Tom Wren: "It is a new show"
This Friday night sees the premiere of the retooled Australian drama The Blake Mysteries, and we have lot of opinions about it in this week's episode of WHO's TV podcast, Binge List. Joining the cast for Channel Seven's first Blake telemovie is Tom Wren, who chatted to us about his role and how the show is moving on. Read what he had to say following the trailer below.
What was it like working on The Blake Mysteries?
It’s a super fun group of people making a show set in 1963. Half the scenes I was in, it felt like the set of Mad Men. I play a newspaper man, so my office is all cigarettes and smoking. I play Martin Carver, the new editor of the Courier paper, and I am a Sydney boy, blown in eight months ago and still pretty fresh to Ballarat.
What is your character doing?
He releases a bunch of news articles about unsolved murders in Ballarat and then all of a sudden a bunch of new murders happen that relate directly to those stories. And Jean (Nadine Garner) is trying to find the links and all the rest of it. My character’s release of these articles is clearly the link, because every one of the stories is connected to a current murder.
And Craig McLachlan's character, Dr Lucien Blake, has disappeared?
He went missing about eight months ago.
Is he murdered?
No one knows. Jean is not quite mourning him. But he went up to Sydney to investigate a story, and then has just gone.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. Obviously it's a tricky situation…
Yeah, look, I am new to it, so it’s not new for these guys, but with the new direction, it is a new show. Nadine is the lead, and she is the central axis of the whole story. She is not side saddle anymore - she is front and centre.
It’s a very clever way of moving the story on.
You could say the parallels between 1963 and 2018 are kind of nice. My character is the news man, and television has only been around for five or six years, and JFK gets murdered, and the whole swinging '60s is about to kick off. There’s a brave new world that Jean starts moving through.
To hear what the Binge List team thought of The Blake Mysteries: Ghost Stories, have a listen to the latest episode below and tune in to the telemovie on Friday November 30 at 8.30pm on Channel Seven.
