The legacy of Annie Murtagh-Monks precedes her. Her casting work on movies like Japanese Storyand Rabbit Proof Fence, and TV shows like Ship to Shore and Sweat, helped bring a welcome and much needed diversity to Australian screens. There’s a reason these shows and films are so memorable, and it’s thanks to Annie’s work in filling out the roles with great actors like Toni Collette, Heath Ledger, and Steve Le Marquand, that we recall with vivid intensity Japanese Story or Sweat or Last Train to Freo.
This dedication and attention has culminated with Annie’s most ambitious casting brief yet: to fill speaking roles that include a Vietnamese family, an Aboriginal family, a Persian refugee family, a character with Cerebral Palsy, and a number of LGBTIQA+ characters for the ABC TV series The Heights. With over 100 speaking roles in season one, it was no small task to present the diverse, multicultural Australia as it truly is. Especially when a lot of the roles required greatly underrepresented actors.
The immense task of filling these roles was recognised by the Casting Guild of Australia, with Annie beating out shows like Total Control, Diary of an Uber Driver, and Wentworth, to win the award for Best Casting in a TV Drama.
Upon wining the award, Annie had this to say:
“I am thrilled to be recognised by my peers for my work on The Heights, because not only was it my most ambitious casting job to date, it was also my most rewarding. It was a genuine privilege to be tasked with finding so many diverse new faces, and the majority of the cast are from Western Australia, which makes me particularly proud of our state. I’m grateful to Matchbox Pictures for bringing me on board and the CGA for this wonderful recognition.”
Ahead of the highly anticipated second season of The Heights, I caught up with Annie to talk about the casting directors role in such a big show. I’ve long been an admirer of Annie and her exceptionally talented son, Daniel, and as such, I was thrilled to be given the chance to talk about the Australian film and TV industry with her.
Given most of us consume film and television and don’t pay much mind to the process of how these productions come about, I jumped off the interview by asking Annie about the role of a casting director.
I advise production companies to help them find the best possible cast for a project. So I’m actually working for the producers or the production company, or the directors, depending on who has instigated the project. In collaboration with them, through meeting with the directors and also the producers, I need to ascertain what their mission is for the project, stylistically.
I also need to be pragmatic and work out what kind of budget they have so we can aim for actors who they can afford. After reading the script multiple times and meeting with them often several times I’ll then go through the process of searching for actors. If they’re an actor with a high profile it will often mean sending scripts to their agent and trying to ascertain if they might be interested in doing it. Then we brief their agent and let them know what we’re looking for, and in many cases, we screentest the role.
All those screentests are used by my immediate producers, of in the case of The Heights, the showrunner, Warren (Clarke), and Peta (Astbury), who was our producer here in Perth. Then we tend to sort them, and organise call-backs, if they’re going to be one of the recurring lead ensembles, and then getting the ok and approval from one of the lead executive producers. On something like The Heights we have a variety of executive producers, so we have Matchbox Pictures, as well as the ABC, so they would see a screentest, and they would give their opinions. It’s really casting by committee these days.
With that in mind, I ask Annie about what point she comes on board to a production. Are scripts complete? Or does she help find people as the scripts are being written?
For The Heights, I came on almost three and a half years ago, so when I came on board there was a bible and a number of outlines for recurring ensemble characters are. There’s a big heap of information for what the character arcs and the story arcs are going to be for the characters. There were draft scripts that were changed by discovery through the casting process as well.
The Heights is, in many ways, a serialised drama. I stumble a bit in my questioning here, trying to find the right words for the show, and instead come back with the label ‘elevated soap dramas’. I cringe as I say the words ‘heightened soap’, knowing full well the tepid pun I’ve just made. It’s not entirely true to say this about The Heights, given it actively tries to reflect real life, and as such, it elevates the serialised drama genre. Thankfully, Annie knows what I’m trying to say and as such, responds in kind.
It’s quite different, it’s almost a hybrid, because something like Neighbours would shoot six episodes a week, whereas The Heights would only shoot two episodes a week, so our shooting schedule was closer to a series, rather than a serial. And I think that allowed a very extensive period of time developing the scripts, over a couple of years even, for the first series. A whole team of writers worked on those extensively, so it meant that the quality of the script, I thought, were amazing, and that then allowed each frame and every other aspect to also be heightened.
I’m not sure if Annie also made the pun at the end of her answer to help accommodate the awkwardness brought about by my silly pun, but the more I spend talking to her, the more I appreciate how aware, empathetic, and understanding she is. Her answers are considered, reasoned, and well thought out. She is quite clearly someone who knows the importance of her role in Australian film and television, and as such, she’s keenly aware of the impact her actions have on those who want to help change the industry for the better.
Which is part of the reason why Annie’s much deserved win for Best Casting in a TV Drama at the Casting Guild of Australia’s 2019 awards means so much. Annie’s appreciation and understanding of what needs to take place for real-world diversity to be shown on screen is evident in her output as a casting director. But, that doesn’t mean that it’s not a challenge. I ask her how she manages to reflect the real world when it is so rarely shown on screen?
As the Screen Australia study showed a few years ago, it highlights where we need to be going. I have to say as a casting director in the industry over several decades, and one of the executive members of the casting guild, we have been talking about this for many years, and often we will get the go ahead to screentest people from a diverse range, and we’ve gotten down to the final two people and often there was sometimes a safety element that came into play in the final decision.
For this particular show Que (Minh Luu) and Warren (Clarke) who had the initial idea, they had wanted to create a series, or a serial, that more accurately portrayed the Australian society now and have stories that included real life drama, and believable scenarios rather than perhaps more heightened or less every-day situations. They were absolutely dedicated every step of the way to find people who were authentic in those different areas and not take short cuts.
So, when we were looking at a particular nationality like Iris, who is a Vietnamese mother, I couldn’t cast a Eurasian actor, or an actor who is Thai, or a Chinese actor, or an actor who was a different nationality in that position, and so I really did have to go and find someone who was in the Vietnamese community who I was then able to train up and give acting coaching to. And Carina has come up exceptionally well.
And we have the Persian-Iranian refugee family, we have the Aboriginal family. We have the character of the girl with cerebral palsy, and I thought to myself, wow, that’s going to be a real challenge. Because I know having a son who is disabled, there is only a small pool of disabled actors in Australia and understandably so, because there haven’t been many opportunities for them to be cast in things. Therefore they don’t see the potential pathways for themselves, and haven’t necessarily paid the money to get the training or anything. But, fortunately, we were able to find Bridie (McKim), who Daniel (Monks) was actually mentoring at the time, and she was in a second year at NIDA doing the acting course at NIDA, the full time degree acting course, and I asked Daniel to do a self-tape with her so that she could be considered in the running, and she was just great and perfect for it.
And although she hadn’t ever acted professionally before, she had all the right possibility and she brought a charm to it, and a natural quality, which was fantastic, and she has cerebral palsy. And of course, when we were able to cast Roz Hammond as her mother… one of my peeves that I hate about parent/children combinations is that they don’t look believable… as Bridie’s real-life mother made a comment one day on a Facebook post, she said, ‘how come Bridie’s television mother looks more like her real mother than I do!’
As a testament to Annie's ferocious desire to meet the brief she's delivered with, when presented with a possible hurdle in relation to casting a Vietnamese character in their 50's, she had this to say:
The producers had the option to re-write the character, but instead I reached out to Perth’s Vietnamese community via letterbox drops, community groups and the Vietnamese Consulate. I received 50 expressions of interest from Vietnamese women across Perth. We narrowed it down to a shortlist of three, and ultimately cast Carina Hoang, an author with no acting experience. Carina was a refugee herself, but had never considered taking up acting.
While The Heights is full of diverse talent, there’s also a few ‘name’ actors in the cast. People like Roz Hammond (Micallef-show regular, Muriel’s Wedding), Shari Sebbens (The Sapphires), and Marcus Graham (Underbelly) help round out the cast. I ask Annie about how important it is to have people like Roz there to help lift up the underrepresented actors?
Absolutely vital! They’re names because they’re damn great actors so having actors like Roz, like Fiona Press, like Kelton Pell, those people really help to help raise the bar. Rupert Reid on this series, and Marcus Graham on the first series, all of those people who had experience, they’re really able to be there and help out and mentor the brand-new actors and the ‘newbies’ in the series.
But these 'name' actors weren't the only ones helping out the 'newbies', with Annie stepping into the role of acting coach on The Heights, helping actors like Carina work through their first professional roles. In turn, Iris has become one of the shows most loved characters. When I watched the first two episodes of Season two with a full audience, the feeling in the room was purely electric when Iris appeared on screen. The affection for her, and Carina, was tangible. Just as the affection for every other actor and character was too.
This diversity and the grounded nature of The Heights has had people raving about the show on social media. The feedback I’ve seen online has been positively rapturous, with many commenting about the real nature of the show, and as such, a genuine community has been established around the show. Part of me wonders if the way the first half of season one was available to binge in its entirety helped with this. Having watched the first two episodes of season two at a projected screening at Luna Leederville, I was left itching to find out more. The inherent hook of these serial shows leaves you needing to see how the lives of these characters develops.
(As an aside, the show looks absolutely stunning on the big screen, so much so that if the show has the legs it deserves to have, I’d pay good money to see a movie spin-off down the line.)
Annie responds in kind:
It is great, and really affirming, particularly for a production that was shot all in Western Australia. Even though we had some of those actors who were high profile that we brought from interstate, we had over 100 speaking roles on the first series, and of those, we had only five who weren’t West Australian, or who had never been trained or born in Western Australia, so it was huge boon for our industry here, and a recognition of the talent that is here in WA.
It’s funny, I have a daughter in law who lives in London… my eldest son who lives in London, and his wife who is Filipino-Chinese mentioned about an Asian Facebook group in London that was talking about The Heights! And talking about Iris (Carina Hoang) as a parent, and of course, she has such a pragmatic relationship with her son, and she was joking about how much it rang true the whole thing of an Asian child going to their parent saying, ‘mum, can I have a hug?’ and the mother or the father going, ‘what’s wrong? Are you sick? What’s happened?’
That kind of relatability is important and vital to the strength and success of a show like The Heights. But, the key thing is, diversity doesn’t just mean different people on screen, different cultural backgrounds, or sexualities, or genders, or religions. Diversity also extends to landscapes and cities. Australia is not just Sydney and Melbourne, and as such, the difference of Perth is just as important to show on screen.
The personality (or, as we like to say in Perth, the Perthonality) of this humble city is reflected brilliantly in The Heights. It’s not distinctly Perthian, with the show operating in a vague kind of ‘anywhere in Australia’ realm, but the suburbs of Perth looks distinctly different than the suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne. Seeing the Narrows bridge, or the lights of Elizabeth Quay, or Beaufort street, on screen is a surprisingly emotional sight.
This is my city. This is my world. This is Perth.
I know how important it is to have a production like this in WA, but I’m curious to hear Annie’s take on it.
It’s huge. It gives a continuity of employment which is something that so need. We used to have a lot of it when Barron Films (production company behind Ship to Shore) the childrens TV series here, so it was employing people on a regular basis, and they would go from one production to the next and the next, and they were able to make a living here. Whenever it used to be feature films that just a four, five, or six week shooting period, then a lot of our professional crew would obviously work on that, but then they have to go away to be able to make money to pay mortgages and rent. It was really wonderful.
But it also has the other aspect of quite a few people who have to started, or are emerging crew, who started working on The Heights, and now have a production/broadcast credit to their name which will help them go to the next stage. Several of our directors are female, who have been able to get work. It just means that they’re able to ramp up their career prospects as well.
For someone who has been in the industry for decades, Annie has seen changes come and go. I ask her about what has changed, and what needs to change in the casting process.
There’s been a couple of significant changes… when the global financial crisis… not the one we’re having right now, but the last one, happened, following that, I noticed that there were quite a few significant changes, in that any production partner who was investing in a project suddenly became far more concerned that they were actively involved in the different stages of the casting process. Prior to that, often investors, network or overseas buyers of a production would be very happy to be the final stage of production, and push the screentest of whoever the producer, or the director, or myself, who we had identified as who we wanted to cast in it. And they usually would very very rarely exercise their right of veto, and they would want to just see that final screen test of that single actor in that role.
After the global financial crisis, it changed and people suddenly wanted to see options, often two or three shortlisted options for a role, so they could also consider who they think would be best for the production. So that really did make it far more like casting by committee. Which isn’t a bad thing, and I totally understand why someone in their company who is investing millions of dollars in a project that they would want to make sure that their responsible with that money. I sometimes feel that ‘wouldn’t it be nice if I didn’t have to screentest actors so often’ because I know from years ago when I was an actor working professional that it’s one of the parts of the industry that noone likes, noone enjoys that process. It’s a necessary evil almost. But now that because of the people who are going to invest in a production and they want to see them, you’ve got to do them.
Another change is that websites like Casting Networks have made my job and other companies much, much easier. I used to have filing cabinets full of different coloured manila folders, with one for every single actor, with photos, and their cv’s, notes that I’d taken down. And every project, I’d literally pull out hundreds of these, and be showing them to directors and producers when we would have meetings. Nowadays, with things being online, and having the internet, it’s amazing, it’s so much easier, it’s so much quicker, you can communicate so much more easily. Actors can all be on Casting Networks or Showcast. I can do footage now, and can almost upload it instantaneously to my private folder on Casting Networks, and then have it be able to be viewed in minutes by my executive producers, producers, and directors.
Also, it’s enabled (technology) actors to self-record, and self-test for roles from anywhere in the world and send them in. It means that location is not so much of a challenge now, and it allows actors to go up for roles wherever they are, and when they are cast they can go where they need to go for those roles.
I think about the impact of the last global financial crisis, and I worry about the fact that we now have to differentiate which crisis people are talking about. Pie in the sky dreaming has me thinking that a show like The Heights is an ideal future for film and television in Australia. It’s cheap to film in Perth. There’s a wealth of excellent talent and crews who are hungry to work on films and television. And, as The Heights shows, having a diverse and engaging cast of characters helps create compelling viewing experiences. Yes, there is security in name actors in the cast, but the people that fill out those roles help add vibrancy and variance to the stories that can be told. Ideally, I want other productions to look towards Perth as a viable place to make their film or show.
I hear about the barriers being broken down, barriers that technology and the immediacy of being able to send an audition tape off straight away from anywhere have helped remove, and I think, well, why not Perth?
As my extensive discussion with Annie comes to a close, I know it would be remiss of me if I didn’t enquire about her exceptionally talented son, Daniel Monks. Nominated for the Best Male Actor in a Play at the 2018 Helpmann Awards for his performance in The Real and Imagined History of the Elephant Man, as well as being nominated for Best Actor at the 2018 AACTA Awards for his performance in Pulse, Daniel has now shifted his work to London, where he’s found great success and acclaim on stage.
I ask Annie about the mother side of her life, and what it’s like to see Daniel doing so well overseas, getting the accolades he deserves?
It’s amazing! It’s amazing as a mother. It’s amazing to see his acting process, and I still give him advice, and we talk a lot. I was having a discussion with him the night before last, where he had his first day off in about three weeks where he didn’t have rehearsals or anything as he’d been going flat out, and he was presenting an award on one of his days off as well! It was a beautiful honour.
He is living the dream, and that’s what he keeps saying, he feels so blessed and honoured, and it’s almost spooky how things are transpiring. He’s getting roles in the UK, people are coming and seeing him, they saw him doing Teenage Dick, and he got extraordinary reviews and won Best Actor at an award show in London. I often say to him, there are so many actors going to London, and they would be incredibly lucky if they got a small bit role, if they could even get any role in London, or much less the Donmar Warehouse (where Teenage Dick played). But he’s feeling very blessed, but he’s worked very hard, that lovely thing is “the harder I work, the luckier I get”. I am so thrilled for him.
I must say, in the UK, they have a far more open approach to casting actors with disability. I think there are a lot more actors there as well who are able to get the training, so they can get the skill levels to compete on the same level playing field in the acting craft areas. In Australia, we still have a way to go.
I graduated from NIDA, and Daniel, several years ago - without me knowing - had contacted NIDA about applying and auditioned to go there. And they said, I’m sorry we don’t train disabled actors, we don’t train people with disabilities, and he was pretty stunned. He said, why not? And they said, the problem is, there aren’t roles for them, and if we train them, then we’re setting them up to fail if there aren’t the roles there. So, I can understand at that time, their attitude, but certainly now fortunately there’s been a shift in change, but more actors are able to spend the time and money to get the training they need from a diverse background.
The disabled community, as per the Screen Australia study, is the most underrepresented community. It is the subsection that is the least represented on our screens in Australia. That will change, people need to keep trying to do it.
I wrote about Daniel’s struggle with NIDA and being recognised in Australia as seen in the show Perspective Shift. Additionally, I mentioned about my interview with RJ Mitte when Standing Up for Sunny came out, and mentioned how a show like Breaking Bad wasn’t helping open the doors it should have for other actors. It seems to me like Australia and the US have blinkers on when it comes to casting, where they just won’t consider disabled actors for roles.
Annie ‘yes, and’s’ and carries on:
...and also, start thinking broader when reading a role. It doesn’t have to be written as a disabled role for you to consider casting a disabled actor. And that’s one thing that Daniel was very excited about when he was cast as Constantine. The first that he said was, mum, you’re not going to believe this, here I am, gay and disabled, and I’m going to play a romantic heterosexual lead role opposite Emilia Clarke. My thing is, that’s a disability blind casting, which is wonderful. Similarly, it’s what happened when he did Lord of the Flies with the Sydney Theatre Company with Mia Wasikowska, where his character wasn’t written as disabled, and in fact, he wanted to play the diabolical, most extreme bully character, who ends up killing Piggy, because he didn’t want to play the victim. He wanted to break away from any kind of cliche pitied and poor, of being the disabled character who ends up being the one who is bullied and killed. He actually convinced the director to cast him in the almost, baddie role, if you like.
And it’s here, this deep mentality of ‘thinking broader when reading a role’ that I feel is the core mentality of how Annie Murtagh-Monks works.
When casting for a role, Annie is certainly thinking about the best person for the role, but she’s also operating under the knowledge that inclusion and acceptance helps foster a wealth of talent who are routinely overlooked because they’re not what we’ve come to expect on screen. Change is occurring, and it is a gradual process, but with the Annie Murtagh-Monks of the world out there helping fill shows like The Heightswith a massively diverse cast of actors, it’s happening just that little bit quicker.
Season two of The Heights kicks off on ABC on March 12th at 8pm. Catch episodes live, or follow up with them on iView.