If you like your humour dark, your plots twisty, and a setting that’s quintessentially small-town Aussie, it could be time to check out Amazon Prime’s Deadloch. A second season arrives after audiences fell hard for the show’s weird mix of serious detective drama and character-driven, absurdist humour. Think Broadchurch, but with laughs. Leading the mayhem are two very different detectives, Dulcie Collins and Eddie Redcliffe, who are forced together to investigate a murder in an offbeat Tasmanian town. In Season 2, they relocate to the Northern Territory, or, as Amazon states, “Forget Tassie noir – Deadloch is entering its tropical Gothic era.” If you fancy joining the cast of this award-winning global hit, read on.
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Created by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan (aka “The Kates”), the show, which debuted in 2023, centres on the uneasy relationship between two detectives. Kate Box plays Dulcie, a straight-laced, by-the-book type, and Madeleine Sami is Eddie Redcliffe, a city detective not afraid to ruffle local feathers. In the second season, they’re described as “sticky, sweaty, and dealing with thrush infections.” This is a show that merrily turns crime drama conventions on their head, while also keeping comedy and character front and centre. With Luke Hemsworth, Shari Sebbens, and Steve Bisley joining the cast this time round, Deadloch clearly values homegrown Aussie talent – and it’ll likely continue to do so if it returns for Season 3.
The first two seasons of Deadloch have been cast by Aussie powerhouses Kate Leonard (Mad Max: Fury Road, The Great Gatsby) and Alison Telford (Shantaram, Better Man). “The whole casting process was done over Zoom,” McLennan told Concrete Playground.
Telford’s advice to auditioning actors? “Firstly, don’t overthink self-taping. Because they do have that luxury of doing it 25 times, I think that’s something that actors need to check themselves on and that sometimes your instinct is right.… In the room, it’s just being present and getting out of your head a little bit. Just listen and be present.”
Leonard wants actors to know she and her casting team are on your side. “Every single tape I start, I go, in my head, ‘This is the character. This is the person’,” she says. “That’s how you want to think of every tape and give them every assumption that they are going to be so fantastic, because we want them to be. You’re not asking people to prove themselves to you. You’re rooting for them.”
When it comes to auditioning, being flexible may stand you in good stead. Just because you see yourself as one role doesn’t mean you’re not perfect for another. An extreme case in point is Sami, who was a writer on the show before she got called up to audition.
“Interestingly, we were working with Mads [Sami] writing scripts with her when the audition process was happening, but we pretended that we didn’t know that we were getting her into this,” McLennan recalls. “She’s like, ‘Guys, did you know I’ve got an audition?’ And we’re like, ‘Great!’. And the more we worked with Mads, the more that we could see that she was a pretty good fit.”
“I auditioned for the two leads. So I auditioned for Dulcie as well, and, to be honest, I put more effort into the Dulcie character audition,” Sami told Flicks. “She had a lot more lines, and I was like, ‘Yeah, maybe I feel like doing a little bit more of a dramatic role, and a queer role as well.’ And I didn’t put much effort into the Eddie character audition at all.… But, turns out, that was the perfect energy to get the part – the least amount of effort possible.”
Her co-lead, Box, also auditioned for both characters. “I gave Mads quite a lot of shit when we’d get to the scenes that we were shooting that I’d done in my audition scene,” she told Concrete Playground. “I was like, ‘Ohhh, are you going to do it like that? Yeah, I wouldn’t have when I was doing it’.”
Clearly it works to be open to possibilities in the audition room. In the meantime, check out the below materials to get yourself prepared.