Tasma Walton: Transforming For Cleverman

By James Mottram

“Look, it’s a bit tedious,” actress, Tasma Walton, laughs to FilmInk at The Berlin Film Festival when asked what it was like to be made up for her role as Araluen in the new ABC TV series, Cleverman. “But with the end result, as an actor, it is so wonderful to look in the mirror and see a very, very different creature looking back at you. It just helps you inhabit that space very easily.”

Set in the near future, the indigenous-driven Cleverman involves a species from ancient mythology – labelled the Hairypeople (or “Hairies”) because of their overly hirsute appearance – that must live amongst humans and battle for survival in a world that wants to silence, exploit, and destroy them. At the heart of the story are two estranged brothers, Koen (Hunter Page-Lochard) and Waruu West (Rob Collins), who are forced together to fight against terrifying enemies – both human and not of this world. But can Koen, a man bestowed with a powerful gift and destined to become the Cleverman, learn to harness his power before everything around him crumbles? Cleverman combines rich storytelling with subtext and action, with the character of Koen already being pitched as “Australia’s first Aboriginal superhero.”

The veteran of series like Blue Heelers, City Homicide, and Home And Away, one of the cast members of the exemplary feature, Mystery Road, and the better half of radio and TV personality, Rove McManus, Tasma Walton was thrilled to be involved with Cleverman, despite the aforementioned rigorous demands of her make-up application to play one of the show’s “Hairies.” Much of that was to do with the series’ incorporation of Aboriginal mythology, and diverse cast. “We have such a great cross spectrum and representation of our multicultural society at the moment,” Walton says of the cast, which includes Frances O’Connor (The Missing), Deborah Mailman (The Sapphires), Stef Dawson (The Hunger Games) and Iain Glenn (Game Of Thrones). “But that isn’t usual on Australian television.”

One of the ABC’s biggest productions of the year, Cleverman was not without its risks. “With diversity in our storytelling, there is always concern that it is not going to be marketable enough, or that it’s not going to reach a broad audience. There’s a belief that the audience is used to seeing a particular type of story with particular types of characters and that they’re not going to want to change. The hope is that with something like Cleverman that the story is so strong, and that it’s powerful enough to be compelling to a broad range of people. In doing that, it will hopefully reveal that you can have as much diversity in the casting as you want. People are still going to be interested. It’s going to be a turn on. Not a turn off. That’s what our greatest hope for the project will be. The concept alone is pretty extraordinary. It was an amazing team of people too. It was like magnetization that happened. This pull, this gravitational pull that this concept had to bring all these very interesting and unique people around the world to come.”

For Tasma Walton, getting involved was a no-brainer, particularly with director, Wayne Blair (The Sapphires) at the helm. “I’ve known Wayne for a very, very long time, and he just said, ‘Does this appeal to you?’” Walton explains. “I’m also playing one of the hairy people, so they were trying to lock in their cast for that core family very early because of the effects nature of it. There was a lot of time that they needed in pre-production to make sure that it was right, and they wanted the actors involved early. I came a bit earlier to the project, and it was really just because I knew Wayne. At that stage, they were still writing, and there wasn’t a huge amount of literature to read, so it was a leap of faith. But knowing that Wayne was on board, I felt that I was in safe hands. And, for me as an actor, I’ve never had the opportunity to play such a physically transforming role. That’s always very exciting.”

Cleverman will launch on ABC and ABC iView on Thursday, June 2 at 9:30pm. Stay tuned for more on Cleverman right here, and for more on the show, head to its Facebook page. And be sure to check out our interviews with director, Wayne Blair, and actresses, Frances O’Connor and Stef Dawson.