It's in the news today, but it was actually on TV.
Reload, the podcast Plant Beef.
Hey guys, welcome back to TV Reload. I want to thank you for clicking and downloading on today's episode with Brendan Cow from Plum, which is about to be seen on the ABC. And I have to tell you, Brendan Cow would have to be one of my favorite Australian actors, so I'm very excited to be chatting with him today. Brendan was an actor that first came into my life when I was watching Love My Way, which was on
Foxtail back in the day. And if you've been with me for a long time listening to the podcast, you may know that it is my favorite Australian drama series ever made. So Brendan Cow not only stars in Plum, but it's actually based on a book of the same name, which he also wrote. Brenda will talk about how he got started in the industry and what he remembers about
Love My Way. We will talk about how Brendan Cow has passed over on Secret Lafe of Us, but how his journey with John Edwards has led him back to Asha Ketty. With this series, I will discuss the hurdles and if there was any with a pushback from the Kranulla Sharks, considering a story can be quite sensitive at times.
You will even get to find out why Brendan cow explores the Aussie man his ability to create authentic Australian stories, and if he knew that the book Plum would be made into a TV series when he was writing it. There's actually so much to talk about, with so many inside revelations as always, so guys, sit back and relax as we unpack the wonderful world of Plum, which launches this Sunday night on the ABC.
Hi Brendan, how I? How are you?
I am very well. I'm very excited to be talking to you because I'm actually a very big fan and so this is a real joy to be able.
To have this chat with you.
Thanks May Sadly, I loved Love My Way so much that I've watched it every year since it has come out, and I would go as far as saying on the record that is my favorite TV show ever made.
We'll you'll take it. We were also young and attractive in that show. I like it. When PEED would talk about.
It still look the same. I'm watching Plum and I can still see remnants. I've always wanted to talk to you about the way in which you write and create characters that feel more real and more authentic than any other content creators that I've ever come across.
Well, I've never been called a content creator. Oh really, I thought that was TikTok. I thought content was social media thing. But I didn't realize Plum was Love my Way and Plum were content. Are they content?
Yeah, I'd say it's content. I mean it's like content creation is about making stories, making it compelling, and making it interesting for people. And I guess maybe the influencers in the way in which they create content. I've sort of owned that phrase. But when I think about making good Telly, which is what you do, that's content.
I would prefer to make people content.
That's a good way to go, a good way to look at it.
If it makes me edgy and present and relevant, I'll say I'm a content creator. But yeah, I mean Love my Way. You know, that's where I didn't know what I was doing when I started I Love my Way. They you know i'd come off right and a few crazy plays and winning a few playwriting awards. Patrick White and Rabbit at the Stables and Bed and Rubin. You know, I hadn't even ridden Reuben Guthrie yet, and Glaudia and John kind of said they actually got me a meeting
with Secret Life of Us but didn't work out. And then Love my Way, kind of Secret Life of Us in your thirties, I guess, came along and I was thrown into a story room with kind of these four amazing women and myself and Tony mcnamart, you know, And that's kind of where I had no idea how to write television. But I got to watch the Owner series and Jack and Percy and lou Fox and kind of learn and I just listened, you know, And that's why
I've become good at what I did. I just really I only had to hear it once, you know, and I just asked a lot of questions and kind of took my expressive, kind of aggressive, aggressively comic theatrical style into TV writing. But yeah, that's where I learned everything from my way those kind of five years.
When did you realize that you had this sort of ability to write characters and write characters that represented Australian people so well, you know.
It was probably when I wrote Men, my first play in two thousand, which I wrote in a pure you know, through pure vanity to just lift up my non existent acting career in nineteen ninety nine two thousand, it was like, I'm going to write a play with a great role, and I'm going to put it on so then people will be forced to watch me act. And the play sold out at the Old Fids, went to Belvoire, went
to Edinburgh, went to New York. It was my first play, and everyone said, write another play, and I thought, and I wrote another one for me to be in Happy new and then I wrote a third one and I thought,
I won't be in this one. And people were really resonating with the young people that I was writing, particularly the rage and the young male, and I felt that there was a real kind of gap in what I was seeing on stage, and I felt I could really communicate what it was like to have these bewildering emotions,
these conflicting emotions, and that I could write relationships. And then as I grew up, grew older, I started to want to, you know, I guess deal with the family, the Australian family, which is something that i've kind of rested on in Plum.
I think that's vulnerability in what you've explored with men. And I think before we, you know, before you're talking about this work, we sort of had this way of presenting men and their struggles as just being one dimens and I think it's really impressive with how that vulnerability comes through with a lot of your characters. I mean, we see that again in this series so well. I mean, you could easily be making this very sort of polarizing
character and have it him be unlikable. But every single second that you're watching this character on screen, there's this vulnerability that makes you compelled to keep watching his story and feel for him.
Thank you. And I guess that's is that a question or a provoking statement? I guess when I watch men behaving badly in TV of film and I'd find myself not connected, it's because they're swept up in their own torture and self importance, and those kind of characters I don't find interesting because I don't find any access to them. And I'm not talking about likability, but in order to access a character, we need to see them trying, and Peter Lum is trying to face something so much bigger
than him. But he doesn't have the emotional skills. He's never been taught them. What he's been taught is the opposite. I'll never take a backwards step plow on almost like he not only does he not know how, he doesn't feel like he's allowed to deal with this in the proper way, which is to communicate, reach out, ask for help,
admit that you're scared. And you know, I remember writing episode three of The Slap Harry and Harry's the man that slaps the kid, and thinking, well, he does actually go and apologize, and you know, and I learned that the audience went with Harry once he turned around and went, Okay, I'll try. And I think it's all that we want from our male figures is for them to try or just try to try. And I didn't have a lot
of male role models growing up that did that. But what I love about Peter Love is that he is a beautiful man. It's very sentimental, and that's what I found with a lot of rugby league players. They are really sentimental, utterly family people. But these men are capable of uncertable, you know, of bad behavior when they get overwhelmed by something they don't have a language for and
trying to articulate. That means that you can push the behavior of a character further because you've connected the audience to the fact that there's a lost eight year old boy in there trying to try to get out, you know. And if we can connect an audience to the pain and the confusion, then we've got great comic tragic behavior, which is really what you want to watch. You want to watch people behaving, yeah on screen, you know what I mean, not suffering things, but behaving out of the
corner of their own kind of torture. And that's what kind of plumb is. He's this good bloke being fucked over by fate, fate being a brain injury that he didn't mean to get, and this whole family try to deal with it. They're good people, and you know that's what I try to write. It's good people behaving badly because what faith has presented them with.
Well, we get to see ourselves on screen. I think through a lot of your work, and I think that's an accessibility that is the magic behind you. And I think that the key to this series, whether it represents what I'm talking about or whether it is about the sport. I feel like his journey where he's struggling to face the realities of something and keeping it a secret is something that I think we all do, you know.
I think that's right.
You ask anybody, and they spend so much time worrying about something that's eating themselves up inside that they don't feel that they can reach out and ask for help. And I think that's what drew me to this story. That's what made the story for me so compelling, because it made me sort of look back at myself and think about the things that I don't verbalize, and then I don't feel comfortable asking for help with.
Oh yeah, and everyone is so anxious, and it manifests in your body what you hold in me, you know, and it spits out sideways in the wrong way. Whatever we hold in me, it will bubble over.
I think it's fear, you know. Fear is really interesting because when we as people feel fear, we behave badly. Yeah, And that's what I think happens to all of us, you know, when we don't have the answers, that's usually where bad behavior starts to sort of surf it well, sort of that's where it's that's the root of where it's coming from.
That's right. Fear stands for fuck everything and run.
When people are rude to me, or I see people behaving badly, my brain tells me that that person's in trouble.
You know.
My brain doesn't tell me to fuck you and fuck off from that, do you know what I mean? Like, I see fear as a request and I see bad behavior as a request for help.
Wow, well you must be a good friend and family member if you're like that, because that's that's the higher ground, right, that's the ninja move man, if you can get to that kind of level of evolution. But when it comes to family, that's not always achievable because family pressure buttons. Relationships press your buttons, and so you try to take the higher road, but it hurts, you know, the ones who love us the most, of the ones where the most cruel to you know what I mean, And the
ones that we struggle to communicate with. You know, you can probably tell your hairdresser or the guy at the pub what's really going on for you. And in Plumb's case, Sylvia Plats, the ghost of Sylvia platf he can tell you know what I mean? Like he can tell a trans poetry club owner what's really going on for him? Can he tell his girlfriend and his fucking son, you.
Know what I mean?
And that's kind of the grand irony, isn't it? But yeah, I think fear, You know, perfectionism is fear. You hear people who go, oh, let me tell you about this. I know this. You know the alpha male, all those overconfident people who pretend to know everything and they can't change their opinion, and they need everyone to hear their opinion, and they go on the internet and they savage other
people's opinion. They are completely possessed by fear. Fear is controlling them, and that turns into anger and resentment and the need to tell everybody that they're wrong. And you think you are wasting such a huge period of your life being controlled by fear in such a negative way. And if you can let go and let go of your ego for a second and let your ego drift out to sea, you can be present and you can learn.
And this is what Peter Lum learns, is that you know, once you let go of your ego and you open yourself up, suddenly the misfits and the people that you never saw in Cronulla become your friends, and you see that everyone's human and everyone's trying, and if you surround yourself by people who think the same as you, you're never going to grow. You're just going to stay controlled
by that same fear and anger. And Peter Lum learned that there's just so much more to life than just thinking the same thing and doing life the same way, you know what I mean, and hiding out, and he starts to grow in episode five and six when he puts this to the test.
The characters they're so eclectic in so many ways, and they bring out different things in him, and it's really powerful to watch what it is that people that he'd never seen and you're in your words, you know, had never seen them before, what they sort of letting down those barriers just a little bit and finding out about other people. How that's actually helped him out unlock some
of the answers for himself. And I think that is sort of how you've structured this story, because in episode one it's a real starting point and the evolution of where we're going with this story is quite brilliant. It's quite amazing. It's quite uplifting, and I think that's what we want from television, you know, we want real and this can be quite bleak, I think at times, but I think it takes us on a journey that's quite rewarding.
Yeah, watch a lot of television that I don't think respects the Australian slash global audience. I think Australians watch a lot of TV, especially coming out of the pandemic, and we live complicated, difficult lives here and you know, throughout history and through what's going on now politically and in the suburbs. You know, things like this affect lives. And I Fiona Series and I who wrote the show together,
adapted the novel together. We really wanted to give the audience a big job to do and to live in the grayness, especially in a black and white world now where everyone's like love hate, you know, and there's nothing in the middle. We wanted to make a messy show where women, men, young and old. Everyone behaves well and everyone behaves badly. Everyone's reacting to the ripple effects of
the King of Crinulla's brain injury. And that's when after one and two, where you see you know, basically denial. You know, the first act of the three dramas, there's two episodes, and he's behind denials. You know there is no monster. Episode two. Okay, there is a monster. I'll admit there's a monster. It doesn't mean I'm going to do anything about it. Three or four he starts to go, oh shit, if I don't admit there's a monster and do something about it, I'm going to fuck my whole family,
Like this is going to really destroy all my relationships. Yeah, and then five and six, you know, I'm going to have a look at this monster, see the monsters in me, and try to change change who I am. And you know, what we really wanted to do was just you know, which is often hard with networks and investors because they're like, this isn't clear and this person's behaving in a negative way, and they go, yes, haven't you in situations like this, isn't that what we do when we love too much
and we're scared? And then it flips it on its head that you think, Oh Renee played by the extraordinary Ashi Ketty, she's this nosy, kind of shallow Oh hang on, she's going to save the day here she's the one with the biggest heart. She's going to rescue. And you start to watch the characters behave in different ways and fulfill different roles within the family and surprise each other,
and they change and people don't change. And I guess that's what this shows about, is change isn't drinking a little more water and turning your phone off the ten minutes, and that's not changed. Change is doing what you're not doing, doing something else, turning around one point eighty, faithing the other way, becoming another person. It is so hard to change, It is so scary. And if you if you're interested in fear, then try and change, you know what I mean,
because you have to face all of them. And Peter Lum, the allegend toughest guy in Australia, is finally scared of it. And the thing he's most scared of is personal growth and change and vulnerability. He'll run at any Pacific islander forward. He will fight anyone in a boxing ring or in a pub. But you put him, you know, put him in front of himself and he's try childer me then and suddenly he's terrified, you know, And yeah, his mortality.
I always feel like that. I'm scared of a lot of things, but my parents told me to push against the fear. So instead of seeing something and going oh, I'm scared of that and walking away or recoiling from that, I've was brought up to push myself against the fear. So I'm often in situations where people I don't even think realize how nervous or scared I am.
But I am.
And that's because I'm so thirsty for living my life and pushing myself, you know what I mean, and getting the most out of it.
I guess that's wonderful. And what do you want to look back on when you're seventy eighty ninety, you know, is all the things you didn't do or all the times you're scared?
Did you jump out of the plane? You know, it's interesting just to take a side step, just very quickly, because we are running out of time. One of the things I love about this show is the fact that watching it on my television in Queensland, I could smell Sydney. That's how well you captured Sydney and Cronulla. I've got my best friend that lives in Crinola, so I go there often and as soon as I was watching the show,
and very cleverly. I think the Noiseworks song that was chosen as well captured the setup of I just I don't know, does it sound silly to you that I'm saying this, but it just you could smell it. It was so visceral.
Yeah, thank you very much. And I think, you know, talking to my mother a lot about it, like, we don't make shows enough that are affectionate, you know, that are affectionate landscapes of the insights into the suburban life. If we do, we're mocking the way we speak, or we're showing this really depressing documentary about people living on
the fringes. And a lot of the reviews for my novel were col sets sets his tail in the in the suburban world or cow suburban and you think, well, most of us live there, most of us grew up there. Seventy percent. This is Australian life. I just went there with a lens. You know, that's the importance of that speech. At the start, he's got it argent girlfriend that puts skinwire in the salad, and he's got a Torres Straight Island girlfriend and they go to the gym together and
you know, I go down there all my mates. I've got four kids and they're freethinking people, and you have conversations in what's called slow time. You sit around a table eating sausages with a kinwar salen the kids that the sixteen kids in the pool, and you have a chat for two hours and you hear people's pain and the illnesses and the changes and the thoughts and there's
real dialogue going down there on a different pace. And I wanted to show suburban people dealing with something beyond them and how they get in via love and connection and how strong the family connection is down there. And I think at the end of the day, you know, Plumb is about a guy suffering from a brain injury who learns that poetry can be healing. Right, that's probably the one liner. But really it's about Australians urban family. It's about our lives and it's about pushing on together.
And I think that's where we really found the shark.
It would be remissive me not to ask this question just before you go, but I mean, sport is such a huge part of Australian culture, and you know, the Kernella sharks are just such an iconic team. I was curious about, you know, was there any pushback from them in terms of portraying some of the harsher realities of the game, because I think that is also a huge part of this story. And I was curious about you being careful not to sort of either glorify it or
make it look too dangerous. I mean, what was going through your brain looking at that?
When I wrote the book, I didn't know I would be making a TV show, you know, And I don't want to be one of those novelists who writes a book that looks like a TV show. I want to write an inner monologue, which I think is what Plum the novel is. And if anything, I hope the TV show makes people read the book, you know, because the book is so much more epic. You know, It's got
lots of different storylines in it. And if you like the show, by the book, you know, the Sharks, the Sharks were like and it's one thing that Rugby League doesn't do enough. Oh it doesn't refer to itself enough. And it's great history. It's the national game, you know.
Ben Mendelsson did this trailer that I was involved in for Channel nine showing in, you know, the conversation in Huddersfield, and we don't revere ourselves like American sports do and remark on our history and have museums and look back. You know, we're always pushing on like a brand. And look, it was the NRL in the end that were kind of reluctant to give us too much footage of or any footage of big hits. And that's fair enough. But yeah, the Sharks in themselves were like, no, come down and
film there. And we've continued to market the show down there and they've really championed it. And you know, the clubs are fantastic. They have protocols, they want to protect their players, They love their players as men primarily, and I think the Roosters have really led the way with that, Trent Robertson, you know, Robinson retiring, you know, medical retiring some of the best players instead of going no, you'll
play another season. So we need to make the finals, you know, I mean like, and I think the other clubs have followed and gone it's more important for a man to live a life with all these faculties than it is to make, you know, to make the top four and let's remember that. And I think if the if NRL can make some changes which might be a little drastic now, it means the game could go forever. You can make some changes now, you can live forever.
You know, absolutely, I mean you can definitely hear that passion that you have for the game and the sport and the respect for it, which I think is also important to do. I finished my podcast with answer asking this last question because you know, Brendon and I could talk to you all day and honestly, this is so enjoyable for me.
Oh thanks man.
Always knew that I could have a very in depth conversation about humanity with you, and I think that what you're tapping into with your life's work is so compelling and it's so interesting. But as I said, I finished the podcast with the same question every time, what is something from behind the scenes, something you might not necessarily know? And a question about Asha Kenny maybe because you know you both work together on Love My Way and you
both have such amazing chemistry. I was wondering about maybe how she got attached to this project. Did you call her up and ask her to do it? Like maybe there's something in the behind the scenes secret there.
Well, I'm going down to Melbourne next week to do a couple of days of pressed with Asha, so I
guess we'll be talking about that quite a lot. But you know, and I've spoken about this a little bit, is that Ash I asked, you know, my my most high profile friends to do a quote for the book, which is the hardest part of publishing is to harass famous people, you know, and say, can you read it in like three weeks and give me three lines that are just almost like you know you've ever read and they're okay, and then you got to harass them, you know.
But Ash came forward, like really quickly. She goes, I read it twice because she's.
Just that's hoo, you kind of since she is, and she kept calling me and she's like, I just want to talk about because she's got thuns and she's who plays board and family and you know, I was just walking around Centennial with my mother and we had her on the out speaker, and by the end of the call, it just started to feel like if we ever got this thing made, I was playing plumb and she was playing Renee and she goes, yeah, I think so too.
That's what I was thinking, and it was just like an organic thing, and I went, well, I can't guarantee it, you know, because I'm no tred Dalton. But ABC responded to it and made the call and I went, well, I've got to ask key, you know, and they're like what, and I'm like, yeah, I don't, Asha Eddy. So that definitely put us on the top shelf.
And you know, I think about your chemistry, but it really is. I mean, I can think back to that scene of walking down going to King's Cross and Love my Way, where she was drunk and she was trying to get you to go and buy pills from King's Cross. The two of your characters sort have really only melded together in those sort of final series of Love My Way, but you could definitely see that chemistry. But this has leveled itself up.
Well, we've been looking for someone for so long, you know, we've been looking for one for twenty years, because we've just been admiring each other from Afar and I've been in London for eight years, and you know, and she's a show runner now too, and I became a showrunner and we've just kind of been admiring each other and we're good mates, you know, and no mates with her husband, and so we missed a few and then this one came and it was like, bang, this is it, and
we're both so glad that this was the one, this was the one for us to come together. And she keeps you on your toes. You know, she kind of appears like she doesn't know her lines and she isn't ready, and then it's action and it's bag bag bang, and she has this detailed You just know that she's all last night, she's been musing over what to do, and she stayed in cornella the whole time she was here.
She goes, now, I'm staying down here. And she got up early and walked around and listened to the women and went to the esplanade. And you know that's what she does. If she's going to do something, she does it. She'll fucking do it. Yeah, And that's what the best do. You know, that's what the best do.
There's a scene in this where she's wearing a jacket that's something you've never said that Asha Ketty probably would never wear. It was some sort of hideous Leopard's big period and immediately you could see Cranella women. I don't know why.
I don't want to.
Say that, is that the negative or a good a good thing or a bad thing. I just was like, immediately her with that champagne talking to you, I was like, she is that person.
She is someone knows. It was my ex girlfriend Selene and the costume designer Olivia Smiles kind of got together and went through every Wag photo on the Daily Mail and it was kind of that kind of was like, how do we keep her within her integrity, but really pushed the big label belts and the sparkly sandals and and that that you know, Ash plays a lot of those kind of very well to do, you know, women in lovely kitchens, and we thought, now we want to
we want to make it slightly garish. You know, she she's back after postnatal depression, and you know she's like, I'm fucking back, I'm on the lines, I'm getting out there, you know. So exactly, so we wanted Renee to be kind of, you know, reliving, which is side of why her and Pete get in a tangle, is she's she's reliving a bit of her Wag past. Yea through this.
Yeah, that's so good congratulations, make on mate.
Thanks for the chat and thanks for your support. I appreciate it.
I just can't wait for people to watch this, and I hope you get to bask in the accolade anyway.
He looks up.
She's thanks for your time.