NEED TO KNOW
- Mali, Levi, Cash, and Tane’s adventure park boys’ trip quickly turns into chaos.
- Kyle Schilling, who plays Mali, told WHO that the behind-the-scenes production took a physical and emotional toll.
- Schilling explained why he had to put his body on the line for this role.
Home and Away’s massive event week kicked off on Monday, July 20 and promised even more chaos and drama than usual. However, what fans didn’t expect was an edge-of-your-seat cliffhanger that left the life of one Summer Bay resident (literally) hanging in the balance.
What started as a carefree day at the adventure park for Mali, Levi, Cash, and Tane quickly turned into a rescue mission no one saw coming.
After extending their trip and heading into an overnight bush hike alone, things turned desperate and dangerous, resulting in Levi falling off a cliff, unresponsive to Mali and Cash calling out to him above.
Speaking to WHO about the climactic episode, Kyle Schilling (who plays Mali) revealed that the physical and emotional reality of preparing for this plotline was just as “gruelling” as you would expect.
‘I was completely rattled’
Schilling unpacked what it was really like to prepare for a Home and Away episode as dramatic as this one (and the ones to follow).
“You read it on the page, and you can only do so much preparation until you’re in the environment and you actually have that opportunity to be able to yell and run and jump and hurt yourself,” Schilling told WHO. “It doesn’t really become real until you’re in the elements and then you can really push that scene a lot harder.”
“There’s this one scene where I’m running through the bush and running up this mountainside, and it was gruelling. We had to do this scene where we’re walking down with all our luggage, ready to go camping with all our equipment, and we’re walking down, and we’re doing this drone shot, and then they’re like, ‘All right, let’s reset and do it again.’ So then we’re turning around, we’re walking back up the mountainside, and then you do it again. Then back up the mountainside, do it again.”
He also revealed that after he and his co-stars walked up and down the mountainside about six times, he was then directed to a new hill to run up another six or more times.
“It actually got to the point where the lactic acid built up in my legs, and it was so full-on that when I went to jump up this one last step, I just couldn’t make it,” he confessed. “I was completely rattled. I was done.”
‘I threw my body on the line’
Schilling then teased another moment to come in the boys’ race to find help for Levi, revealing even more physically challenging moments to come.
“Then there’s other elements to it where I run out onto the road, I’m trying to get reception,” he teases. “Realistically, Mali has just been running for hours, he’s not going to do things where it’s like, ‘Oh, I’m going to safely get down this’. He’s exhausted.
“So I threw my body on the line and I threw myself down a hill and slid onto the road and tried to make it as realistic as possible.”
If you thought watching the cliff-hanger episode was stressful, imagine actually acting out the scene.
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