Source : the age
There’s a body waiting at the bottom of an outback mine shaft for Detective Ivan Lucic. “Why me?” he asks the unknown voice on the other end of the phone.
“You need a tan,” comes the deadpan reply.
And so begins Treasure and Dirt, the six-part ABC drama adapted from Chris Hammer’s best-selling crime novel set in the fictional opal mining town of Nulla, where (of course) nothing is as it seems. If that sounds hokey, it’s really not. And when you consider it follows hot on the heels of The Killings at Parrish Station, another local drama that gives the staid crime genre a solid kick in the shins, it proves murder mysteries, done the Australian way, are in rude health.
And just as The Killings at Parrish Station is held together by a terrific pair of twin performances from Mia Wasikowska and Heather Mitchell, Treasure and Dirt is centred on Michael Dorman as Lucic, a tightly wound detective who wears his suit as armour, and local rookie detective Nell Buchanan, played by Liv Hewson. In true genre fashion, they are both trying to outrun their past, but it’s more Wake In Fright than Midsomer Murders.
“There’s so many shows I’ve done where it’s this love theme,” says Dorman. “Where these two people come together and it’s romantic, they experience this thing, and it’s amazing, and that shifts their world. I loved that this was two humans coming together. It wasn’t about romance, it was two humans stripping each other back and seeing each other. I just f—ing loved it.”
Dorman – Kiwi-born, kinda claimed (or assumed) as one of our own – is sitting at an outside table at a cafe in Los Angeles with his phone propped up so we can see each other over Zoom while we talk (and he eats).
“It’s bright,” he says. “I have sunnies on. Here’s my eyes. Hello there [leaning into the camera]. It’s so bright I had to put sunnies on. It’s always weird when you’re chatting to someone, and they’ve got sunglasses on. So some serious apologies.”
Dorman’s (justified) enthusiasm for Treasure and Dirt goes beyond the PR hamster wheel. The 45-year-old – who first broke through in 2002 in The Secret Life of Us as baby-faced musician Christian and has since carved an impressive career in the US in under-the-radar series Patriot (Amazon Prime Video) and For All Mankind (Apple TV) and last year’s local Netflix hit Territory – has been around the block long enough to know when he sees something that he likes.
“We are creatures of comfort,” he says. “I feel like I can lull into a space of comfort at times, as we all do, and I felt like the projects that I was working on were moving towards that space. So I was looking for someone that wanted to do something different. Someone that wasn’t afraid to take a risk and do something outside the box.”
Directed by Madeleine Gottlieb, with the bulk of the episodes written by Matt Cameron (with Kate Mulvany penning episode two), Treasure and Dirt does indeed throw caution to the wind. The camera tilts and the sense of unease is palpable, as Nulla is filled with freaks, geeks and everyone in between – including a pony-tailed mayor who enjoys his hot tub, a bizarre religious sect, a couple of warring mining magnates and an underground fight club.
“The script reads as a crime show, which it is – we’re really good at doing the procedural crime shows – but the thing that was a real kicker was sitting down with the director,” Dorman recalls. “She talked to me about her vision, and I called my team straight afterwards and said. ‘Absolutely, yes.’
“What she set out to do was something that I’d been waiting for someone to want to do, and for me to be a part of. It’s interesting because, on some jobs, you’re wooed by the powers-that-be, and you come in and you’re so excited, and then once you actually get going on the project, things shift. That’s just how it goes.
“This was one of those [shows] where something was pitched, and when we got on the floor, that was exactly what we were trying to do. I worked on a show called Patriot a long time ago, and that was one where Amazon had just started streaming, and it was the perfect sweet spot, to be in a position where everyone said, ‘Cool, let’s do something so different.’ It had been a long time between drinks, in finding that perfect cocktail, where things were working in our favour, where we were able to flip everything on its head and try and do something that is a little bit risky.”
Conversely, Dorman’s character, Lucic, is a man who appears to be completely averse to risk. He is brittle and buttoned up in every sense of the word – even, at one point, showering in his suit – and wary of the new environment he finds himself in.
“He has this idea about the way that he should be, the way that he should look,” says Dorman of Lucic. “And it’s all driven from his own demons. We all have our own personal demons.”
Dorman’s performance is such a big swing, even his wife questioned what he was up to when she visited him on set.
“She watched the first take of what we were doing and she came after and said, ‘You’ve really, really taken this one out there,’” he says, laughing.
Finding Lucic involved Dorman driving nine hours from Adelaide to the show’s set in Coober Pedy, so he could start to get a sense of his character. He then stayed in one of the town’s underground properties. A culture shock from LA, if ever there was one.
“It’s magical out there, it’s dangerous out there,” he says. “You’re alone with whatever’s happening with you when it’s night. You can’t see your hand in front of your face. I was staying 10 metres underground. I’d never been in a dugout before. The way that it moves, the temperature never shifts, it’s deafening silence. It’s unbelievable.”
Has he noticed a certain averseness to risk in Hollywood? There has been an ongoing chat about the sameness creeping into streaming shows, which is why when something like Widow’s Bay – a show unapologetically different – comes along, everyone sits up and takes notice.
“I feel like I’ve been really lucky in the shows that I have done,” he says. “I like to stick around for a minute, you know. Generally, I’ll do a couple seasons, so you really get a compass for what people are trying to say, and I’ve been lucky. But obviously, a lot of people that I know, friends, have different experiences.
“I feel like sometimes money is your friend, and sometimes money is not your friend. [With Treasure and Dirt] we weren’t, you know, bleeding from the gills with bills, we were in a space where it was, ‘OK, we’re all here together with the same idea about why we’re here and what we want to achieve, and there’s a lot that strikes against us, but here we all go.’”
Luck is what landed Dorman his big break in The Secret Life of Us. He was 21 and had just finished studying in Brisbane, when the show’s co-creator Amanda Higgs plucked him from relative obscurity and put him in the middle of what was then the biggest show on TV.
“It was the sought-after role,” he says. “Everyone wanted that role. I’ve just come out of drama school, I was living on the streets in Sydney, and then I go and do this audition, and Amanda Higgs says, ‘Yeah, come and do this show.’ Dude, I didn’t know what a mark was [where to stand for filming]. I was a theatre actor, and it just fully shifted everything.
“The insight for me was what it’s like to be in the public eye, you know, from sitting on the corner going, ‘Please, can I have $1’ to, ‘No, you don’t have to pay for anything any more. Get in, no, it’s free for you.’ It was ‘What the f—?’ It was wild.”
Treasure and Dirt was wild in its own way. “What I learned when I was out there was that the opals will always find you,” he says. “I didn’t buy any opals, but the day that I left, as I was getting into my car, an opal found me.”
That sounds very mystical.
“It was,” he says. “These [experiences] don’t come very often, and we’re not going to see this [again] possibly for a long time, so let’s just make the most of it. Fill your cups, OK? Everyone, fill your cups, fill your pockets, if you can, take it back into real life with you. It’s gonna be OK.”
Treasure and Dirt premieres at 8.30pm on Sunday, July 19, on the ABC and ABC iview.
