Aussie stars earn their wings
Shows picked up … Poppy Montgomery will star in Unforgettable and Rachael Taylor in Charlie’s Angels.
EVERY year hundreds of hopeful Australian actors audition for roles in American television pilots hoping for a shot at Hollywood stardom. Last week three Australian angels earned their wings.
Transformers star Rachael Taylor will headline the remake of the 1970s cop show Charlie’s Angels, Without a Trace’s Poppy Montgomery is the lead in a new crime series Unforgettable and former Neighbours star Margot Robbie will take flight in Pan Am, a girl’s own adventure series set in the 1960s, at the dawn of the jet age.
All three shows are being produced by Sony Pictures, whose hits include Seinfeld and Damages. Yet the studio’s head of drama program development, Sharon Hall, insists she isn’t biased towards Aussies.
”When they come in to audition many of them are speaking with American accents and it isn’t until you go, ‘Did I hear something there?’, that you realise they’re Australian,” Ms Hall says.
”They are winning the part based on their craft. It is absolutely a reflection of their talent, their training and that certain something, that ‘it’ quality.
”They’re fabulous and we feel really, really lucky to have them in these shows.”
On their side is their uniquely Australian attitude: ”There is this kind of authentic lack of self-consciousness that these girls share.”
Among the other new shows generating buzz are a Desperate Housewives-style soap Good Christian Belles – which was renamed because the original title, Good Christian Bitches, was considered too provocative – and a Glee-style musical drama about young teens trying to break into Broadway. Both of those will go to Seven.
Nine, through its output deal with Sony Pictures, gets Charlie’s Angels, Unforgettable and Pan Am, while Ten lands the new Spielberg blockbuster Terra Nova and the US version of the Australian comedy Wilfred.
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