A NEW MAN ARRIVES ON DROVERSThe West Australian - 10 February 2007
The real-life farm set of McLeod's Daughters makes acting easy for the
show's classically-trained new star, Matt Passmore.
"It's miraculous," he says after six months of shooting and on the eve of his character Marcus Turner's first appearance on TV screens. "It comes with all the other things - flies, cold, hot, that sort of thing - but when the director says: "look in awe out into the sunset', you're not looking into a blue screen or at a wall, you're looking at an amazing sunset. It does the work for you."
The South Australian outback is a long way from his experience shooting on
another of the Nine Network's remote area dramas, The Alice.
"That was mostly shot on a toxic wasteland in Sydney," he says. "We'd stand on this hill, supposed to imagine it was The Alice ... we'd be looking straight onto a massive construction yard," he says. "On McLeod's it could be beautiful and green, then you come back two weeks later and the hills are all brown. It's just the most majestic countryside. It's the star of McLeod's. "That's the romance of it, the glorification of the Aussie rural life."
Brisbane-bred Passmore moved to Adelaide in August last year to join the key cast of the outback Aussie drama. Already an unwitting journeyman of Australian drama, having appeared on the now cancelled series The Cooks,
Blue Heelers and Always Greener, Adelaide is the fourth Australian city in which Passmore has lived.
He left Brisbane, where he was based as a combat field engineer in the Australian Army for three years, for Sydney to study at National Institute of Dramatic Arts (NIDA). He graduated in 2001.
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UNDERBELLY 2
THE CUT
NOIR DRIVE
PLAY SCHOOL
MCLEOD'S DAUGHTERS