Underbelly: It’s a wrap

Underbelly wrapped its production yesterday, ending a long shoot of a series  in very fast turnaround. Five episodes have already been to air.

In it’s first night the show managed a whopping 2.5m viewers, and impressively it has remained above the 2m mark each week.

According to actor Matt Passmore there was little time to celebrate on set. Most of the cast and crew, who have seen success before, had more pressing issues to address.

“Everyone’s very experienced and they’ve worked on a lot of shows,” he said. “So you take it with a wink and a pat on the back and then it’s ‘man, look at our schedule today!'”

He says the everyone involved in the production has been under the pump to get the show in the can.

“There’ll be celebrations at the cast party when the job’s done.”

Nevertheless, he acknowledges the show is hot right now. This week it took another 2.23m viewers.

“An actor without an audience is pretty much just pulling faces in a mirror by himself. It’s the stories that you do you’re doing for an audience. Otherwise it’s just a tree falling in the woods.

“I only saw it for the first time on that first night myself. I thought the feel of it was just brilliant. It evokes a type of nostalgia that I think is very much in Sydney’s psyche. Being a Brisbane boy I knew all about the Fitzgerald Inquiry but I had no idea about this sort of period.”

Playing one of the drama’s cops, Passmore says his ‘day at the office’ was a lot of fun.

“When you’re on set and the road’s filled with Valiants and Kingswoods and the cop shop’s just full of cigarette smoke and half the actors have got mo’s and the other half don’t, it draws you into that world.”

On the back of storylines centred around Donald Mackay, Robert Trimbole and the Great Bookie Robbery, Underbelly will also draw upon the beginnings of the Australian Federal Police.

“My character’s a cop who joins a task force to follow the crims. One of the great things about the series that hasn’t been touched on yet is the formation of the Federal Police Force from the Commonwealth.

“They went to the Prime Minister and said ‘listen we need to do something about all the corruption and narcotics and all that stuff.’

“It started to make an impact. The Commonwealth cops weren’t taken too seriously before that.”

Passmore is also appearing in The Cut on the ABC.

Underbelly airs 8:30pm Mondays on Nine.