, that Moore – a proud Tasmanian – was able to reveal his Tassie links.

“I remember we got on Zoom,’’ the 42-year-old recalls.

“And I think it was Andrew describing to me the concept of Tassie as a place. And I said ‘oh, mate, I grew up in Tassie, I thought that was one of the reasons we were talking’.’’

After having a laugh at what Dusseldorp describes as “totally fortuitous”, their conversation continued and Moore eventually landed a major role in the eight-part comedic crime drama which is set to air on ABC TV on July 16.

Moore, who is best known for his roles alongside Keanu Reeves in 2014 film, John Wick, and Tom Hanks in Steven Spielberg’s 2010 miniseries, The Pacific, as well as more recent roles in shows including Daredevil (available to watch in Australia on Disney+), The Blacklist (Netflix), Billions (Stan) and The Unusual Suspects (SBS).

He was born in Sydney but spent his formative years in Tasmania – he’s the son of actor, voice artist and motivational speaker Robyn Moore, who is best known for voicing 90s cartoon character Blinky Bill, which inspired his own love of performing.

Moore left the state to study at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA) in Sydney before heading overseas to further his career.

And after living in America for 12 years, Moore says he never imagined being able to return to his home state to film a highly-anticipated new TV series which would showcase the beauty of Tasmania – and the state’s local acting and production talent – to the world.

He and his wife, actor Michelle Vergara Moore, came back to Australia to work for three months just as the pandemic hit, when they both landed roles in TV series The Unusual Suspects, which was being filmed in Sydney.

“There were about 1000 deaths a day in New York at that point, it was pretty grim,’’ Moore recalls, adding that it seemed like the perfect time to be working in Australia.

They ended up staying for 2½ years, and were conveniently in Australia at the right time for Bay Of Fires.

“What a dream; it’s absolutely remarkable,’’ Moore says of working on the project, which was filmed on Tasmania’s West Coast from June to October last year.

“I was so thrilled when I saw Bay Of Fires pop into my inbox. Because I never thought as a kid I’d ever have an opportunity to film a project in Tassie. Back then I saw the only way of working in the industry was to go to NIDA and live in Sydney or Melbourne or America.

“I read the first few scripts (for Bay Of Fires) and I adored them. And then I asked for a meeting with Marta and Andrew.’’

The show, which was filmed in Queenstown, Zeehan and Strahan, follows the story of a single mum in a small, remote community bursting with simmering feuds, crime and sometimes, murder.

Anika Van Cleef (Marta Dusseldorp) is a city slicker and queen of her family’s business empire and is the last person who would want to give up her life in Melbourne and live in a remote community in the wilds of western Tasmania. But multiple attempts on her life suggest a change of address is advisable.

In a nightmare blur, a stranger who claims to be on her side provides her with a new name she hates (Stella Heikkinen) and a house.

And she and her two children find themselves in Tasmania’s Mystery Bay – a town so remote it eludes any mention on GPS. The town is not the kind of place you’ll find on postcards and the newly-named Heikkinens find Mystery Bay unlike anything life has prepared them for – a place where locals hide more secrets than they do, and outsiders are viewed with great suspicion.

Moore plays local resident Jeremiah, an “enigmatic, laconic, jack-of-all-trades” who is the first person the Heikkinens meet as they approach Mystery Bay.

After years of playing characters in business suits, Moore says he relished the chance to unleash his “inner bogan” for the role.

“I’ve been in a suit for a long time, but this guy, Jeremiah, I don’t think he’s even seen a suit before,’’ he laughs.

“He’s very enigmatic. And I think that’s true of just about every single character in Bay Of Fires. Everybody’s got some sort of secret and that’s the joy of watching it all unfold.’’

Moore says as soon as he read the script, he knew he’d stumbled upon something wonderful. And he says the wild Tassie landscape plays into the story beautifully.

“It’s warm and it’s comedic in a dark way,’’ he says of Bay Of Fires.

“It’s handled in a sardonic and irreverent way – it’s cheeky – and that’s what I love about it. I think crime drama really seems to suit Tassie.”

He says the impressive ensemble cast made the project a joy to work on.

“I signed on fairly early,’’ he says.

“Then to gradually see people I’d admired from afar, like Stephen Curry and Bob Franklin and Roz Hammond … there are too many names to mention, but I was a big fan of The Micallef Show in Tassie as a kid, so when I started to see these actors joining us, I thought ‘oh, good – this is going to be funny’.

“It’s dark and its got pathos but it’s darkly comedic – I think people are going to enjoy it.’’

The show also features Kerry Fox, Imi Mbedla, Ava Caryofyllis, Rachel House, Yael Stone, Nicholas Bell, Matt Nable, Tony Barry, Ilai Swindells, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Mitchem Everett and Tasmanians Pamela Rabe and Rhys Muldoon.

Moore had been back to Tasmania to visit family many times since moving to the US, but had rarely visited the West Coast.

“Because this is filmed on the West Coast it was really exciting,’’ he says.

“I think I’d been to Strahan before and I’d driven through Queenstown and Zeehan, so I was really looking forward to discovering that side of the island … and I really fell in love with all those three places.

He was especially thrilled to be a Tasmanian actor, working in Tasmania.

“Once I got (to the West Coast) it all felt very organic, I was also very proud to be doing that,’’ he says.

Being a Tasmanian, he also felt added pressure to ensure the project was a success.

“There’s nowhere to hide, you’ve got to get it right,’’ he says.

Moore picked up a few new skills during the filming.

In the first episode, Moore’s character arrives in a tow truck. That truck was a manual, and Moore had only ever driven an automatic, so he received lessons from a manual driving instructor before the camera rolled.

“So now I can kind of drive a tow truck,’’ he laughs.

He says the fact he’s always learning is one of the things he loves about acting.

“You’re always learning something, or brushing up on an old skill,’’ he says.

Moore got his first performing gig at the age of eight, when he narrated a short SBS documentary on Japanese vending machines.

He also has fond memories of a job with his mum, where they played mother and son advertising the new komodo dragons at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo.

“I enjoyed doing voiceover work, and I still do lot voiceover work,’’ he says. “I got into my head at about the age of nine that there was this place called NIDA and the blinders were on at that point.’’

Moore returned to the US in December. He says Americans are always interested to hear that he hails from Tasmania, and he’s excited that Bay Of Fires will showcase his home state to a global audience.

“When I did John Wick years ago, Keanu Reeves asked me where I was from and I said Tasmania and he said ‘oh, Mona’. And it blew my tiny mind,’’ Moore reveals.

“At that point he hadn’t been there, but people had told him about that amazing museum.

“I’ve been there a ton of times, it’s great; it’s one of my favourite museums on the planet.

“Americans get very excited when they see you’re from Tasmania, it’s so exotic. I love talking about it and being an ambassador.’’

He hopes Bay Of Fires inspires an influx of other Tasmanian-based projects.

“I guess we’ll have to wait and see if that’s going to change Tassie going forward,’’ he says.

“But I’m glad to see we’re being represented on camera.

“I’m really glad that Tassie has been discovered by the industry because you can point a camera anywhere on the West Coast – and anywhere in Tassie, really – and it’s a shot, it’s stunning.

He has nothing but praise for Dusseldorp, and her dedication to championing the arts in Tasmania.

“I had an absolute blast on this,’’ Moore says of Bay Of Fires. “This really is Marta’s baby … I spent most of my screen time with her … she’s fabulous.

“Also what she’s doing for the island is just incredible. She’s so committed to bringing us to Tassie and nurturing the talent that is down there.’’

MARTA Dusseldorp had never set foot in Zeehan until a couple of years ago. And when she did, she knew it was the perfect place to film Bay Of Fires.

Originally from Sydney, Dusseldorp met her Tasmanian husband – actor and director Ben Winspear – 20 years ago, and has been connected with Tasmania ever since. They spent a lot of time living and working in Sydney but made the move to Hobart to live with their two daughters five years ago.

Dusseldorp recalls a family caravanning trip when their daughters, now teenagers, were small, and remembers visiting Queenstown and Strahan, but not Zeehan.

“Ben said, ‘you’ve got to see this place, it’s so wild and beautiful’,’’ Dusseldorp recalls of the West Coast.

Then, in 2021, while writing Bay Of Fires, she and Winspear toured Venus and Adonis, with a show in Devonport as part of the Ten Days on the Island festival.

“He said, ‘Marta, I think I know where the show should be set’. And he drove me into Zeehan’s main street, and it just took my breath away,’’ she says.

Dusseldorp laughs that the tiny and remote Tassie town looked so much like a Hollywood set, that she found herself looking behind the buildings for the scaffolding that would surely be holding up the facade.

Of course the town was real, and Dusseldorp was smitten. She just needed to ensure the town’s residents were onboard with her ambitious vision.

“I met Phil Vickers, he was the local mayor,’’ Dusseldop says.

“And I said, ‘how would you feel if I made this main street the centre of an eight-part ABC series?’ And he said ‘absolutely, here’s the key and how can I help?’.

“When you get that sort of reception it just makes it a no-brainer.”

As more of her plan fell into place, with shooting locations identified at Strahan and Queenstown, Dusseldorp brought Andrew Knight to Tasmania and drove him along the winding roads to the rugged West Coast.

“As I drove Andrew – he’s going, ‘you’re mad, no one is coming here, we can’t come here, it’s too hard’,’’ Dusseldorp recalls.

“And then we drove into Zeehan, and he said ‘this is genius’.

“And the ball started rolling and never stopped.’’

Dusseldorp drew on her own personal experiences – as a mother of two children who farewelled a life in Sydney to make a new home in Tasmania – as a basis for the series.

During her long and successful theatre, film and television career, including roles in Wentworth, A Place to Call Home, BlackJack, and Janet King; Dusseldorp came to know Knight, whom she worked with on 2003 Australian miniseries After the Deluge and television drama series Jack Irish.

“We worked out we’d known each other for 20 years, we’ve always been really good friends between shows,’’ Dusseldorp says.

“I’d been bugging him, saying ‘please, let’s create a show together’.

Knowing a lot of his creative projects would have been put on hold when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Dusseldorp called Knight, who was in lockdown in Melbourne, and enticed him to the “most beautiful place in the world” with her Tasmanian-based proposal.

Then writer Max Dann came on board and the end result was Bay Of Fires, which was based on a “hodge podge of all sorts of experiences we’d all had’’.

Dusseldorp says it was encouraging that ABC quickly picked up the show, and it also sold quickly to an international distributor.

And the fact it has “one of the best (cast) ensembles you can pull together” was testament to the strong belief everyone had in the project.

“It was really lovely to dream it up, and get the finance and the belief … all these beautiful people jumped on board because they just loved the story,’’ Dusseldorp says.

Having talented Tasmanian actors in the show was important, and so was having Tasmanians working behind the scenes. About 150 cast and crew worked on the project, and were based in Queenstown for the duration of filming.

“I really wanted to put Tasmanians at the centre of the work,’’ Dusseldorp says.

“All the locals are the extras, if they’re not in front of the camera, they’re behind the camera.

“Our job on Bay Of Fires was to keep it remote and keep outside of the main cities and to me there’s so much joy in all of that. Shooting over in Queenie, once the locals got to know us, once we were embedded into the community, they started to show us their secret spots … the locals were willing to take us down a dirt track, and say ‘don’t tell anyone else’.’’

As a result, there are some secret, off-the-map locations in the show that many Tasmanians will never have seen.

“It was just lovely having a base in (Queenstown) in the dead of the winter,’’ Dusseldorp says.

“Many a Tasmanian said to me ‘you don’t want to do that’ (due to the unpredictability of the region’s weather during winter)”. But she says they were blessed with “glorious weather” and as a result have been able “see a side of Tasmania very few people have seen’’.

And while there are always going to be added challenges – and costs – when filming in a remote location, Dusseldorp says “the ease of it outweighed the difficulty getting there’’.

The project was made easier due to support from the state government and Screen Tasmania who recognised the economic benefits of shooting in regional parts of the state. Dusseldorp expects the show will give visibility to a region that is often overlooked.

“It’s so fabulous to shoot here; everywhere you look it’s just gold,’ Dusseldorp says of filming on the West Coast.

“There are no traffic lights, and we didn’t stop for anything … there’s no noise and no clutter.’’

She says everyone who worked on the project was captivated by the region.

“Everyone on set was looking at realestate.com.au’’ she says.

“And Andrew now has a place in Tasmania.’’

She says with shows like Rosehaven, Alone, Deadloch, The Kettering Incident and The Gloaming all filmed in Tasmania, the state was steadily earning a reputation as the place to be.

And as someone who has had a firm focus on strengthening the arts scene in Tasmania since moving here five years ago, while also nurturing talent through her local stage and screen company, Archipelago Productions, Dusseldorp hopes Bay Of Fires is yet another solid step in the right direction for Tasmania.

The show has already been sold to several international territories and will be seen by millions around the globe.

“This is a love letter to Tasmania from me, and Andrew, and Max – and everyone who made it,’’ Dusseldorp says.

“I can already feel the response from the internationals – it’s so unique and engaging, it’s exciting to see places we haven’t seen before.

“I’m so excited and nervous … all the feels, as my kids would say. It’s the stakes of it all. This time I co-created it, and I’ve produced it, and I’m in it.

“My DNA is in it, and my life and my breath and my love of Tasmania.

“And now that I live here it’s a much bigger deal to share it all.

“It really is a love letter to the West Coast of Tasmania and to the communities and the people in those communities.’’

“It has just been a phenomenon to experience.’’

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Bay Of Fires premieres on Sunday, July 16 at 8.30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.