by James Mottram
When Joel Edgerton first heard about the police operation geared to capture the perpetrator of one of Australia’s most notorious murders, he was hooked. “My initial impulse was ‘I love this story, I want to write it, I want to direct a movie based on this’,” he says. Then he “stumbled across” director Thomas M. Wright, who had made the 2018 film Acute Misfortune, the true story of a young journalist tasked with writing a biography of an unhinged acclaimed artist. “I realised that he would be far more qualified to make this story in a subtler fashion than I may be able to do.”
Edgerton is being modest: one of Australia’s most gifted actors, he’s already directed two well-received features, The Gift (2015) and Boy Erased (2018). But there’s no doubting Wright’s skills here. The Stranger is a brooding true-crime drama, inspired by events following the horrifying kidnap and murder of 13-year-old Queensland resident Daniel Morcombe in 2003. Wright’s film has no interest in the immediate aftermath, or the extensive manhunt that followed. Rather, he concentrates on the elaborate sting that finally brought the killer to justice, as he’s lured into an entirely fake criminal organisation.
“When you read about how they solved the crime, it was the opposite of a normal police sting operation,” says Edgerton, when FilmInk speaks to him at the Cannes Film Festival shortly after The Stranger’s world premiere.
“Instead of one cop pretending to be a criminal, and going into a group of criminals, it was the opposite. It was one criminal being invited into a fake crime network. And it felt to me like it was The Truman Show. But like a drama.” Edgerton doesn’t play the killer, however. He is Mark, one of the cops deep undercover, whose job it is to entice the suspect into a gang, and then ultimately get him to confess to his crime.
Playing the killer, a bearded drifter known only as Henry, is British actor Sean Harris, who previously worked with Edgerton on the historical drama The King. “I don’t want to just dwell on Sean’s ability to be dangerous on screen, but he’s one of a handful of people, a small stable of actors, that can truly emanate a sense of danger without having to manufacturer false tricks,” says Edgerton. “The audience truly feels unsettled. But then I’ll go and see Spencer [with Harris as the head chef in this Princess Diana bio] and see a man completely dedicated and focused in other ways. What Sean brings to the screen is unique – a razor focus with anything he’s doing.”
Harris, who gives an utterly menacing turn as Henry, spent two weeks in hotel quarantine before he shot The Stranger, arriving in Australia amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “I had psychiatric doctors and nurses ringing me up every day: ‘How are you doing? How’s your mind? What are you thinking of?’” he recalls. “And I thought, ‘Okay, this is interesting. I can answer these questions as Henry’. So, it was an acting exercise. This nurse would ring me every day and I’d start to find Henry. Then also, I would get knocks on the door. The same policeman: ‘How you going, mate? Have you been out of your room?’ And I started to find Henry’s hatred of authority.”
It even got a little bit out of hand, remembers the actor. “The same policeman came to me every day. And it was one confrontation where I got the two policemen right up into my face. And this is not something I’m proud of – and I don’t think it’s clever what I did – but it’s me wanting to push something as far as I can go. The policeman went: ‘Ah, fuck it! You’re just a peanut, mate!’”
Edgerton marvels at Harris’ immersive approach. “For a policeman to break their cold, clinical, procedural approach to the public, to make a personal insult… he must have been inflamed in some way.”
As authentic as The Stranger feels, it’s perhaps too authentic for some. What does Edgerton think about the reactions of the victim’s family? “I know that they’re aware that the film was going to be made,” he answers. “The focus for us was about going ‘We’re not going to tell their story’. We’re not bringing that story into focus in terms of the timeline of the narrative… it’s very much in the background. What we’re focusing on, is the operators and what happened in that decade after the crime. So, the focus for us was about not presuming to understand the emotions and the feelings and the experience of what a family goes through in a situation like this. It’s not our job.”
Yet in July, after the Cannes premiere, Bruce and Denise Morcombe, the parents of Daniel, called for people to boycott the film. “The movie is not supported or sanctioned in any way by the Morcombe family,” they wrote on the Facebook page for the Daniel Morcombe Foundation. “Its appalling storyline ignores our family’s pain and chooses to profit from 13-year-old Daniel Morcombe’s death. In a twisted way, it also provides oxygen to a sadistic beast by notarising his evil acts.” As production company See-Saw Films recently told Guardian Australia, “The name of the victim is never mentioned in the film and the film does not depict any details of the murder.” Still, the debate about profiting from the pain of those grief-stricken by such heinous crimes will continue.
Both Edgerton and Harris kept well away from their characters’ real-life counterparts, partly out of respect for the Morcombe family and partly because of the highly covert nature of the operation. “I’ll never meet Mark. I’ll never know his real name. I’m never allowed to meet him. He’s an enigma to me. And I can only learn about him through other people,” says Edgerton. Even when he was decorated for his work in bringing the killer to justice, it was “a closed door [ceremony]”, says the actor. “There were no cameras, and it was a very subdued affair, and then they go off to their next job or back to the mission that they’re working on at the moment.”
Likewise, Harris was reluctant to seek out the real killer, now languishing in jail. “Why would I want to? It doesn’t help me… I’m not playing this man. I want to do something that’s mine, that’s unique. It’s not a documentary. You’re making a movie.” Indeed, in many ways The Stranger is far more about the psychological impact of the operation on Mark than about the crime itself or the emotional toll on the family. As Edgerton reiterates, they never wanted to make anything close to this, out of sheer respect: “We’re not going to ever stand up and say we told your absolute truth. It’s dishonest.”
The Stranger is in cinemas from October 6, 2022. It streams on Netflix from October 19, 2022
