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Speaker 1: It's in the news today, but it was actually on TV Reload the podcast past week.
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Speaker 2: Maline.
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Speaker 1: Welcome back guys to TV Reload. As you may know, my name is Benjamin Norris and this is your podcast to get all the inside goss on the popular TV shows you may be watching from around the world. Undeniably our TV's that's a major part of our home entertainment, and yet very little is known about how our favorite shows get made. So each episode I've been finding guests that want to dive just that little bit deeper into the shows they're currently making, so that you can hear all their exclusive stories and gain access to some of the biggest names in Australian television. I want to thank you for downloading all subscribing to this podcast however you've found me. I love hearing your feedback, so make sure you leave a review or a comment on your chosen podcast platform. On today's podcast, I have Kick Gurry, an Australian actor who has been on our screens for over two decades. Is start alongside Tom Cruise, Christina Richie, Pa Miranda and so many others in a career that he has collected relationships and connections that has led him to this series we're here to talk about today. Court is a brainchild that came out of the Melbourne Locke Downs. Kick picked up the interest of Sean Penn, signed him up as an executive producer, signed up friends Matthew Fox, Alexander London, Lincoln Unis, amongst many others. Not to mention Susan Sarandon and Brian Brown, both cinematic legends right across the globe. Court sees four Australian soldiers sent on a mission to a war torn country who were captured by freedom fighters who they convinced to produce a hostage video that goes viral. It is a satirical comedy. Even though you listen to that and think what is going on? You kind of have to watch it to believe it. But it is a bold choice and they go for last where most filmmakers would not dare. Kick is the writer, producer, director and star of Court, and I can't wait to hear how this all came together. I will talk to Kick about gaining the interest of Sean Penn and how his involvement affected the production of the show. Kick will talk about the essence of the series and how Court reflects modern society in terms of who we are on social media and the pathway to everyone now wanting to be famous. Along the way, we will unpack the giant penis scene which you might have seen in the trailer, and Kick will reveal how many people were allowed on set for that naked shoot. Plus we will get plenty of exclusives from behind the scenes of Caught, which comes out on Stann Australia September twenty eighth. So make sure you are subscribed to stand for this because it is quite hilarious. Anyway, let's bring Kick into the podcast, and I hope you enjoyed this chat, even though you can hear that I have a cold and it makes me sound like I'm seriously talking from underwater. Anyway, let's bring Kick in. How are you very excited to talk to you?
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Speaker 2: Very excited to talk to you, Benjamin. Yeah, and I'm doing good. Just feeling the heat in Sydney yesterday and today actually, which is very strange in September.
00:02:40
Speaker 3: But no, it's a very exciting time, you know, to have.
00:02:43
Speaker 2: There's a lot of people in my line and work who dream of this moment, and I certainly for twenty five years have dreamed of telling my own story and having something that I created. So I'm really just trying to soak it all in. It's a very special five years of a career for me, which has been filled with far more disappointment and failure than success, and you sort of bake that into your soul and you kind of have to get your head around the idea that this moment will never happen, that you'll never get to tell your own story. That's unfortunately the journey we're on as artists. So I'm very grateful for having forgetting to have this moment.
00:03:21
Speaker 1: Oh my god. I mean, I've been in your audience for so long. It was funny. I was actually just looking at your IMDb and I remember watching like wild Side, Sea Change, all of these performances. I remember seeing a previous screeting of Looking for Ola Brandy about four months before it was released. It was like screening for it, and I was so familiar with that book, and I thought that the casting in that movie was brilliant. So you've been in my life the whole time. And I guess when you are an actor, you're sort of measuring yourself up against your successes. But for me, it seems like you've always been amazing.
00:03:55
Speaker 3: You would be wildly inaccurate in that. Remember that's your that's that's your that's your reality. That's bad. I wish I could live in that.
00:04:03
Speaker 2: But no, I just in some ways, I wouldn't really change much about the journey. I've been so lucky to have worked on the things I have, and I've always had a real instinct to drift towards things like wild Side and Sea Change, and that wasn't by choice early in my career, they were the first jobs I got. But working with Kerry Armstrong and John Howard on Sea Change, and Tony Martin and Alex Demitriartis on wild Side, Rachel Blake, I mean, I was a young actor and just I just couldn't believe I was getting to work with these people and real heroes of mine.
00:04:35
Speaker 3: And yeah, just just lucky the whole the whole way through.
00:04:38
Speaker 2: Then getting to work with you know, there were Chowski's on movies, and getting to do a little role in a.
00:04:43
Speaker 3: Movie with Tom Cruise.
00:04:44
Speaker 2: I mean, so many of the the you know, But but I just don't want to sort of pretend like that's been the whole journey that the year and a half before you get those moments is a lot of disappointment and failure and a lot of people asking you if you're still acting.
00:04:57
Speaker 3: Hey, are you still acting? And you sort of go, oh god. It takes a toll, but yeah, I wouldn't change much of it.
00:05:03
Speaker 1: Well, I love your courage to tell bold stories. I mean this new story. You know, I found this quote about someone saying how audacious it is, but I mean it is a six part series, very satirical, It's a great story for Stan Australia. It's like nothing I think audiences have ever seen before.
00:05:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that was very much the plan, Benjamin.
00:05:22
Speaker 2: I have an insatial appetite for sort of original things, and they're the things that I love when something's new and you I think for me that the way we've drifted as storytellers, if you look at the world as a whole, is I think for some reason, the tail started wagging the dog in that I think people started to want to know what they were watching when they were watching it. They want to know, they sort of want to know the lens they're watching it through. And I've always loved my favorite thing in life is when you're at a dinner, you're hanging out on a tram or a train, and you're hearing someone tell a story and you have no idea where they're going with it. That's what I love the most, and there's a danger in that because it could be headed some where that you don't lie, and I do think we've lost as an entertainment community. We've lost slightly first for provocation, and I don't necessarily think provocation is a bad thing in I love art to provoke ideas and thoughts, and I personally think art has played a huge role in where we've evolved to as a society, which I think is certainly a more equitable one, and one focused on that people of different cultures, different ways of life, different genders, different sexual orientations should be embraced as magical and special for their differences.
00:06:38
Speaker 3: Rather than weird and you're you know you're the other.
00:06:42
Speaker 2: I think we've certainly drifted towards that, and I think hopefully we can keep doing that.
00:06:47
Speaker 3: But I think art has played a big role in that drift, and I.
00:06:50
Speaker 2: Think we need provocative stories to keep that push going because we need people to you need people to sit around the table and debate and convince each other.
00:06:58
Speaker 3: Of good ideas. Aren't just say something is.
00:07:01
Speaker 2: A good idea and then everyone goes like, oh yeah, you need smart people having good conversations to get there. So yeah, this show hopefully was my contribution to that of I mean, there's certainly some ludicrous elements which.
00:07:14
Speaker 3: Child here for Billy. Yeah, me too.
00:07:18
Speaker 1: I was talking to your friend Claire Lovering and she was saying that you were working on this during lockdown and that you know, you kept saying, Oh, I'm gonna have Sean pen involved and I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do that, and it seemed so outrageously ambitious that she was like, oh yeah. But then she said, you know you've pulled it off. Is this a project? Is this your love child from the COVID lockdowns in Australia?
00:07:39
Speaker 3: Very much? So yeah, we we.
00:07:41
Speaker 2: I thought of the idea just before COVID And in a way, you know, it's a bit uncouth to say COVID was a blessing because it was a devastating thing for everybody and including me, But within it that all that time and doing nothing for you know, six months, I was in the Melbourne lockdown, I just sort of put my head down and just kept writing the show, and then we would do a table read every week, which Claire was a part of.
00:08:04
Speaker 3: On some of them, we were all in lockdown around Australia.
00:08:06
Speaker 2: We'd all get on Zoom, which I'd never heard of, but we'd get on Zoom and we'd do a table read of these scripts that I was writing, and some were bad, some were good, some were fun, some weren't, but it was all great for us because we had nothing else to do. And then yeah, on the on the back side of it, now here it is ready to roll, and yeah, Claire's right, and the ambition of it kind of just.
00:08:25
Speaker 3: Kept growing growing.
00:08:26
Speaker 2: It was pretty crazy because Sean got in Champagne got involved early on, and once he was involved, it sort of felt like, well, if that's the outer marker, then everything's in play, you know. So the ambition kind of grew and grew and grew, and it did make me really proud. Last night we watched it with the crew and it just made me really proud that because it was an almost impossible feat to pull off, not for me, for me personally, it.
00:08:49
Speaker 3: Wasn't my difficulty.
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Speaker 2: It was me saying to them, this is what I want to do, and the crew just pulled it off. The organizational structure, the sort of know how and the sort of motivate to say, let's do it what you know is just spellbinding. Was it was a miracle and I'm so proud of them all.
00:09:06
Speaker 1: Did you have actors in mind for the roles? I mean, were you're writing stuff and thinking, well, Brian Brown, who was an Australian legend, you know, he has to play the prime minister. I mean, did you know that those people? I mean, did you have those people in place? Did you have them in mind?
00:09:20
Speaker 2: No one, I'm definitely in mind, but no one was in place. But every role was written for the actor that played those roles.
00:09:26
Speaker 3: So certainly as I was right.
00:09:28
Speaker 2: I mean, Brian, I've known him for over twenty years and you really when you're he's such an incredible thinker and a problem solver, and I've always thought, you know, he'd be such a great prime minister.
00:09:40
Speaker 3: But there's not that much humor in Brian bringing a great.
00:09:42
Speaker 2: Prime minister, and so I wanted him to play a bit of an idiot, which he was more interested in playing because he's real life.
00:09:49
Speaker 3: His owner is a wild intellect.
00:09:51
Speaker 2: So for him it was a fun chance to come and play against Taipe and played this real idiot he doesn't know what's going on, which felt like it pope fun of a political system that didn't feel like we drifted too far into satire. To be honest, it felt like it was almost realistic.
00:10:07
Speaker 1: Well, some of the things you could just believe happening, I mean, the ridiculousness of the Today Show with Karl Stefanovic and Bindio and but Mindio and like, there's lots of things in place that are ridiculous, but they're kind of a piss take on the realities of what it's like to actually be in some of those situations.
00:10:25
Speaker 3: Oh, no doubt.
00:10:26
Speaker 2: And I do think, benjam we've drifted into an absurd reality that we're all living in and we're sort of not commenting on it in a way. And I felt like those scenes for me was meant they were my sort of reflections on the absurdity of what we're doing in the world. And as you say, like you watch them and you go, well, this isn't really it's not really that exaggerated. I mean, Matthew Fox sort of inspired the Sean on the Today Show scene because Matthew he was on a show somewhere and he got told he was going to promote last and suddenly they brought out these puppets, and he didn't know what was going on, and he was suddenly interacting with these puppets, and he didn't know I think it was in a foreign country and he didn't speak the language, so he didn't know whether what he was doing was meant to be funny or whether they were doing a sort of a satire or if it was real. And he's suddenly with these puppets. And we always laugh about that story, me and him, So that scene is sort of based on that well.
00:11:22
Speaker 1: And actually, you know, I was going to jump in there and say, you know, I was on a reality show which I won, and then the next day I was on the Today Show with these people, and I thought I was there for like an interview, but they really threw me in at the last part while they were cooking prawns, and they quickly asked me about this whole experience. But with no TV experience with live television like that, I felt like this whole thing was just so ridiculous. I was like, here was me thinking I was getting some sort of Andrew Denton sit down interview about my experience, and then all of a sudden, it was something completely different. It was like not just one thing, it was like three things added in, which made me laugh so hard at this whole thing.
00:12:00
Speaker 2: I think that the line, you know, reality TV, I think Big Brother was really the first one.
00:12:05
Speaker 3: I remember when that that that came out when I started acting.
00:12:08
Speaker 2: So this birth of reality TV happened at the same time that I was becoming an actor, and I think reality TV was sort of that first ten years, and then that morphed into social media because I think reality TV gave birth to the idea that it's sort of we lost the mythology of or the myth of that famous people. But no, but no that. But I think it's quite a simple thing because I think human beings are just fascinated by human beings. It's it's what separates us is that there's a line in it in court about Iguanas don't tell stories. They don't tell each other what just happened.
00:12:45
Speaker 3: We do. We share our experience, and in a way it's a very.
00:12:48
Speaker 2: Exposing vulnerable place to go to to go on Big Brother, And I think people think it's about.
00:12:54
Speaker 3: Fame and you know, trying to get famous, But I don't.
00:12:57
Speaker 2: I don't think that's really when I watch really TV, I don't when I used to. I don't think that was most people involved in that sort of motivation. I don't think that you were going on there to become famous. I think you were going on there. I don't know this for sure. I'm being very presumptuous, but my observation was that people are going on to tell stories, to share and connect, and filming it was sort of a way to you know, immortalize it in a way it'll be forever. We sort of care about legacy and what will my story be if I don't tell it in a way that gets recorded. And then that morphed into social media, which became everyone. So suddenly it wasn't just the people on reality TV, like you, it was everyone. It was everyone at school going like here's my holiday in Europe. And group emails. When group emails started and people started sending a group email to their whole email list about like, oh I'm in Europe and I'm doing this and I remember thinking, why they're telling everyone this and they couldn't be bothered writing.
00:13:52
Speaker 3: But then and I think storytelling became, you know, morphed into something else. And I don't think.
00:13:56
Speaker 2: We've necessarily there hasn't been a show that I've seen that as that drift in society. So I felt like this show, for me, was me trying to start a conversation and hopefully provoke a conversation around because I do think that in the story, like he wants to become famous to save his daughter. I don't think that's an unrealistic goal.
00:14:16
Speaker 3: No, no, no, think that's.
00:14:17
Speaker 1: The thing that made me laugh so loud because the whole absurdity of a blue tick. You know, you guys mock it so well. I mean, Justine Clark is so great because she's playing that role straight. And not to give too much away because I want people to enjoy that scene and unpack it when they see it, but I just loved the ridiculousness of how accurate that was. She was like, well you need help. Well I had this person for maths come in who raised one hundred. You know, the whole thing was just so ridiculous but extraordinarily accurate.
00:14:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think that's a thing that we're wrestling with as individuals in life, and that we're trying to work out where the moral compass sits on all of that, because we surely we don't want to live in a world where a child can be saved by some one from maths but not saved by our own medical system.
00:15:04
Speaker 3: And we've sort of drifted.
00:15:05
Speaker 2: Into that place, and you say, well, how do we get out of that place?
00:15:09
Speaker 3: And the thing for me about the commentary on social media is.
00:15:13
Speaker 2: Sort of that we've created a machine that could save the world, but we haven't figured out how to use it yet. So I see social media as an enormously positive thing. When you saw the Arab spring, when you see movements.
00:15:28
Speaker 3: Shamefully, I can't remember it was it about.
00:15:30
Speaker 2: It was about gay marriage, I think when everyone changed their their profiles, the flag, those things are so powerful as an information source, as a movement, and so we've sort of created this engine that can be this powerful agent of change, but as a society, we've sort of lost control of it at the wheel and it's just running wild now, and it feels to me like it's probably more of a negative at the moment than it is a positive overall, and I wish we could figure out how to drive it properly.
00:16:00
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that the problem with it all is the narcissism of social media. I think that if smarter people wanted to use it, well maybe they don't want to use it because it feels too self indulgent, do you know what I mean? Like, you really do have to put yourself on the line to put yourself out there with a particular cause, And because there are so many people with a glutton for fame and a glutton for attention, it probably distracts a lot of the other people from wanting to use that space in a way that could benefit other people.
00:16:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so.
00:16:31
Speaker 2: And I think it gave everyone a voice. I mean when I was a kid, if someone wanted to say something bad about you, they wrote it on the toilet the bathroom stall on the wall.
00:16:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, kick going.
00:16:42
Speaker 2: Dickhad and you'd sort of be upset when you'd go into the toilet you'd see it, but only the people that went to the toilet saw it. And it was sort of it was it was sort of caged in its own demise because it was written on a toilet wall.
00:16:56
Speaker 3: So but then we created social media and now everyone can say.
00:16:59
Speaker 2: Anything about anyone anywhere, and it doesn't have it has an air of validity to it online for some reason. It's not like a toilet wall. People read things, they think it's real, and I think, yeah, I think there's a danger to it that yeah, we haven't quite figured out yet, and I do think then I call it the nacissistic cyclone. I've had many friends get lost in it where they're just posting things about themselves. Everyone's commenting on it, and they're just in this swirling idea of meanness and they don't they can't look out and see the beautiful, wide world out there.
00:17:34
Speaker 1: Well, it's hard. I think you're putting value on something in a different way. I remember after doing something like Big Brother, it was just as social media started, and I remember I posted a photo every day for like twelve months, like something for my life. But I realized my life was about curating this photo after a while, and then I was like, if I stopped doing this, I'll lose all my followers. And then I ended up talking to someone about that and they were like, well, what's what is having all that followers mean to you, and it meant nothing. So I stopped posting every day, and my followers kept decreasing because you know, obviously I wasn't doing it. But it didn't matter, do you know what I mean? Like my life was no longer. My life was still important regardless as to whether or not I was posting it. And the other person that it really mattered to anyway was me, Like, why would I value the fact that some you know, one hundred thousand faceless people have commented on a photo? Do you know what I mean?
00:18:25
Speaker 3: You know, I think, fortunately for you, that's very enlightened.
00:18:29
Speaker 2: I think unfortunately for a lot of people is they don't have that enlightenment.
00:18:33
Speaker 3: They do care, and they're growing.
00:18:35
Speaker 2: Up with this metric of views as all of encompassing and they just want it. And I just see teenagers and I think, god, man, growing up now would be a nightmare when you just you know, they see it that this person's got a blue tick, this person's got ten thousand this, but it's like they genuinely think that it's always been this way a little bit, but an eye surgeon who spent their life developing a treatment for glorg co homers or something that's helping people in the third world see for the first time might have ten thousand followers, and then someone who's just posting bikini selfies will have two hundred thousand. A lot of kids these days just look at those two and think that the two hundred thousand and one is more important.
00:19:15
Speaker 3: That there's no.
00:19:15
Speaker 2: Morality or integrity baked into their measurement of those two scenarios. They just look at it and go that one. I want that one because it's got more, and you go, oh wow, we're sort of in an eighties and nineteen eighties Bigger is better, more is better, sort of greed period again, sort of good and Gecko's style. So I've been really obsessed with this whole idea of pop culture and reality TV and social media and what it all means and where it's where it's pointing us as a society, and so the show really was born out of that obsession a little bit.
00:19:47
Speaker 1: I could see that though. Kick I was like watching the first three episodes and I've actually watched them through twice, so I've watched it three times. I've watched it through again twice, and I just thought to myself when I finished watching it the last time, I was like, like, I really appreciate your ability to collect stories. I felt like this was like your collection of nostalgia in some ways, like filter take a picture, that song that takes us out of the first episode. I feel like that's an eclectic nostalgia that you've been able to bring to this show whilst being able to voice a particular opinion on society today. And then even these amazing people Like I was talking to someone who said, I can't believe Susan Sarandon, Sean Pan, Matthew Fox, all these people are in it. But then I knew your career well enough to know that you'd actually met a lot of those people, you'd worked with them along the way, and you collected them and so yes, some people forget to use the stories they've got, And I think you've really brought all of it together for this big project, which is a success. And I think that's really important for other people to watch and then believe in themselves to do something similar.
00:20:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's the hope, benjam It means a lot to hear you say that, actually, because that's the hope for this for me is that there is an ambitious nature to a collection of those stories. But for me personally, they're just my friends and people I've worked with along the way, and I love them all so dearly.
00:21:07
Speaker 3: And there was part of me that worried about it.
00:21:09
Speaker 2: I thought, well, what happens if you do put Matthew Fox and Sean Penn and Susan in an Australian comedy.
00:21:15
Speaker 3: Some people are going to look at that and say and.
00:21:17
Speaker 2: Have a negative reaction to it, and a bit like you with losing followers and fearing that a little bit, I suddenly realized at one point, well, if that's their reaction, then I welcome that. If they want to think that and feel that, that's fine, but that's not my story. My story is These people are my life. They've been my friends, they've been my heroes, and I want to put them in this story that I want to tell, and I want to do it in Australia, and I want to I personally would love it if Australians felt a deep sense of pride about like where this little I always feel that when I watched the Olympics, where this little country. You know, we're a big country in mass but we're twenty million people on a global scale. We're a spec but we can compete at the highest level in I mean seeing the Matildas my girlfriend kept laughing at because I mean I was in tears every single Matilda's game. I was crying and it just something about it just was so beautiful. And I don't know if it was that it was the first time women's sport was just exploding on such a big scale.
00:22:20
Speaker 3: And I've got nieces and my mom, my grandmother's.
00:22:22
Speaker 2: And so many females in my life that I sort of felt like I wish they lived in that world where these women were being celebrated. But whatever it was, I just thought it was beautiful. But part of it was We're just this little country. I mean we were playing against Spain and France and I mean these are soccer mad.
00:22:39
Speaker 3: Countries and these girls were just dominate.
00:22:42
Speaker 2: I just loved it so much, and for me, this was I want to do that artistically with the show. Is I wanted to be a show that he's like the Matilda's where you know, people in Australia get to go like, yeah, man, we can you know, we can have Oscar winners on TV shows why not.
00:22:57
Speaker 1: Why was laughing because I was like, we have a Georgie Parker practice joke with Susan Sarandon and Sean Pen and Matthew Fox or I grew up watching on Party of five, Like the whole thing was so ambitious but so hilarious, Like that's what made me laugh so much throughout it, as well as the Big Dicks. But you know that's a different story. Yes, I have to tell you this really quickly before I go. I had so many questions. I think I've asked you too, which is great because I'll just let you take us on a journey, which I've really appreciated. And I was going to say to you. I had Claire Lovering on the podcast and I was talking about you not knowing you knew her, and I was, I don't know how we got onto it. I think she's told you this story, but I was. I had to go on Google it the other day to find out what was the bar, but I'm pretty sure I was at the bar at the Dime Bar on Fairfax in Los Angeles when you're on your first date, no disrespect to your current partner with Christina Ritchie, and I was like on the table listening to this conversation happening now, I want to ask, is this real?
00:23:56
Speaker 3: Was it a fit?
00:23:56
Speaker 1: Do you remember whether or not that was a first date or.
00:24:00
Speaker 2: I don't remember if that was a first date, But I definitely used to hang out at the Dime on Fairfax. That was a favorite haunt. My friend used to live just around the corner. And yeah, that would be That's certainly an event that I would back your recollection of better than mine. I'm not I don't have a memory of it, but yeah, I would back I would back yours for sure.
00:24:20
Speaker 1: I think we just stopped. My friend and I who were there with we stopped talking just so we could try and listen into what you were saying. But as you know from the Dime bar, it's quite loud, so.
00:24:29
Speaker 3: Very loud, loud, and very dark, so dark, so.
00:24:32
Speaker 1: Dark, but really fine bar. I hope it's still there. I haven't been back.
00:24:35
Speaker 2: Matthew box and I actually used to go there a lot, so I'm surprised Matthew wasn't there when we finished speed Racer.
00:24:40
Speaker 3: You know, Christina was in speed Racer as well.
00:24:43
Speaker 2: Christina Boxy, Susan, John Goodman, Emil her I mean, we all became such good friends at the end of that.
00:24:50
Speaker 3: And that's what I've been really lucky in my career to be.
00:24:53
Speaker 2: A part of things, you know, like even you know, doing Tangles TV show in Australia or even Wild Tide, like I still speak to Tony Art and Rachel Blake and it's like I've been a part of these things that you sort of have these friends that you take with you for life, and that to me is the Brian Brown actually said it once.
00:25:11
Speaker 3: Really I thought it was such a smart thing.
00:25:13
Speaker 2: He said, I didn't become an actor because I wanted to play Hamlet, or he said, I just saw a world with insanely interesting people, and I just wanted to be in that world for the rest of my life.
00:25:26
Speaker 3: And that's really for me. How I felt like, I love, you know, even your openness to talk about your story, your life.
00:25:33
Speaker 2: Not that many people in the world just openly say, ah, well, I was worried about losing followers, and like, you're exposing a part of your life that you and I. In our world that we exist in in this industry is quite commonplace. Were around people who just expose themselves and I just find that so intoxicating, and I just I love being around that, and I just want to be around that always and forever.
00:25:55
Speaker 1: Well. I think Sean said that really beautifully. I think he was saying, everyone's afraid of selling, you know, telling stories right now, and we have to push forward with our courage in storytelling. And there's nothing more of a commodity that works with connecting with other people than being raw and being real and sharing your story. And it's funny that we know that, but yet we still struggle to do it. And I feel like with this particular series, while it's a satirical comedy, I feel like it's a kick Gurry spitball. You've rolled up all of your experiences and put it in and you've shot it out. All I have to say is I hope people love it as much as I've loved it, so that they can enjoy it.
00:26:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, And the ultimate hope is that people just enjoy it. You know.
00:26:35
Speaker 2: I think we get lost a little bit in the analysis of stuff. At the end of the day, we want to be entertained, we want to be enthralled, we want to be moved and made feel things, and that's what we attempted to do and we worked really hard at that and all the actors did to entertain people have something that they could watch and just really enjoy.
00:26:54
Speaker 3: And it is very much what you said. That was my aim.
00:26:57
Speaker 2: I thought, if I'm going to tell my story, I want it to be unique to my experience. And I have had a weird, unique experience, you know, through life, through so many crazy work experiences.
00:27:10
Speaker 3: You know, I ended up when I first moved to Hollywood, I ended up living at Heath Ledger's house.
00:27:15
Speaker 2: And then years later I did a film with Joaquin Phoenix called Buffalo Soldiers by an Australian director, and I ended up, you know, spending time at Joaquin's house. And dawned on me at one point recently that I'd lived with both jokers who won Academy Awards for their performance as a joker.
00:27:31
Speaker 3: And I thought, but.
00:27:33
Speaker 2: It has been a strange It's been a strange journey through the world of film and television and pop culture for me, and I wanted to sort of have a way of expressing that creatively.
00:27:44
Speaker 3: So, yeah, this is that. It's nice to hear you say that, Benjamin.
00:27:47
Speaker 1: Well, I think you could run a lot of biography. You know, I think people be very interested. Before you go, though I have to because I have to let you go to some run out of time. I honestly could talk to you for twenty four hours. I feel that what is something from behind the scenes of making caught though, something that the audience won't see, kind of like a behind the scenes moment that's kind of ridiculous. I guess you know that you can audiences.
00:28:08
Speaker 3: You alluded to.
00:28:10
Speaker 2: There's a there's a pit scene with a Joe Lige.
00:28:15
Speaker 3: Giant, yes, and we were all in there.
00:28:18
Speaker 2: And these days it's very sensitive around that stuff on a film set, thankfully, so there's real rules and regulations around it, and you make sure everyone's there, and there's intimacy coordinators. And we're all four mates, so we didn't give a shit. We were just sitting there, you know. At one point, Ben and I, you know, we were all wearing you know, cock socks.
00:28:35
Speaker 3: They call them in the industry. So we're all wearing socks.
00:28:38
Speaker 2: We're all in the pit naked together, and everyone had said to me, you know, and I'd sort of told the boys.
00:28:43
Speaker 3: I said, listen, you know, it's gonna a close set.
00:28:44
Speaker 2: And we set up a tent around it so that no one could see us, and it was all very official and a close set's meant to be just the camera crew are in there with you and no one else and what We've been in there for about an hour. At one point I was directing from underneath the four boys. All of them were on top of me, which is a strange experience. And we got out for a rest. At one point the first d D said, you know, boys, get it, stretch the legs, get arrest and I stood up in the pit and so it stretched from the back and I looked over and there was Andrew, phenomenally talented caterer who was doing the catering on the show, and he was standing there with a huge tray of food walking it to lunch and he was just watching what was going on on the side and he looks at me and he goes, this is the funniest thing I've ever seen. And I was saying, that's about as far from a closed set as you can get when literally the light, you know, the the caterer is sitting on the set. But that's what the show had was this very festive you know, and then we had peacocks running around. We're out in the pow camp and there were peacocks that natural naturally there and Ben and I off at one point and we're chasing the peacock and there's funny photos of us naked running after these peacocks, and so yeah, when people see that scene, they should know that the crew around that on that day was just it was such a festive atmosphere because a little bit, like you alluded to, Benjamin, we are afraid of telling stories now a little bit, and we were four guys who just wanted to tell a wild, crazy story and create that wild moment, and everybody fed into it, whole crew. They were all so into it. We're all laughing hysterically, and you know, the outtakes from that day could go on for hours. And yeah, so that was a fun, fun little experience on that day.
00:30:29
Speaker 3: Little Bond scenes, A.
00:30:30
Speaker 1: Lot of it feels like the outtakes, you know what I mean, Like a lot of it feels like you're watching people having a lot of fun telling a story, and the story's worth watching and you get some really good belly laughs out of it. So I really hope that people tune into Stand Australia and watch it and enjoy it as much as I have.
00:30:45
Speaker 2: Thanks Benjamin and I love this chat and Matte we should travel unto a twenty four hour chat on a podcast.
00:30:50
Speaker 3: We'll break the record.
00:30:51
Speaker 1: Many questions you have no idea
Speaker 1: It's in the news today, but it was actually on TV Reload the podcast past week.
00:00:03
Speaker 2: Maline.
00:00:04
Speaker 1: Welcome back guys to TV Reload. As you may know, my name is Benjamin Norris and this is your podcast to get all the inside goss on the popular TV shows you may be watching from around the world. Undeniably our TV's that's a major part of our home entertainment, and yet very little is known about how our favorite shows get made. So each episode I've been finding guests that want to dive just that little bit deeper into the shows they're currently making, so that you can hear all their exclusive stories and gain access to some of the biggest names in Australian television. I want to thank you for downloading all subscribing to this podcast however you've found me. I love hearing your feedback, so make sure you leave a review or a comment on your chosen podcast platform. On today's podcast, I have Kick Gurry, an Australian actor who has been on our screens for over two decades. Is start alongside Tom Cruise, Christina Richie, Pa Miranda and so many others in a career that he has collected relationships and connections that has led him to this series we're here to talk about today. Court is a brainchild that came out of the Melbourne Locke Downs. Kick picked up the interest of Sean Penn, signed him up as an executive producer, signed up friends Matthew Fox, Alexander London, Lincoln Unis, amongst many others. Not to mention Susan Sarandon and Brian Brown, both cinematic legends right across the globe. Court sees four Australian soldiers sent on a mission to a war torn country who were captured by freedom fighters who they convinced to produce a hostage video that goes viral. It is a satirical comedy. Even though you listen to that and think what is going on? You kind of have to watch it to believe it. But it is a bold choice and they go for last where most filmmakers would not dare. Kick is the writer, producer, director and star of Court, and I can't wait to hear how this all came together. I will talk to Kick about gaining the interest of Sean Penn and how his involvement affected the production of the show. Kick will talk about the essence of the series and how Court reflects modern society in terms of who we are on social media and the pathway to everyone now wanting to be famous. Along the way, we will unpack the giant penis scene which you might have seen in the trailer, and Kick will reveal how many people were allowed on set for that naked shoot. Plus we will get plenty of exclusives from behind the scenes of Caught, which comes out on Stann Australia September twenty eighth. So make sure you are subscribed to stand for this because it is quite hilarious. Anyway, let's bring Kick into the podcast, and I hope you enjoyed this chat, even though you can hear that I have a cold and it makes me sound like I'm seriously talking from underwater. Anyway, let's bring Kick in. How are you very excited to talk to you?
00:02:32
Speaker 2: Very excited to talk to you, Benjamin. Yeah, and I'm doing good. Just feeling the heat in Sydney yesterday and today actually, which is very strange in September.
00:02:40
Speaker 3: But no, it's a very exciting time, you know, to have.
00:02:43
Speaker 2: There's a lot of people in my line and work who dream of this moment, and I certainly for twenty five years have dreamed of telling my own story and having something that I created. So I'm really just trying to soak it all in. It's a very special five years of a career for me, which has been filled with far more disappointment and failure than success, and you sort of bake that into your soul and you kind of have to get your head around the idea that this moment will never happen, that you'll never get to tell your own story. That's unfortunately the journey we're on as artists. So I'm very grateful for having forgetting to have this moment.
00:03:21
Speaker 1: Oh my god. I mean, I've been in your audience for so long. It was funny. I was actually just looking at your IMDb and I remember watching like wild Side, Sea Change, all of these performances. I remember seeing a previous screeting of Looking for Ola Brandy about four months before it was released. It was like screening for it, and I was so familiar with that book, and I thought that the casting in that movie was brilliant. So you've been in my life the whole time. And I guess when you are an actor, you're sort of measuring yourself up against your successes. But for me, it seems like you've always been amazing.
00:03:55
Speaker 3: You would be wildly inaccurate in that. Remember that's your that's that's your that's your reality. That's bad. I wish I could live in that.
00:04:03
Speaker 2: But no, I just in some ways, I wouldn't really change much about the journey. I've been so lucky to have worked on the things I have, and I've always had a real instinct to drift towards things like wild Side and Sea Change, and that wasn't by choice early in my career, they were the first jobs I got. But working with Kerry Armstrong and John Howard on Sea Change, and Tony Martin and Alex Demitriartis on wild Side, Rachel Blake, I mean, I was a young actor and just I just couldn't believe I was getting to work with these people and real heroes of mine.
00:04:35
Speaker 3: And yeah, just just lucky the whole the whole way through.
00:04:38
Speaker 2: Then getting to work with you know, there were Chowski's on movies, and getting to do a little role in a.
00:04:43
Speaker 3: Movie with Tom Cruise.
00:04:44
Speaker 2: I mean, so many of the the you know, But but I just don't want to sort of pretend like that's been the whole journey that the year and a half before you get those moments is a lot of disappointment and failure and a lot of people asking you if you're still acting.
00:04:57
Speaker 3: Hey, are you still acting? And you sort of go, oh god. It takes a toll, but yeah, I wouldn't change much of it.
00:05:03
Speaker 1: Well, I love your courage to tell bold stories. I mean this new story. You know, I found this quote about someone saying how audacious it is, but I mean it is a six part series, very satirical, It's a great story for Stan Australia. It's like nothing I think audiences have ever seen before.
00:05:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that was very much the plan, Benjamin.
00:05:22
Speaker 2: I have an insatial appetite for sort of original things, and they're the things that I love when something's new and you I think for me that the way we've drifted as storytellers, if you look at the world as a whole, is I think for some reason, the tail started wagging the dog in that I think people started to want to know what they were watching when they were watching it. They want to know, they sort of want to know the lens they're watching it through. And I've always loved my favorite thing in life is when you're at a dinner, you're hanging out on a tram or a train, and you're hearing someone tell a story and you have no idea where they're going with it. That's what I love the most, and there's a danger in that because it could be headed some where that you don't lie, and I do think we've lost as an entertainment community. We've lost slightly first for provocation, and I don't necessarily think provocation is a bad thing in I love art to provoke ideas and thoughts, and I personally think art has played a huge role in where we've evolved to as a society, which I think is certainly a more equitable one, and one focused on that people of different cultures, different ways of life, different genders, different sexual orientations should be embraced as magical and special for their differences.
00:06:38
Speaker 3: Rather than weird and you're you know you're the other.
00:06:42
Speaker 2: I think we've certainly drifted towards that, and I think hopefully we can keep doing that.
00:06:47
Speaker 3: But I think art has played a big role in that drift, and I.
00:06:50
Speaker 2: Think we need provocative stories to keep that push going because we need people to you need people to sit around the table and debate and convince each other.
00:06:58
Speaker 3: Of good ideas. Aren't just say something is.
00:07:01
Speaker 2: A good idea and then everyone goes like, oh yeah, you need smart people having good conversations to get there. So yeah, this show hopefully was my contribution to that of I mean, there's certainly some ludicrous elements which.
00:07:14
Speaker 3: Child here for Billy. Yeah, me too.
00:07:18
Speaker 1: I was talking to your friend Claire Lovering and she was saying that you were working on this during lockdown and that you know, you kept saying, Oh, I'm gonna have Sean pen involved and I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do that, and it seemed so outrageously ambitious that she was like, oh yeah. But then she said, you know you've pulled it off. Is this a project? Is this your love child from the COVID lockdowns in Australia?
00:07:39
Speaker 3: Very much? So yeah, we we.
00:07:41
Speaker 2: I thought of the idea just before COVID And in a way, you know, it's a bit uncouth to say COVID was a blessing because it was a devastating thing for everybody and including me, But within it that all that time and doing nothing for you know, six months, I was in the Melbourne lockdown, I just sort of put my head down and just kept writing the show, and then we would do a table read every week, which Claire was a part of.
00:08:04
Speaker 3: On some of them, we were all in lockdown around Australia.
00:08:06
Speaker 2: We'd all get on Zoom, which I'd never heard of, but we'd get on Zoom and we'd do a table read of these scripts that I was writing, and some were bad, some were good, some were fun, some weren't, but it was all great for us because we had nothing else to do. And then yeah, on the on the back side of it, now here it is ready to roll, and yeah, Claire's right, and the ambition of it kind of just.
00:08:25
Speaker 3: Kept growing growing.
00:08:26
Speaker 2: It was pretty crazy because Sean got in Champagne got involved early on, and once he was involved, it sort of felt like, well, if that's the outer marker, then everything's in play, you know. So the ambition kind of grew and grew and grew, and it did make me really proud. Last night we watched it with the crew and it just made me really proud that because it was an almost impossible feat to pull off, not for me, for me personally, it.
00:08:49
Speaker 3: Wasn't my difficulty.
00:08:50
Speaker 2: It was me saying to them, this is what I want to do, and the crew just pulled it off. The organizational structure, the sort of know how and the sort of motivate to say, let's do it what you know is just spellbinding. Was it was a miracle and I'm so proud of them all.
00:09:06
Speaker 1: Did you have actors in mind for the roles? I mean, were you're writing stuff and thinking, well, Brian Brown, who was an Australian legend, you know, he has to play the prime minister. I mean, did you know that those people? I mean, did you have those people in place? Did you have them in mind?
00:09:20
Speaker 2: No one, I'm definitely in mind, but no one was in place. But every role was written for the actor that played those roles.
00:09:26
Speaker 3: So certainly as I was right.
00:09:28
Speaker 2: I mean, Brian, I've known him for over twenty years and you really when you're he's such an incredible thinker and a problem solver, and I've always thought, you know, he'd be such a great prime minister.
00:09:40
Speaker 3: But there's not that much humor in Brian bringing a great.
00:09:42
Speaker 2: Prime minister, and so I wanted him to play a bit of an idiot, which he was more interested in playing because he's real life.
00:09:49
Speaker 3: His owner is a wild intellect.
00:09:51
Speaker 2: So for him it was a fun chance to come and play against Taipe and played this real idiot he doesn't know what's going on, which felt like it pope fun of a political system that didn't feel like we drifted too far into satire. To be honest, it felt like it was almost realistic.
00:10:07
Speaker 1: Well, some of the things you could just believe happening, I mean, the ridiculousness of the Today Show with Karl Stefanovic and Bindio and but Mindio and like, there's lots of things in place that are ridiculous, but they're kind of a piss take on the realities of what it's like to actually be in some of those situations.
00:10:25
Speaker 3: Oh, no doubt.
00:10:26
Speaker 2: And I do think, benjam we've drifted into an absurd reality that we're all living in and we're sort of not commenting on it in a way. And I felt like those scenes for me was meant they were my sort of reflections on the absurdity of what we're doing in the world. And as you say, like you watch them and you go, well, this isn't really it's not really that exaggerated. I mean, Matthew Fox sort of inspired the Sean on the Today Show scene because Matthew he was on a show somewhere and he got told he was going to promote last and suddenly they brought out these puppets, and he didn't know what was going on, and he was suddenly interacting with these puppets, and he didn't know I think it was in a foreign country and he didn't speak the language, so he didn't know whether what he was doing was meant to be funny or whether they were doing a sort of a satire or if it was real. And he's suddenly with these puppets. And we always laugh about that story, me and him, So that scene is sort of based on that well.
00:11:22
Speaker 1: And actually, you know, I was going to jump in there and say, you know, I was on a reality show which I won, and then the next day I was on the Today Show with these people, and I thought I was there for like an interview, but they really threw me in at the last part while they were cooking prawns, and they quickly asked me about this whole experience. But with no TV experience with live television like that, I felt like this whole thing was just so ridiculous. I was like, here was me thinking I was getting some sort of Andrew Denton sit down interview about my experience, and then all of a sudden, it was something completely different. It was like not just one thing, it was like three things added in, which made me laugh so hard at this whole thing.
00:12:00
Speaker 2: I think that the line, you know, reality TV, I think Big Brother was really the first one.
00:12:05
Speaker 3: I remember when that that that came out when I started acting.
00:12:08
Speaker 2: So this birth of reality TV happened at the same time that I was becoming an actor, and I think reality TV was sort of that first ten years, and then that morphed into social media because I think reality TV gave birth to the idea that it's sort of we lost the mythology of or the myth of that famous people. But no, but no that. But I think it's quite a simple thing because I think human beings are just fascinated by human beings. It's it's what separates us is that there's a line in it in court about Iguanas don't tell stories. They don't tell each other what just happened.
00:12:45
Speaker 3: We do. We share our experience, and in a way it's a very.
00:12:48
Speaker 2: Exposing vulnerable place to go to to go on Big Brother, And I think people think it's about.
00:12:54
Speaker 3: Fame and you know, trying to get famous, But I don't.
00:12:57
Speaker 2: I don't think that's really when I watch really TV, I don't when I used to. I don't think that was most people involved in that sort of motivation. I don't think that you were going on there to become famous. I think you were going on there. I don't know this for sure. I'm being very presumptuous, but my observation was that people are going on to tell stories, to share and connect, and filming it was sort of a way to you know, immortalize it in a way it'll be forever. We sort of care about legacy and what will my story be if I don't tell it in a way that gets recorded. And then that morphed into social media, which became everyone. So suddenly it wasn't just the people on reality TV, like you, it was everyone. It was everyone at school going like here's my holiday in Europe. And group emails. When group emails started and people started sending a group email to their whole email list about like, oh I'm in Europe and I'm doing this and I remember thinking, why they're telling everyone this and they couldn't be bothered writing.
00:13:52
Speaker 3: But then and I think storytelling became, you know, morphed into something else. And I don't think.
00:13:56
Speaker 2: We've necessarily there hasn't been a show that I've seen that as that drift in society. So I felt like this show, for me, was me trying to start a conversation and hopefully provoke a conversation around because I do think that in the story, like he wants to become famous to save his daughter. I don't think that's an unrealistic goal.
00:14:16
Speaker 3: No, no, no, think that's.
00:14:17
Speaker 1: The thing that made me laugh so loud because the whole absurdity of a blue tick. You know, you guys mock it so well. I mean, Justine Clark is so great because she's playing that role straight. And not to give too much away because I want people to enjoy that scene and unpack it when they see it, but I just loved the ridiculousness of how accurate that was. She was like, well you need help. Well I had this person for maths come in who raised one hundred. You know, the whole thing was just so ridiculous but extraordinarily accurate.
00:14:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think that's a thing that we're wrestling with as individuals in life, and that we're trying to work out where the moral compass sits on all of that, because we surely we don't want to live in a world where a child can be saved by some one from maths but not saved by our own medical system.
00:15:04
Speaker 3: And we've sort of drifted.
00:15:05
Speaker 2: Into that place, and you say, well, how do we get out of that place?
00:15:09
Speaker 3: And the thing for me about the commentary on social media is.
00:15:13
Speaker 2: Sort of that we've created a machine that could save the world, but we haven't figured out how to use it yet. So I see social media as an enormously positive thing. When you saw the Arab spring, when you see movements.
00:15:28
Speaker 3: Shamefully, I can't remember it was it about.
00:15:30
Speaker 2: It was about gay marriage, I think when everyone changed their their profiles, the flag, those things are so powerful as an information source, as a movement, and so we've sort of created this engine that can be this powerful agent of change, but as a society, we've sort of lost control of it at the wheel and it's just running wild now, and it feels to me like it's probably more of a negative at the moment than it is a positive overall, and I wish we could figure out how to drive it properly.
00:16:00
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think that the problem with it all is the narcissism of social media. I think that if smarter people wanted to use it, well maybe they don't want to use it because it feels too self indulgent, do you know what I mean? Like, you really do have to put yourself on the line to put yourself out there with a particular cause, And because there are so many people with a glutton for fame and a glutton for attention, it probably distracts a lot of the other people from wanting to use that space in a way that could benefit other people.
00:16:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so.
00:16:31
Speaker 2: And I think it gave everyone a voice. I mean when I was a kid, if someone wanted to say something bad about you, they wrote it on the toilet the bathroom stall on the wall.
00:16:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, kick going.
00:16:42
Speaker 2: Dickhad and you'd sort of be upset when you'd go into the toilet you'd see it, but only the people that went to the toilet saw it. And it was sort of it was it was sort of caged in its own demise because it was written on a toilet wall.
00:16:56
Speaker 3: So but then we created social media and now everyone can say.
00:16:59
Speaker 2: Anything about anyone anywhere, and it doesn't have it has an air of validity to it online for some reason. It's not like a toilet wall. People read things, they think it's real, and I think, yeah, I think there's a danger to it that yeah, we haven't quite figured out yet, and I do think then I call it the nacissistic cyclone. I've had many friends get lost in it where they're just posting things about themselves. Everyone's commenting on it, and they're just in this swirling idea of meanness and they don't they can't look out and see the beautiful, wide world out there.
00:17:34
Speaker 1: Well, it's hard. I think you're putting value on something in a different way. I remember after doing something like Big Brother, it was just as social media started, and I remember I posted a photo every day for like twelve months, like something for my life. But I realized my life was about curating this photo after a while, and then I was like, if I stopped doing this, I'll lose all my followers. And then I ended up talking to someone about that and they were like, well, what's what is having all that followers mean to you, and it meant nothing. So I stopped posting every day, and my followers kept decreasing because you know, obviously I wasn't doing it. But it didn't matter, do you know what I mean? Like my life was no longer. My life was still important regardless as to whether or not I was posting it. And the other person that it really mattered to anyway was me, Like, why would I value the fact that some you know, one hundred thousand faceless people have commented on a photo? Do you know what I mean?
00:18:25
Speaker 3: You know, I think, fortunately for you, that's very enlightened.
00:18:29
Speaker 2: I think unfortunately for a lot of people is they don't have that enlightenment.
00:18:33
Speaker 3: They do care, and they're growing.
00:18:35
Speaker 2: Up with this metric of views as all of encompassing and they just want it. And I just see teenagers and I think, god, man, growing up now would be a nightmare when you just you know, they see it that this person's got a blue tick, this person's got ten thousand this, but it's like they genuinely think that it's always been this way a little bit, but an eye surgeon who spent their life developing a treatment for glorg co homers or something that's helping people in the third world see for the first time might have ten thousand followers, and then someone who's just posting bikini selfies will have two hundred thousand. A lot of kids these days just look at those two and think that the two hundred thousand and one is more important.
00:19:15
Speaker 3: That there's no.
00:19:15
Speaker 2: Morality or integrity baked into their measurement of those two scenarios. They just look at it and go that one. I want that one because it's got more, and you go, oh wow, we're sort of in an eighties and nineteen eighties Bigger is better, more is better, sort of greed period again, sort of good and Gecko's style. So I've been really obsessed with this whole idea of pop culture and reality TV and social media and what it all means and where it's where it's pointing us as a society, and so the show really was born out of that obsession a little bit.
00:19:47
Speaker 1: I could see that though. Kick I was like watching the first three episodes and I've actually watched them through twice, so I've watched it three times. I've watched it through again twice, and I just thought to myself when I finished watching it the last time, I was like, like, I really appreciate your ability to collect stories. I felt like this was like your collection of nostalgia in some ways, like filter take a picture, that song that takes us out of the first episode. I feel like that's an eclectic nostalgia that you've been able to bring to this show whilst being able to voice a particular opinion on society today. And then even these amazing people Like I was talking to someone who said, I can't believe Susan Sarandon, Sean Pan, Matthew Fox, all these people are in it. But then I knew your career well enough to know that you'd actually met a lot of those people, you'd worked with them along the way, and you collected them and so yes, some people forget to use the stories they've got, And I think you've really brought all of it together for this big project, which is a success. And I think that's really important for other people to watch and then believe in themselves to do something similar.
00:20:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's the hope, benjam It means a lot to hear you say that, actually, because that's the hope for this for me is that there is an ambitious nature to a collection of those stories. But for me personally, they're just my friends and people I've worked with along the way, and I love them all so dearly.
00:21:07
Speaker 3: And there was part of me that worried about it.
00:21:09
Speaker 2: I thought, well, what happens if you do put Matthew Fox and Sean Penn and Susan in an Australian comedy.
00:21:15
Speaker 3: Some people are going to look at that and say and.
00:21:17
Speaker 2: Have a negative reaction to it, and a bit like you with losing followers and fearing that a little bit, I suddenly realized at one point, well, if that's their reaction, then I welcome that. If they want to think that and feel that, that's fine, but that's not my story. My story is These people are my life. They've been my friends, they've been my heroes, and I want to put them in this story that I want to tell, and I want to do it in Australia, and I want to I personally would love it if Australians felt a deep sense of pride about like where this little I always feel that when I watched the Olympics, where this little country. You know, we're a big country in mass but we're twenty million people on a global scale. We're a spec but we can compete at the highest level in I mean seeing the Matildas my girlfriend kept laughing at because I mean I was in tears every single Matilda's game. I was crying and it just something about it just was so beautiful. And I don't know if it was that it was the first time women's sport was just exploding on such a big scale.
00:22:20
Speaker 3: And I've got nieces and my mom, my grandmother's.
00:22:22
Speaker 2: And so many females in my life that I sort of felt like I wish they lived in that world where these women were being celebrated. But whatever it was, I just thought it was beautiful. But part of it was We're just this little country. I mean we were playing against Spain and France and I mean these are soccer mad.
00:22:39
Speaker 3: Countries and these girls were just dominate.
00:22:42
Speaker 2: I just loved it so much, and for me, this was I want to do that artistically with the show. Is I wanted to be a show that he's like the Matilda's where you know, people in Australia get to go like, yeah, man, we can you know, we can have Oscar winners on TV shows why not.
00:22:57
Speaker 1: Why was laughing because I was like, we have a Georgie Parker practice joke with Susan Sarandon and Sean Pen and Matthew Fox or I grew up watching on Party of five, Like the whole thing was so ambitious but so hilarious, Like that's what made me laugh so much throughout it, as well as the Big Dicks. But you know that's a different story. Yes, I have to tell you this really quickly before I go. I had so many questions. I think I've asked you too, which is great because I'll just let you take us on a journey, which I've really appreciated. And I was going to say to you. I had Claire Lovering on the podcast and I was talking about you not knowing you knew her, and I was, I don't know how we got onto it. I think she's told you this story, but I was. I had to go on Google it the other day to find out what was the bar, but I'm pretty sure I was at the bar at the Dime Bar on Fairfax in Los Angeles when you're on your first date, no disrespect to your current partner with Christina Ritchie, and I was like on the table listening to this conversation happening now, I want to ask, is this real?
00:23:56
Speaker 3: Was it a fit?
00:23:56
Speaker 1: Do you remember whether or not that was a first date or.
00:24:00
Speaker 2: I don't remember if that was a first date, But I definitely used to hang out at the Dime on Fairfax. That was a favorite haunt. My friend used to live just around the corner. And yeah, that would be That's certainly an event that I would back your recollection of better than mine. I'm not I don't have a memory of it, but yeah, I would back I would back yours for sure.
00:24:20
Speaker 1: I think we just stopped. My friend and I who were there with we stopped talking just so we could try and listen into what you were saying. But as you know from the Dime bar, it's quite loud, so.
00:24:29
Speaker 3: Very loud, loud, and very dark, so dark, so.
00:24:32
Speaker 1: Dark, but really fine bar. I hope it's still there. I haven't been back.
00:24:35
Speaker 2: Matthew box and I actually used to go there a lot, so I'm surprised Matthew wasn't there when we finished speed Racer.
00:24:40
Speaker 3: You know, Christina was in speed Racer as well.
00:24:43
Speaker 2: Christina Boxy, Susan, John Goodman, Emil her I mean, we all became such good friends at the end of that.
00:24:50
Speaker 3: And that's what I've been really lucky in my career to be.
00:24:53
Speaker 2: A part of things, you know, like even you know, doing Tangles TV show in Australia or even Wild Tide, like I still speak to Tony Art and Rachel Blake and it's like I've been a part of these things that you sort of have these friends that you take with you for life, and that to me is the Brian Brown actually said it once.
00:25:11
Speaker 3: Really I thought it was such a smart thing.
00:25:13
Speaker 2: He said, I didn't become an actor because I wanted to play Hamlet, or he said, I just saw a world with insanely interesting people, and I just wanted to be in that world for the rest of my life.
00:25:26
Speaker 3: And that's really for me. How I felt like, I love, you know, even your openness to talk about your story, your life.
00:25:33
Speaker 2: Not that many people in the world just openly say, ah, well, I was worried about losing followers, and like, you're exposing a part of your life that you and I. In our world that we exist in in this industry is quite commonplace. Were around people who just expose themselves and I just find that so intoxicating, and I just I love being around that, and I just want to be around that always and forever.
00:25:55
Speaker 1: Well. I think Sean said that really beautifully. I think he was saying, everyone's afraid of selling, you know, telling stories right now, and we have to push forward with our courage in storytelling. And there's nothing more of a commodity that works with connecting with other people than being raw and being real and sharing your story. And it's funny that we know that, but yet we still struggle to do it. And I feel like with this particular series, while it's a satirical comedy, I feel like it's a kick Gurry spitball. You've rolled up all of your experiences and put it in and you've shot it out. All I have to say is I hope people love it as much as I've loved it, so that they can enjoy it.
00:26:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, And the ultimate hope is that people just enjoy it. You know.
00:26:35
Speaker 2: I think we get lost a little bit in the analysis of stuff. At the end of the day, we want to be entertained, we want to be enthralled, we want to be moved and made feel things, and that's what we attempted to do and we worked really hard at that and all the actors did to entertain people have something that they could watch and just really enjoy.
00:26:54
Speaker 3: And it is very much what you said. That was my aim.
00:26:57
Speaker 2: I thought, if I'm going to tell my story, I want it to be unique to my experience. And I have had a weird, unique experience, you know, through life, through so many crazy work experiences.
00:27:10
Speaker 3: You know, I ended up when I first moved to Hollywood, I ended up living at Heath Ledger's house.
00:27:15
Speaker 2: And then years later I did a film with Joaquin Phoenix called Buffalo Soldiers by an Australian director, and I ended up, you know, spending time at Joaquin's house. And dawned on me at one point recently that I'd lived with both jokers who won Academy Awards for their performance as a joker.
00:27:31
Speaker 3: And I thought, but.
00:27:33
Speaker 2: It has been a strange It's been a strange journey through the world of film and television and pop culture for me, and I wanted to sort of have a way of expressing that creatively.
00:27:44
Speaker 3: So, yeah, this is that. It's nice to hear you say that, Benjamin.
00:27:47
Speaker 1: Well, I think you could run a lot of biography. You know, I think people be very interested. Before you go, though I have to because I have to let you go to some run out of time. I honestly could talk to you for twenty four hours. I feel that what is something from behind the scenes of making caught though, something that the audience won't see, kind of like a behind the scenes moment that's kind of ridiculous. I guess you know that you can audiences.
00:28:08
Speaker 3: You alluded to.
00:28:10
Speaker 2: There's a there's a pit scene with a Joe Lige.
00:28:15
Speaker 3: Giant, yes, and we were all in there.
00:28:18
Speaker 2: And these days it's very sensitive around that stuff on a film set, thankfully, so there's real rules and regulations around it, and you make sure everyone's there, and there's intimacy coordinators. And we're all four mates, so we didn't give a shit. We were just sitting there, you know. At one point, Ben and I, you know, we were all wearing you know, cock socks.
00:28:35
Speaker 3: They call them in the industry. So we're all wearing socks.
00:28:38
Speaker 2: We're all in the pit naked together, and everyone had said to me, you know, and I'd sort of told the boys.
00:28:43
Speaker 3: I said, listen, you know, it's gonna a close set.
00:28:44
Speaker 2: And we set up a tent around it so that no one could see us, and it was all very official and a close set's meant to be just the camera crew are in there with you and no one else and what We've been in there for about an hour. At one point I was directing from underneath the four boys. All of them were on top of me, which is a strange experience. And we got out for a rest. At one point the first d D said, you know, boys, get it, stretch the legs, get arrest and I stood up in the pit and so it stretched from the back and I looked over and there was Andrew, phenomenally talented caterer who was doing the catering on the show, and he was standing there with a huge tray of food walking it to lunch and he was just watching what was going on on the side and he looks at me and he goes, this is the funniest thing I've ever seen. And I was saying, that's about as far from a closed set as you can get when literally the light, you know, the the caterer is sitting on the set. But that's what the show had was this very festive you know, and then we had peacocks running around. We're out in the pow camp and there were peacocks that natural naturally there and Ben and I off at one point and we're chasing the peacock and there's funny photos of us naked running after these peacocks, and so yeah, when people see that scene, they should know that the crew around that on that day was just it was such a festive atmosphere because a little bit, like you alluded to, Benjamin, we are afraid of telling stories now a little bit, and we were four guys who just wanted to tell a wild, crazy story and create that wild moment, and everybody fed into it, whole crew. They were all so into it. We're all laughing hysterically, and you know, the outtakes from that day could go on for hours. And yeah, so that was a fun, fun little experience on that day.
00:30:29
Speaker 3: Little Bond scenes, A.
00:30:30
Speaker 1: Lot of it feels like the outtakes, you know what I mean, Like a lot of it feels like you're watching people having a lot of fun telling a story, and the story's worth watching and you get some really good belly laughs out of it. So I really hope that people tune into Stand Australia and watch it and enjoy it as much as I have.
00:30:45
Speaker 2: Thanks Benjamin and I love this chat and Matte we should travel unto a twenty four hour chat on a podcast.
00:30:50
Speaker 3: We'll break the record.
00:30:51
Speaker 1: Many questions you have no idea
