It's in the news today, but it was actually on TV Reload, the podcast Last Deep Bairline. Welcome back to TV Reload. My name is Benjamin Norris, and this is your podcast to get all the inside goss on the popular TV shows you may be watching from around the world. Underniably, our TV sets are a major part of our home entertainment and very little is known about how our favorite
shows get made. Each episode, I find guests that want to dive just that little bit deeper into the shows they've currently been making, so that you can hear all their exclusive stories and gain access to the biggest names in Australian television. I want to thank you for downloading or subscribing to this podcast. I love hearing your feedback, so make sure you leave a comment on your chosen
podcast platform. On today's podcast, I have Nathan Mayfield, the executive producer of the captivating four part musical drama series In Our Blood, which will premiere this Sunday, the nineteenth of March at eight thirty on ABCTV FYI. You will be able to also binge this series on abc I view from this Sunday, and I highly recommend that you
do so. Said in the eighties. In Our Blood tells the story of people from politics, medicine, and affective communities grappling separately with the arrival of the AIDS virus in Australia. Nathan Mayfield is the chief creative officer and co founder of Hoodlum and Emmy and Bafter Award winning production company. We will talk about why this story was so important to tell in twenty twenty three, where he stands on
queer actors needing to play queer roles. Nathan will also unpack the rationale to make this a musical and have the actors talking to the camera. Plus, we will get plenty of exclusives from behind the scenes of the new series In Our Blood. Anyway, let's bring Nathan into the podcast and I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Fine, Nathan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and talking about this show which is In Our Blood.
Yes, finally I'm going to be able to share it with the worlds.
I can recognize your work in the stories that you've been telling, you know, and it's interesting once I read the bio on how this all came together because so many of the shows that you work on seem to have a bit of a signature to it, which must be attributed to the type of work that you made.
I'm glad you recognize it, because you never know. You sort of work in a bubble in some ways. But Hoodlum has been around for almost twenty five years now and we've always sort of done things outside the box. I mean the fact that we've been based in Brisbane for the entire time. We've got an office in the US as well, but we've always had to sort of
find interesting ways to sort of tell stories. And you know, for us, we're a small team and we're independent as well, so it means that we really seek out those stories and projects that matter, and this was one of them.
Will you bring raw and I would say, unique voices to the screen that kind of reflects society in a way that I think is very honest and I think is very truthful. Are they sort of like mantras that you have behind the scenes when it comes to choosing projects?
I think ultimately, like I said, we're a bunch of friends. My business partner and I started the company and we are still actively in the company, and that means our mantras really life is too short, So we find projects that we love and that we can have fun telling. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're all lighthearted pieces, but we find reasons for why these should be on screen. The other parts of that is, of course, that sort of passion is something that translates to when you have
to pitch these projects. So you know, for Hoodlum, we don't have a bottom draw per se. We're in love with the projects that we developed five years ago. It's just that the timing's not right. So it's sort of finding those projects that we're always going to be having there. We're just waiting for the stars to align.
How did this project come about? And how long did it take to get this show from conception to having it just about to be on screen on the ABC great question.
It's probably the fastest project that we've ever done from the beginning to it being on air. And I think the short version of this story is that I had put out the word that I was sort of looking for a queer series.
I didn't know what that looked like.
My partner he sent me a feature film script from a friend of his, Adriano Cappelletta, and I read the script I loved it immediately, but it was a feature film and I couldn't at that point sort of see how I could make that as a movie. So Adriano and I got on the phone two hours later, a few tears later, just him retelling the story that he discovered, and he sent me a pilot script for the series and I read that and immediately knew that we had
a TV series on our hands. And then when I talk about stars aligning, one of the things that we looked at was, you know, twenty twenty three being World Pride in Sydney as well as the fortieth anniversary of
AIDS hitting Australian shows. So those two things meant that I had a reason to sort of go and speak to the ABC, and I spoke to Sally Riley, who is the head of drama there, and sort of asked that question of what sort of activities were they doing for twenty twenty three, and I said, I think I have the project for you. And it was a pretty swift decision making process from there, I think all in all, probably two weeks. I think Sally might have read the
pilot straight away. I had done a verbal pitch with her on the phone. She was interested, and then it was just about ABC sort of getting their ducks in a row to sort of go, okay, well, how can we push the button and how can we make sure with certainty that we were going to be able to get this on air in time? And as miracles happen we did.
What do you think made the ABC? And why do you think the ABC was the right home for this show? I mean I could think of many reasons, and their coverage, oh, you know, right across world Pride has been very good. But for you as well, I mean you need to find that right synergy I guess to home something like this. Yeah, what was it about ABC that made this the right network?
I think it was that I we could take that shortcut. I mean, we've made four seasons of Harrow for the ABC, so we knew ABC really well, and we loved that relationship. We loved the working relationship. We get along really well, we enjoyed working together. So I guess it's that beautiful thing of being able to just pick up the phone and just get a straight answer straight away.
And that's certainly what happened.
So for us, ABC was always going to be the home we knew that they were going to be the main supporter of World Pride. We knew that they would have had a remit to sort of program for that as well. So I think that was the first that was us getting in the door. And then really the story itself is so compelling and one that we hadn't heard before. I think also piqued their interests. So it
was really from there. Yeah, we sort of pitched the project to them, They read it, they came back to us and said, okay, how are we going to make this work? And so it was really the ABC of course, you know, Screen Australia came on board, Screen Queensland came on board, and Fremantle International came on board to pick up the distribution for worldwide.
It's a painful part of our history. What makes a series about HIV in the eighties so important? Do you think to tell in twenty twenty three?
I grew up in the eighties. For me, it was looking at how can we celebrate and honor the people that were really at the call face at that time, not only being traumatized by the campaign, but also the notion of this disease that was killing killing gays, which
is what it came down to. Also, that stigma. I feel like forty years it felt like the right time to sort of honor that I have worked with a bunch of queer creatives who probably didn't know or really understand the impact that had on let alone Australia, let alone the queer communities. And it was also a story
that wasn't all grim. It was actually a story that I didn't know, which is how Australia led the way in the way that we raised the awareness of AIDS and tackled the AIDS crisis, both at a grassroots level right through to federal Parliament. And I look, I really
have to give that credit to Adriano. Adriano had written a play for Griffin a couple of years earlier, and he had done so much homework and so much research on this subject that really we already had the bones that sort of hit the ground running.
Yeah, it was sort of an important I mean, I have to be really honest. When I first heard about it, I thought I had seen this story being told in different forms, particularly in America, and I thought that there were different tellings of this and so I did sit down and watch all four episodes together and I was
completely blown away. But I was really empowered about our involvement in a difficult time, and I thought that, you know, the AIDS virus went to hit Australia, you know, we were deeply affected, but there was so much that I didn't know about it. And there's so much power I think for audiences and getting to watch this and to see how some very powerful people were able to handle this.
Isn't it great? I love that about it. I mean, I I was with you. You know.
It is a funny thing that certainly when you want to look at stories and pitch those stories to decision makers like networks or studios, of course they're going to look at that and compare it to other projects around the world. My argument is always, well, does that mean that we can only ever have like five AIDS stories?
Like?
Nobody wants to commission these, and it's always just finding the different sort of lens to put on that story. Also, we hadn't seen anything from domestic point of view. We hadn't seen something that really was viewing the AIDS crisis and what happened at that time through an Australian lens. We're very quick to criticize government about how they might
act on certain things. We've just come out of a pandemic, and I thought that this was a really great way to sort of one celebrate just how integral it was and boiling that down to actual humans in Parliament that were just not seeing this as a gay disease. They were just seeing this as as a national health crisis. And I love that about it. They just I guess they rallied, you know, they mobilized what they had to do,
and they understood the urgency. And I think because of that we can sort of sit back forty years later and say, Okay, well, there's a lot of us that exists today thanks to the hard work that they'd done, both at the grassroots, the queer communities, the lesbian community, all of those different players right up to federal government.
And I think, you know, how those communities have come together in a crisis like this. You know, when I look at twenty twenty three and look at us coming out of a pandemic like COVID, I think that there were plenty of things that we were able to I mean, the wider community were able to borrow from us. You know, there were some really important ways in which information was gathered and distributed, and I think that that would have been used, you know, when it came to the pandemic totally.
And we have the benefit of technology, which is probably a blessing and curse in the sense of COVID, but you imagine what this must have been like in nineteen eeventy three. You had far more prejudice, far more stigma, but also the circulation and the dissemination of information was probably a lot slower, you know. I think that was something to reflect on as well. In the show.
There is also really bold choices that you guys have made in the format, you know, with characters talking to the camera and characters singing. What was the process like in making those decisions.
Well, we had the bones there because that's part of what Adriano had done for his play. But then when we got in the room and that was the writers and myself, Adriano, Jane Allen, who was the script producer and just really pulled the show together, Jonathan Gavin, another fantastic queer writer. The four of us sort of sat down and worked out what the rules of this show were going to be and without sounding naugh about it.
We sort of looked at it and said, well, we know that we've got a core audience that we want to speak to. What are the things that we would like to see. This is probably the first show that I've done where there's more queers in the production process than there were straits. Not to say that that means anything more than you know, we felt like it was a really safe space. We had the innovation, we had
the support of the ABC. We knew that we only had four episodes for one hours, so we had to find something that was both bold and exciting.
So that's where we started.
We started talking about the use of speaking directly to camera. We loved this idea of this Greek chorus that really represented the fact that the queer community was omnipresent, that it was everywhere, and that we could use that as a beautiful little signpost for our audience to sort of say, look, they are a Greek chorus. They give us important information,
but also just to say we were everywhere. We were in the halls of Parliament, we were on the streets, we were in our hospitals, we were in We're just everywhere. So we took that piece one of the other really important, beautiful components to this story was of course talking about a community that was grieving and traumatized and in free fall, not knowing what this disease was going to do and how it was being transmitted in those early days.
But what we didn't know is this.
Grieving community would find its hubs. In some ways, those pop songs that were of that era became anthemic to that community. It was a way for them to sort of take a breath and really look at the fact that they exist and that those communities were there. And we wanted to embed that and embrace that in the show. And so what evolved was this beautiful chorus of characters who one speak directly to camera and to also perform these fantastic eighties iconic songs, which was so much fun.
So much fun, and it also offers a little bit of relief to some of the darker moments of the show. But I just think it highlighted to me the importance of music within the LGBTI community and the power of anthems. As you said just then, I think those those things have been so instrumental in the gay community and finding our home and finding our place to be ourselves. A lot of the songs that were chosen represent well for me.
I grew up in the eighties as well. I just every time i'd hear the first few bars of the songs, I'd be like transported to that time.
It's funny because in some ways, you know by the time it goes to where I've seen the show h of times in different iterations, and every time I'm like, oh God, I hope this doesn't ruin my favorite song that I'm hearing it a thousand times, but it hasn't. One of the interesting things about this is I've done hundreds of hours of television, but I've never made a musical. And I really went into this saying to ABC and all of the sort of decision makers, look, you're just going to have to trust.
Me on this one.
Like I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to the musicals, I sort of do, but I've never made one, and I think that was a huge learning for me.
It was, but I made sure.
That I surrounded myself with the best and Elliot Wheeler, who was the composer and did all the arrangements and the recordings for all the musical numbers had just come off Elvis, so I knew I was in good hands.
Oh wow. I was sitting there with my partner at one point and I turned over and said, at one point, I was like, Oh, it's kind of a bit American Horror Story in a way where the characters are allowed to break into song, and just it's important for that to be there in the story. Did you have anything like American Horror Story or maybe other shows that it influenced that decision to have singing in it.
Look, there's a bunch of those movies that we've all watched that we've loved. The fine line that you tread is that you can't have the style over substance. And you know, you can imagine in those very early days of developing this, we've probably had three times as many songs in the show, but you just can't. You need to make sure you've got that balance right. Ultimately, we're telling a serious drama, so we can't let the playfulness of those songs outweigh the importance of this story and
the people that were involved. Don't forget, this is inspired by true events, so all of those characters have their roots in real people, real events. For us, it was very important that we honored that and we respected it. We didn't want anybody to walk away from this feeling like they'd been misrepresented, but we did want to make sure that we had something that, like you said, wasn't
the dark ordeal. We wanted to have those moments of lightness and also just allowing the audience to sort of just take a breath and just enjoy it and hopefully in the execution of the way that we've done those songs too, just makes it a far more interesting drama.
The other thing I was going to mention is the casting is just so brilliant. Was it important or was it a choice to have some relatively unknown actors in this series over maybe some other more recognizable Australian actors.
Yes, what was more important to us was where we could we cast queer for queer. You know, that was important to us that we had people that really resonated with this material, really understood that this was going to be the show that was a safe place, you know, I think from in front of the screen and behind
the screen. That was an ambition of ours to sort of give as many opportunities to our queer community to sort of help contribute to telling this story, and I think it just made the whole process so.
Much more enjoyable.
And that's that's only because it felt like a safe place. And you know, I think we innovated behind the scenes as well, conscious and respectful of pronouns and trauma and you know, all of those sort of things that you know in a production machine are sometimes not ignored, but I think they're not. They don't have as much of a priorities as we made them have on this show.
But the casting was amazing, and what a beautiful process. Sadly, you know, what was really amazing was just seeing all of those casting tapes and seeing how passionate the cast were. The actors that were actually auditioning for the roles. You know, we heard some amazing stories. And normally it's just they
auditioned the scene and that's it. But so many of the people that were auditioning wanted to take that opportunity to one welcome the show and embrace the show, but also maybe tell a little bit of a personal story too, And that was beautiful and I feel very privileged to heard those stories.
What have you made of the debate over you know, gay characters should always be played by gay actors, you know. Was that a part of the process when you're putting this down.
I don't really have an opinion around, like, obviously, my my feeling is it's great if you can find if you've got a gay character, then obviously for me, the preference would be to some who can actually resonate at a personal level. And I certainly don't criticize other shows or other productions that cast people in straight roles. I
just think for me, it's an ambition of mine. You know, there's so many different factors to how somebody gets that role, from the financing through to you know, availability and talent and skill and all of those sort of things. But we were just I say, lucky, but it was it was quite strategic in just you know, trying to do that as much as we could. I think the flip to that is that I wonder if actors now make more considered choices around roles that they go and test for.
We've seen that over the last few years in Hollywood, especially where actors that I have played queer roles but might identify as straight are coming up now and sort of saying, look if it was twenty twenty three. I probably wouldn't have tested for that role or taken that role. And I think that's just an evolution of Hollywood itself and also the educated audience. Our audiences have far greater access to information, their film language is a lot more evolved, so I think they expected as well.
Tim sensational in this as well, and he's really the backbone to the story. I wanted to know, did you see him in Jag A Little Pill, which I also thought he was sensational in.
Yeah.
I mean I've been following Tim for quite some time and I think it was a natural fit. And certainly I know now having worked with him, how excited he was. You know, you don't know that stuff. All you sort of get as a tape. You have a couple of conversations, but then at the end of this process you sort of sit down and you have a chat to Tim and you realize, actually Tim knew that he was right for this role.
Well. Story is quite heavily focused on the way on which the Australian government handled the arrival of the AIDS virus. Was that a bit scary to be responsible to tell that part of the story accurately.
Yes, it was, and we had a bunch of people working behind the scenes. Obviously it's still a fictional piece, but what we wanted to do was to honor the sentiment and the chronology of the events that took place. Look, in four hours, we can't cover every meeting, every argument, every poll, every sort of thing. We had to really
pick and choose our moments. We've had to concertina some of those moments into meetings, but ultimately our goal was to make sure that the message was going to be clear and that it was still going to be compelling. From the beginning. There was always the fact checking around this.
I think one of the things that we regret but we couldn't do anything about is just in four hours we sort of had to really stay to stay true to the story, the queer story, the queer version of events on this There were so many other players and so many other communities that were affected by AIDS at that time. We give nods to them in the show, but ultimately we sort of start to our very core story, and ultimately we also wanted to make sure we had rings to tell that beautiful love story as well.
Yeah, which you do effortlessly you know, it all seems to come together quite easily. How do you remember because I was you know, I was born in nineteen eighty, so I very clearly remember the commercial with the Grim Reaper and the fear that that put into Australia. And
I remember being in my lounge room. I think I might have been seven or eight, and I remember my mother and my stepfather fighting over if they were going to ring a phone number to complain of the ad, and there was very opposing arguments to complaining about that commercial. What was your relationship with that commercial when it came out and what did that do to you and your story with this?
Well, I would have been probably thirteen, I think when that campaign came out, But and I remember being just as horrified.
But I also didn't know who I was.
I mean, what's interesting about that is I didn't know how to describe myself at that point. But having watched that commercial, I was always worried, you know, But I look at it now and I look at where they got to and why that was such an important component of the AID story in Australia, And you know, I'm forever grateful for it, for the fear campaign and for
what it did. You know, the fact that you had federal government by the time slot on every channel to make sure that there was no way you could miss this ad really punctuate the importance and the urgency of getting people to be aware that.
This wasn't just a gay disease.
I think it would be really interesting to explore like our obviously our show finishes at that point, but looking at the impact of that campaign for a decade after that is probably another story that I'd like to tell.
Do you think that that kind of a commercial would work today? And I don't necessarily mean in relation to HIV or AIDS? Do you think that kind of confrontational type of warning still would work?
Good question. I don't know.
I haven't really thought about it, you know, I think there's so many different platforms now, you know how I don't have the answer to that. I guess my question back to that is how would it work? You know,
where does your audience sit. We had in the eighties, when you only had a handful of channels, you had a captive audience, So it was quite a good way to sort of just expose the the crisis to an audience in a very very mainstream way now with so you know, the platforms are so fragmented, the way that people get their entertainment, get their content is so much so diverse. Now, I don't know what that would look like, but look, shock tactics will always work. I guess it
sparks debate, it sparks conversation. It does create stigma, it does create fear. But you know, as our catch line for the series is fear it made infectious, but courage is contagious. And I feel like that's where we sort of came to with this show, is you know, people that fear brought this issue out into the open. It's just that I feel very grateful that at the highest levels of government we had people who were just seeing this as a disease and not a cultural blight.
Well, for me, I don't really like censorship, you know, and I think that these days there's a lot of people coming out there with cancel culture and ship when things where i'mlike, you know, oh please, you know, when we don't need to be wrapped in cotton wool, you know, I don't think I.
Think yeah again, I think it's a really interesting time. I think the pendulums swung to sort of a cancel culture. At the moment, I'm much more in favor of correction culture. You know, I don't think it's about getting letting people get away with sort of outlandish sort of views or sort of but I do think that there is Once the conversation stops, it's very hard to get people back in the room together.
So, you know, I.
Think it's it's it's a tricky one.
It's a very gray area.
It really is. It really is. And I am kind of running out of time, so I'm going to quickly get to the last question, but I will say just before I get to that, that this show is something that I think the wider community will appreciate. And I think anyone that's listening to this to give this show an opportunity to watch it, because it's it's very potent, but it's very and it's very entertaining, and I think that's not an easy thing to do when you're handling
subject matter like this. So I hope people listening to this want to take that chance on it. Everyone who joins the podcast, I asked them this question, what is something that happened behind the scenes kind of maybe like a behind the scenes secret or an anecdote that we're as an audience won't see that we might appreciate to hear.
I did think about this.
I don't have one specific one, only to say that for me, this show was the most visible show that we've ever shot. And what I'm talking about is every time we're on the streets. I thought it was really fun to see we shot something that was said in the eighties, and then you add drag queens and our queer community, with usless chaps walking around as extras and gim masks and you know, great mission brown suits, it
was probably the most visible, you know. I just remember sitting there and clocking just how many people would stop and watch us shoot.
Or ask what are we doing? What are we shooting?
And normally now people are getting used to sort of having films on streets, and I just thought it was a real interesting observation that I had where I've never been on a show that's had so much attention from the beginning, and it was really supportive, you know, Like I thought that was The other bit was that I
was never scared. I felt like we've created a safe space for our cast and crew, but also there was something really encouraging about people walking past and being genuinely interested in the story and us telling them a little bit about what the story was. I never received any negative feedback, and I really like that, you know, because sometimes we can fall into a hole or our bubble and think that this is just us speaking to our
own community. But ultimately, you know, it was a great reset for me to go no, no, Actually, at a base level, we as humans just care about each other. So I know it's not a funny one. I know it's not a great secret, but it was one of those things that I think was quite unique to this show, so I loved it.
Well, speaking of being a storyteller, I have been in your audience for a very long time and will be for a long time to come. Keep telling stories like this. I can't wait to see what you do next.
Me too, And look the callers out like, I'm ready for it. I've come up for it now I'm ready to find the next one. So yeah, thank you, Ben, great chatting