Mark Coles Smith comes full circle for Mystery Road: Origin

When Mark Coles Smith was close to signing on for the prequel series Mystery Road: Origin, he was fielding calls from Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell to please return for more sketches of Curiosity Cul de Sac.

After all he had been so convincing in the cheeky parodies of ABC drama Mystery Road. But if life was coming full circle, then not everybody at ABC knew what was to come.

“I had to stop doing one so I could do the other. There’s only so much suspension of disbelief and emotional distance that audiences can be expected to make!” he tells TV Tonight.

“Personally, I think Shaun is a genius. If I hadn’t been snapped up for Origin I’d probably still be doing those comedy skits, because they’re just so much fun.

“I heard a rumour I’d made one half of Bunya Productions grumpy about it long before I was involved, and the other half thought it was extremely amusing.

“It’s been  one of the more unusual flight paths in the series. I’ve got no explanation for how I managed to pull it off.”

“It’s just a vehicle. Get in it and drive”

In adopting the role of young police detective Jay Swan, Coles Smith did get the blessing of the man who had created the role -Aaron Pedersen.

“Aaron called me when the announcement was made last year to pass the torch and tell me that he was proud of me and hoped I would really enjoy the experience. It’s just a vehicle. Get in it and drive,” he recalls.

“I went back to the films to look at the body language and looked at everything he was doing. When it came time to shoot, I think there was there was enough understanding about what all those character traits were, so that I was able to just let everything go.

“A little bit cockier, a little bit more uncertain, a bit more vulnerable”

“I just wanted to not be thinking about any of that. To just have enough understanding about the timeline of Jay, which we built with Dylan (River, director), about where he ends up and who he is as and being clear about the freedoms of what he could do as a younger person. He can be a little bit cockier, a little bit more uncertain, a bit more vulnerable, he can smile a bit. That’s kind of woven through, while at the same time retaining the core that continues to grow

The six-part series will explore how a tragic death, an epic love, and the brutal reality of life as a police officer straddling two worlds, form, Detective Jay Swan. The series is set in 1999 in his first posting in a mining town, Jardine.[/caption]

Coles Smith, whose body of work includes The Circuit, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Halifax: Retribution, Hard Rock Medical, The Gods of Wheat Street, Sweet As and Last Cab to Darwin, now takes centrestage in his biggest series so far.

“This is definitely the first of this scale… mainstream television, an established series with with a lead role performance by one of Australia’s best male actors. Aaron Pedersen has done such an incredible job forming and shaping Jay Swan into an iconic status. I was super nervous with the whole proposal to step in. It took a bit of discussion with our director Dylan River, who has done such an amazing job, about why it was warranted to go back, what we were going to do, what was going to be distinct about it, and how it was going to be it’s own thing, so that I wasn’t stepping on toes while trying on boots.

“Bunya Productions, and two thirds of the crew, had done the previous seasons”

“I was really lucky in the sense that regardless of the fact that it was not just a very significant lead role for me, but a lead role for a franchise already well established. But I was really lucky in the sense that predominantly, the production team that I was working with, had done all of this before. Bunya Productions, and two thirds of the crew, had done the previous seasons. It was a well-oiled machine. For me it was just a matter of trusting the process and caring about the character.”

The series also features Toby Leonard Moore, Daniel Henshall, Lisa Flanagan, Clarence Ryan, Steve Bisley, Caroline Brazier, Hayley McElhinney, Serene Yunupingu and Kelton Pell. With Dylan River and cinematographer Tyson Perkins the show is also in the hands of young First Nations creatives, fitting given the “origin” themes of the piece. Yet it still aims to retain the hallmarks of the two previous and critically acclaimed seasons (S2 was co-directed by River’s father Warwock Thornton).

“There’s definitely a slow burn quality to it. There’s a lot of breathing space and I really enjoyed a quirky daginess which bubbles to the surface and then sort of disappears back into this kind of heavier Gothic Outback atmosphere,” Coles Smith explains.

“I really enjoyed having the space for reflection. The space of curiosity and wondering….”

“I said that I only wanted to do one season of this”

But if it is anything like the success of its predecessors, is there room for another origin tale?

“I said that I only wanted to do one season of this and I wanted to be able to achieve an origin story for Jay that took place in a single season,” he insists.

“But there’s a lot more here that we can do. We were having some big discussions as we came to the finish line in Kalgoorlie last year about what could be next and how far we could take everything that’s potentially about to happen.”

Mystery Road: Origin screens 8:30 Sundays on ABC.